Top Secret Intranet: How U.S. Intelligence Built Intelink - the World's Largest, Most Secure Network [Paperback]

Fredrick Thomas Martin (Author), Frederick Thomas Martin (Author)

Book Description

Series: Charles F. Goldfarb Series on Open Information Management | Publication Date: November 15, 1998

Through this insider's tour of the U.S. intelligence community's intranet, you'll learn exactly how to build a maximum security intranet that leverages leading-edge technology to organize and deliver extraordinary amounts of information. "Intelink," the U.S. intelligence community's intranet, integrates virtually every piece of information that goes into intelligence gathering, reporting and analysis at the CIA, NSA, FBI and ten other top secret agencies. Now, for the first time, here's the inside story of how they built it. Learn how to build a maximum-security extranet that connects multiple independent organizations; how to migrate to a Web-centric environment; manage access by contractors and other outsiders; choose between off-the-shelf and custom solutions; and much more. Discover how Intelink integrates HTML, SGML, XML, pull and push technologies, interoperable databases and digital libraries to get the right data to the right people at the right time. Then preview the U.S Intelligence Community's strategic plans for intranet technology - and discover how you can use the same ideas to achieve competitive advantage.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This is a great book for spooks, spys, and other paranoids who have just finished Gralla's title (above) and work for a Fortune 500 company. It's not an easy read, but the text offers a fascinating look at the process of intranet development and the futuristic idea of "virtual intelligence." The CD-ROM includes sample Intelink software demos. Recommended for large central libraries.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Back Cover

TOP SECRET INTRANET

How U.S. Intelligence Built INTELINK - The World's Largest, Most Secure Network

The never-before-published story of Intelink

An inside look at the U.S. Intelligence Community's worldwide, super-secure intranet

The U.S. Intelligence Community has built one awesome intranet. "Intelink" integrates and disseminates virtually every piece of information that goes into intelligence gathering, reporting, and analysis at the CIA, NSA, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, FBI, and eight other top secret agencies to their "customers" - from the White House to the Warfighter. It's just about as secure as intranets can be. Now, for the first time, here's the inside story of how they did all that. Sure, there are a few things they can't tell you, but what they can tell you is utterly fascinating - especially if you've got your own intranet to build or manage.

* Building a maximum-security extranet to connect multiple independent organizations
* Implementation: what went smoothly - and what didn't
* Case studies: extending Intelink to new intelligence agencies and customers
* Security: encryption and access control issues
* U.S. Government network security efforts
* Cooperation with foreign governments
* Relevance to business covered in every chapter
* Future intranet tools

Someday your intranet will handle terabytes of data; Intelink is doing it right now. Discover how they've made their intranet secure, integrating HTML, SGML, XML, metadata, pull and push technologies, and collaboration tools to get exactly the right data to the right people at the right time. Then preview the U.S. Intelligence Community's revolutionary strategic plans for managing this information - and discover how you can use the same ideas to achieve competitive advantage. There's even a CD-ROM containing a demo of the actual Intelink interface, plus demo software, tools, metadata standards, training, and other information straight from Intelink. So put on your trenchcoat and dark glasses: you're going inside!

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 380 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall (November 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0130808989
• ISBN-13: 978-0130808981
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,967,977 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars "It was a dark and stormy night," - An so it begins., May 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Top Secret Intranet: How U.S. Intelligence Built Intelink - the World's Largest, Most Secure Network (Paperback)

Intelink is the classified, worldwide intranet for the U.S. Intelligence Community¾ linking together the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and 8 other intelligence organizations, including the FBI. Intelink is the subject of Frederick Thomas Martin's flashily titled Top Secret Intranet: How U.S. Intelligence Built Intelink¾ The World's Largest, Most Secure Network. Perhaps the most surprising revelation the book makes is that this very closed network was built entirely on open system standards like TCP/IP (the communication protocols of the Internet) and SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language, of which HTML¾ the hypertext presentation language of the World Wide Web¾ is an application). Indeed, Martin gets around to boldly stating that "Intelink is patterned after the global Internet."

