Q&A: Caryn Wagner
GIF 2012 Volume: 10 Issue: 1 (February)
Useful Security Information
Caryn Wagner
Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis
Department of Homeland Security
Caryn A. Wagner was confirmed on February 11, 2010 as the under secretary for intelligence and analysis at DHS.
Wagner served as an instructor in intelligence community management for the Intelligence and Security Academy from October 2008 to October 2009. She retired in 2008 from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), where she served as budget director and cyber security coordinator. Prior to that, she served in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as an assistant deputy director of national intelligence for management and the first chief financial officer for the National Intelligence Program. She accepted this position after serving as the executive director for intelligence community affairs, where she was responsible for the Community Management Staff, which provided strategic planning, policy formulation, resource planning, program assessment and budget oversight for the IC.
Wagner’s previous position was that of the senior Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) representative to Europe. She served as liaison for the DIA director to U.S. European Command and to NATO from April 2003 to April 2004. From October 2000 to April 2003, Wagner served as DIA deputy director for analysis and production.
From 1996 to 2000, Wagner headed the director, Military Intelligence (DMI) staff, where she conducted military intelligence community planning and was responsible for development and management of the General Defense Intelligence Program. Other previous positions included serving as staff director of the HPSCI Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence and as an associate at Booz Allen Hamilton. Wagner also served as an Army signals intelligence and electronic warfare officer.
Wagner received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and history from the College of William and Mary, and a Master of Science degree in systems management from the University of Southern California.
Wagner was interviewed by GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly.
Q: You last spoke with GIF early in your tenure at DHS. How would you characterize your experience over the past two years?
A: I honestly feel that, with a great deal of hard work from a lot of people, we have really transformed the Office of Intelligence and Analysis [I&A] into something that people who were in the office in the past, if they were to come back, would not recognize. I had some things laid out for me when I came into this job—things I knew I had to fix, and things that Congress, the Homeland Security Institute and others had identified as being problems. My leadership team and I took those on, and I think we have made huge progress in management challenges, in terms of the basic business processes of the office. We’ve fixed our hiring process and budget process, all of our billets are filled, and we’ve spent all of our money. We have a functioning program-build process, and we have put in place procedures for identifying the need for policies, and writing, publishing and enforcing them. They are the basic things that organizations need, which we didn’t have.
The other thing we’ve done is to focus hard on what our missions are in I&A. Who are our customers, what do we do, and how do we do it better? What’s our value proposition, and what do we add? We have made a lot of progress in focusing our analysis, improving the quality of our analysis and working with the Director of National Intelligence [DNI] Office of Analytic Standards and Integrity. We’ve also done a lot of work on the collection and reporting side. We’re working with our partners in the department to standardize the process for reporting information out of the department to the intelligence community and other partners, in a way that it is timely, actionable and useful. We’re also working with partners to build a consolidated architecture for collection, processing and dissemination.
We’ve made huge strides in our information-sharing with state and local governments, which is one of the unique reasons we exist. All of these things come to bear, because we’re providing them better products, we have a better information sharing architecture with them, and we’ve upgraded the systems that we’re using to get the information to them. We’ve also developed new product lines in response to their feedback. Overall, we still have a lot of areas for improvement, but I feel pretty good that we have made substantial, measureable progress across the board.
One frustration, though, is the articles about us that keep sounding the same themes about I&A. It’s frustrating to see that when I know how much we’ve changed. What’s interesting is that the people who are being quoted in the articles are people who left I&A years ago, certainly before I came onboard. If they’re talking to anyone inside the organization, they’re talking to people who, for whatever reason, still have an axe to grind that is rooted in the past, and not in anything that we’re doing now. I read those articles, and I don’t recognize the picture that they’re painting. I understand that perceptions frequently take a while to catch to up reality, and I’m confident that that will happen eventually. In the meantime, we’ll do what we can to counter that. But if you ask the intelligence community, and the people whose opinions I care about, who are looking at us and gauging our progress, they will tell you that I&A is a much better and more respected place than it was. There’s still room to grow, but we’re doing well.
Q: How would you define the concept of “domestic intelligence”?
