The Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio was host this week to the intelligence industry’s annual trade conference known as the GEOINT 2011 Symposium, shorthand for “Geospatial Intelligence.” This is a conference for those at the forefront the of high-tech marvels now used to fight wars, from thermal imaging and satellite mapping to data-mining and unmanned aircraft.
The focus of this week’s conference has been so-called geospatial intelligence, or using satellite and drone imagery, coupled with finely detailed mapping and charting, to assist troops in combat (“the eyes of the nation” was just one buzz phrase circulating throughout the conference). Conference-goers and high-profile speakers pointed to the most recent, major tactical success for geospatial intelligence — the tracking and killing of Osama bin Laden. Behind the podium, where speakers like Clapper and NSA director and head of Cyber Command Gen. Keith Alexander held forth, were colorful graphics of wires crisscrossing from unmanned aircraft to the White House, along with the iconic Time Magazine cover marking bin Laden’s demise, his face X-ed out in red.
In reality, the large, flashy industry displays lining the aisles of the convention center are a byproduct of the decade-long ramp up in national security infrastructure post 9/11. Formed in 2005, the office of the Director of National Intelligence now watches over some 16 federal agencies, such as the CIA and FBI, that make up our nation’s now-sprawling intelligence community. And private intelligence contractors, including for-hire intelligence analysts, computer techs, and even spies, have reaped the benefits of that boom.
A DNI report in 2007 acknowledged that private contractors had begun to form a “key part” of the nation’s overall intelligence workforce, highlighting concerns from then-CIA director Mike Hayden that his agency had become a “farm system for contractors.”
Earlier this year, DNI Director Clapper disclosed that the entire spy network spends around $80 billion annually. But the federal budget crunch could change that, Clapper acknowledged Monday. Clapper said his office had just handed in its “homework assignment,” the agency’s 2012 budget, to the White House, saying it “calls for cuts in the double-digit range, with a B [billions], over 10 years.”
For many of those industries lining this convention center’s halls with displays touting their interior surveillance systems, biometrics systems, virtualized imagery processors, and thermal imaging systems that could mean a slow transition into “adjacent markets,” like local and state police, emergency responders, and border patrol.
In 2007 the U.S. National Security Administration built its Cryptology Center in the town. The massive complex now graces West Military Drive near Loop 410, a former Sony microchip plant turned hub for America’s top spy agency, employing some 1,500 workers, although details of what happens inside the shadowy data-mining complex, fenced in with barbwire, are largely opaque.
Source: San Antonio Current