"It was a dark and stormy night," Martin's introduction begins, and that is the best written sentence in the somewhat ponderously crafted and repetitious Intro¾the literary techniques of English novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton otherwise conspicuous by their absence. Reading Martin's mushy acknowledgements, one quickly forms the impression of a book both written and vetted by a committee; indeed, one begins to question whether Martin's name should appear on the book at all. Martin recently retired from the NSA as Deputy Director of its Information Services Group.

But it gets better once we reach the book proper. Chapter 1 tells the origin of Intelink, how in 1994 DCI James Woolsey created the Intelligence Systems Board (ISB) to improve the interoperability of information systems supporting intelligence operations. Along with ISB came a permanent staff, known as the Intelligence Systems Secretariat (ISS). Steven Schanzer, the first Director of the ISS, became the "father" of Intelink. A "proof of concept" prototype was put together in April 1994, and by the end of the year Intelink was operational. The rest of Chapter 1 gives a thumbnail history of the Internet and the World Wide Web, introduces SGML and its offspring HTML (an SGML application) and the more recent XML (eXtensible Markup Language, a subset of SGML which will be supported in future Netscape and Internet Explorer browsers), and concludes with a discussion of the need for Intelink to meet the changing needs of intelligence.

Martin notes that SMGL was adopted for document tagging by the Department of Defense in 1987 in its CALS ("Continuous Acquisition and Life-Cycle Support") Program, then as an information processing standard by the CIA in 1993, and finally by Intelink in 1994.

Chapter 2 is essentially a bureaucratic history of the development of Intelink, and describes the eventual formation of the Intelink Management Office (IMO), whose Director alternates between the CIA and DIA, and whose Deputy Director is always NSA. There are dry recitations of duties and goals, some of which read like they were written by an IT-trained Russian speaker struggling with the English language. For example:

"· Enhancing support infrastructures to ensure that future Intelink services enjoy the stability of a robust and well-administered information environment; [Translation: Get our shit together.]

"· Establishing a viable training program to ensure that all producers and users can effectively use existing and new services; [Translation: Teach people to use the system.]

"· Developing a technology integration program to ensure that Intelink enjoys the benefits of early introduction of new information technology;" [Translation: Grab the new stuff pronto.]

The chapter notes that the Global Command and Control System (GCCS)¾ the Department of Defense's new system for delivering command and control capabilities to the warfighter¾ relies in part on Intelink. (See "Intelink-S," below.)

As currently constituted, Intelink is segmented into security levels. At the core is "Intelink-SCI." SCI, according to Martin, stands for "Special" Compartmented Information, although most other people seem to think it stands for "Sensitive" Compartmented Information (see, for example, Jeffrey T. Richelson, The U.S. Intelligence Community, 3rd edition). Information available on Intelink-SCI is classified up to "Top Secret/SCI." About 50,000 people have access to this level, including Monica Lewinsky, while she was at the Pentagon. (You will recall that Monica had a Top Secret/SCI clearance for reasons never explained, but presumably because of her need for detailed handling of Presidential Decision Directives. Image what could have happened, for example, if a foreign intelligence service had gotten a sample of Presidential DNA and created a Clinton clone.)

The next level is "Intelink-SecretNet" or "Intelink-S," which carries information classified up to the Secret level. Intelink-S primarily serves the military, and has around 265,000 users¾ most of whom access Intelink-S through the Defense Information Systems Agency's SIPRNET (short for Secret Internet Protocol Router Network).

The most interesting (and most highly classified) level is "Intelink-PolicyNet" or "Intelink-P," which is operated by the CIA and is only available to very high-level policy makers¾ such as the National Security Council, the DCI, or the President. That way the latter can get all the information they need, say, before deciding to decimate pharmaceutical factories in the Sudan or nomad tents in Afghanistan with Tomahawk cruise missiles.

The final level is "Intelink-UnclassifiedNet" or "Intelink-U," which includes all open-source (unclassified) intelligence, and which is available to members of OSIS (the Open Source Information Service) or others approved by them. OSIS is managed by the CIA, and relies on public data bases and other unclassified information¾ the "open-source intelligence" promoted by Robert Steele. This level is accessed through Virtual Private Networks (but hopefully not ones that use Microsoft's Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol).