A: Domestic intelligence is a problematic term, because it’s loaded for some people. It harkens back to the days when people were doing things they should not have been doing. So we’re trying now to focus the discussion on “homeland security intelligence,” rather than “domestic intelligence,” because that’s what we do here in the department. When people use the domestic intelligence term, they’re generally using that to capture what we, FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency [DEA] and everyone in the homeland does. There is some utility in trying to define it, but I&A’s input into that is homeland security intelligence, and we’ve been spending a lot of time figuring out what that really means. We’re moving toward a definition in which homeland security intelligence is more than intelligence, but also information that is useful to federal, state, local, tribal and private sector partners, because it will help them identify or mitigate threats to the homeland. We go beyond the traditional sources of foreign intelligence to put together things that are helpful to our customers. It’s about the full range of threats— not just terrorism, because homeland security is bigger than just counter-terrorism. It also captures the fact that we have a huge number of customers, many of whom are also our partners, in the sense that we work with them to share information and put together products that can be of use to our mutual customers and constituencies.
We have made a lot of progress in defining what homeland security intelligence is. One of the interesting things is that it’s not just about the homeland, because one of the unique things about the department and I&A is that we have responsibilities for what we call the “approaches” to the homeland. Some people call it the “transit zone” between overseas and domestic or between foreign and homeland. Our job is to protect the borders—both virtual and actual. Every point of departure overseas is a virtual border to the U.S. Even if you’re getting on a plane in Dubai, that’s the border to the U.S. We also have the physical borders as well as the cyber borders, where we’re trying to protect the “dot gov” domain, which is our responsibility in the department, but also working with private industry to protect the broader cyber-infrastructure of the nation. Thinking through what our responsibilities are in homeland security intelligence, it extends into the transit zone, where we’re trying to prevent bad people and things from coming from overseas. That’s one of the department’s unique value-adds. One of the things that we have to figure out in I&A is how best to support that, and more importantly how do we get the DNI and the extended intelligence community to help us support the needs of the people who are protecting the virtual and real borders of the nation.
Q: Please give readers an overview of the DHS intelligence enterprise, as well as what you think can be done to improve it.
A: The enterprise is made up of the intelligence elements of our operating components. I lead the enterprise, in a collaborative way, through the Homeland Security Intelligence Council [HSIC]. We’ve made a lot of progress over the past couple of years. One of the big things has been to build up trust that it is about looking for synergy and ways that we can mutually support one another and leverage different parts of the department to do a better job for the department’s overall mission. It isn’t about telling the components what to do, taking their money, or any of the other things you might be concerned with if you were in a component. With the trust that we’ve developed, we’re now starting to do some interesting and constructive things. As an enterprise, we are reworking our intelligence information report process and trying to standardize the timelines, formats and processes for reviewing and releasing them. One of the main things that we provide from the department to the larger intelligence community and our federal partners is information to which we have unique access. We have unique access to information in a variety of areas, including the cyber domain, the border domain, encounter data in the immigration domain and the travel domain. One of our main challenges is how to share reportable information in response to intelligence needs and requirements in a way that it can be used and received and is standardized across the enterprise. That’s going reasonably well.
We also are trying to make sure that we team together. There are a lot of natural partnerships, for example between Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] and Customs and Border Protection [CBP] on the border, but we have to do the best job we can to bring in all the potential partners to appropriately share information that helps us with our distributed border mission. We’ve created the Border Intelligence Fusion Section within the El Paso Intelligence Center [EPIC]. We provided the SES billet to head it, but there are people from all the operating components in it, as well as people from DEA, FBI and NORTHCOM. It’s all about how we do a better job of pulling in the information and pushing out stuff that’s actionable and useful for interdictors and investigators along the border. That’s one of the things that we started in the HSIC and then promulgated outwards. The operating components are very different in their individual missions, so finding areas of commonality that it makes sense to approach in a common way is not easy. But we’re finding more and more opportunities where we can reinforce each other.
Q: Some in Congress and elsewhere have recently voiced criticism of your office, saying that it has done little to improve intelligence data. What is your response?
