Mind the Language

A report by the civil service into GCHQ in Cheltenham says its failure to attract ethnic minority staff is hampering its efforts to fight terrorism.

(The report was broken in the Sunday Times, now behind a paywall, so here’s a link to a piece on the matter in The Guardian.)

It also makes, perhaps, unwittingly, on of the main points about intelligence analysis that keeps on getting forgotten.

The modern signals intelligence (Sigint) business relies on computer power. Unimaginable computing power. GCHQ is the biggest computer centre in Europe.

The machines are used to intercept traffic, process it, recognize it, route it, decrypt it and turn it into something recognizable for an analyst to look at.

Except if it’s in a foreign language, at which point a human being is needed to look at it.

It is often the dream of managers of Sigint organizations to develop machine translation. Machines don’t go sick, want weekends off, extra pay or promotion.

Neither do they work. Machines can be good for highly formatted, printed text. They can be great. But for hand-writing? Or voice communications. Not a hope.

And terrorists don’t send formatted site reps. They chat. They talk elliptically.

And if they’re doing so in a language which no-one knows in a given agency, then for all intents and purposes, they are using highly encrypted comms, for free.

Better than crypt in fact, because one you’ve broken a cipher, you can break it every time at all times.

Train a linguist to the required standard to translate voice traffic in a given language, which takes up to two years, 18 months if you really push it, then you’ve got him or her for 40 hours a week. For 45 weeks a year.

One of the things intelligence agencies seem really bad at is future planning. Not for technologies, or new techniques. But identifying which areas of the world will need their attention; which languages they’ll need.

It’s tricky because you need to do it three to five years in advance, but its absolutely critical, otherwise all the technology is useless because of a lack of the right pairs of ears.