Martin notes the close relationship of the intelligence community¾ especially the NSA¾ to the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Chapter 3 argues the need for standards (and there is little to argue with here), and discusses three from the Department of Defense: TAFIM (Technical Architecture Framework for Information Management), COE (Common Operating Environment), and JTA (Joint Technical Architecture). In charge of all this is the Assistant Secretary of Defense for C3I (otherwise known as Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence). (Elsewhere I have attempted to create an easy-to-read intuitive guide to what command and control¾ C2¾ is all about, in the context of SIOP, the Single Integrated Operational Plan for Nuclear War.)

The 8 volumes of TAFIM basically focus on open systems and the need to follow international and national standards. JTA¾ which like TAFIM was inspired partly by co-ordination failures in the 1991 Gulf War¾ is the practical implementation of TAFIM, mandating the use of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software and hardware products, as well as standards such as SGML for documents.

COE can be briefly explained as follows. The 1970s mainframe-based war-fighting system, the World-Wide Military Command and Control System (WWMCCS, "whim-mix"), was upgraded in the 1980s, and eventually replaced in the 1990s. The new system was called the Global Command and Control System (GCCS), and was built by direction according to international and national information processing standards, using commercial and government "off-the-shelf" products wherever possible. (GCCS runs on Sun Microsystems computers running the Solaris Unix operating system.) COE consists of the software pieces of this common computing and communications environment, as well as the specifications for putting the pieces together to support specific military missions.

These three Defense Department standards automatically impact 8 of the 13 intelligence organizations within Intelink-NSA, DIA, NIMA, NRO, and the military intelligence units of Army, Navy, Air Force, and the Marines. To such Defense standards are added other initiatives relevant to Intelink and specific to the intelligence community, such as the Unified Cryptologic Architecture 2010 (by analogy to Joint Vision 2010), initiated by NSA Director Kenneth Minihan in September 1997, which mandates common cryptology standards and procedures across the intelligence community.

Chapter 3 concludes with a discussion of the Defense Message System (DMS), Defense's new e-mail system using COTS software. It looks pretty much like the e-mail system you use, except encryption is provided by FORTEZZA instead of PGP. (In the DMS, "e-mail" refers strictly to personal, as opposed to organizational traffic. Here I ignore this dis

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Better Title: "Incedible! Gov discovers Internet it Created", October 6, 1999

By 

John B. Harlow - See all my reviews

This review is from: Top Secret Intranet: How U.S. Intelligence Built Intelink - the World's Largest, Most Secure Network (Paperback)

Best reference of Intelink acronymns - for those who care.

Otherwise if you know what PKI, SGML and digital certificates are, this book is a bust. No discussion of impementation details. No discussion of firewalling, intrusion detection, encryption techniques (except to mention a few commonly known ones) or even VPNs.

Do they really use SSL and DES to protect our national secrets? That's scarier than a "dark and stormy night"!

Promises: "Security and Information techniques you can use right now" - no techniques here - just general discussion of common-sense principles

Promises: "Preview the future of intranets and extranets" - yeah right - from the newbies:

"AOL offers Internet access, updates on weather, email, news, sports, and stocks, multimedia entertainment, and their own search engine. Successful intranets like Intelink must have at their disposal a similar vast array of mission relevant tools" Page 160

Should Promise: "Interesting inside look at Gov. bureaucracy in action!"

Note: This book had to pass review by security agencies and this may be the reason it is so vapid.

Another Note: CD is somewhat interesting or I would have given this book a "0"

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating!, February 7, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Top Secret Intranet: How U.S. Intelligence Built Intelink - the World's Largest, Most Secure Network (Paperback)

My familiarity with Intelink extends way back, and I was truly looking forward to this book. I was pleased to be able to read about a topic for which so little information is readily available. The CD-ROM alone is worth the price of the book: to be able to view and interact with an actual sampling of Intelink makes this book a very unique experience.