A: We tend to get good marks from the Homeland Security committees, but we have more of a challenge with the Intelligence authorizers. One of the reasons for that is because we’re so different in our mission space that if you’re going to evaluate us with the same standards used to evaluate CIA or DIA products, we’re not necessarily going to measure up. We’re trying to accomplish different things and do them in a different way. If you’re expecting us to put out a lot of products that look very similar to other IC products, you’re not necessarily going to see that because it’s not our job. If other people are writing on a topic and doing it well, we’re not going to try to duplicate what they’re doing. We’re just going to leverage that and make sure the information gets to our customers. What we’re trying to do is to advocate that our needs be met. If they’re not, we’ll fill the gaps ourselves, although that’s the exception rather than the rule, and make sure that we’re taking what is of interest to our customers and getting it to them, while maybe adding that bit of extra information that makes it useful.
We have to put out a lot at the For Official Use Only [FOUO] level, because our law enforcement customers in general are operating at that level. What you can put in an FOUO product is frequently not a lot. If you read those and say you could have gotten that from cable news, or that it isn’t really intelligence, you’re missing the point. This is the best we can give them, based on our negotiations with the intelligence community on what can be released at what level. And it is useful for them, because it’s validating what they might have already heard. We’re trying to give them the most we can, and then take it to the next step by saying here’s what you can do about it—the preventative measures and counter-measures and the indicators you can look for. It’s a different art form, and one that we are working constantly to refine and perfect. But if you grade it on the same scale as a CIA assessment, it’s just not the same. We’ve been trying to make that case, and I think over time we will make progress. We’re serving different customers, and our products look a little different. But we have been evaluated by the DNI’s Office of Analytic Standards and Integrity, and they have documented a steady improvement in the quality of our products.
Q: What have you learned over the past two years about the role of geospatial intelligence in your work?
A: One thing I’ve learned is that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is being extremely forward-leaning and innovative in tailoring geospatial products and services to their customers. They focus a lot of attention on the department, which we appreciate. They’re helping us to think about new ways of using the kinds of products and services they provide. In the analytic realm, we are somewhat constrained in the use of imagery. But we’re trying to explore new ways of showing the geospatial characteristics of some of our data and intelligence, and of figuring out when that’s meaningful and useful and when it isn’t. The department overall uses geospatial products and services in a wide variety of ways and we have great support from NGA in doing that. There’s a geospatial foundation to the common operating picture that we’re building across the department. The Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] uses it extensively in both preparation for disasters and disaster recovery. My office helps pull together the available remote sensing capabilities to bring them to the services of FEMA in the wake of a disaster. We’ve been trying to incorporate more geospatial elements into the analysis that we’re doing at the Border Intelligence Fusion Section in EPIC. We’re very interested in some of the new apps that NGA Director Letitia Long has been talking about, such as being able to put information on mobile devices, because they could have a lot of utility for our state and local customers as well as the department. We get great support, and we’re trying to incorporate more and more geospatial technologies and services into our products.
Q: How can intelligence agencies make use of the new social media while protecting citizen rights?
A: This issue came up in the context of conversations I was having with the DNI on what kinds of things we need to think about as a community that have applicability to both the foreign and homeland security intelligence communities. It’s obvious that this is a huge growth area, and it can be of intelligence or counterintelligence value. But it has to be done very carefully, because everything we do includes making sure that we’re protecting privacy, civil rights and civil liberties. Another reason this has to be done carefully is that it’s a new thing—a huge stream of data of uncertain provenance and reliability. It’s like the classic cartoon—“On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” It’s hard to know how much weight to put on things. How many Tweets do you need before you know that something is happening? Do you have to confirm it with information from another source? These are the kind of tradecraft questions that the intelligence community is wrestling with now, both in the foreign and the homeland context. We just want to participate in defining that.
For my own purposes, I have the authority within I&A to do open-source collection domestically, which the rest of the intelligence community, except for the FBI, does not have. But we have very strict rules on how we do that—it has to be linked to a specific authority, mission and requirement. So we’re not out there trolling through people’s Tweets. But we have the ability to look at those things. The question is, though, what do they actually mean, and how do we incorporate them into a product, along with other sources, in a way that is rigorous and valid.
Q: What is your organizational and technological strategy for improving border security?
A: Border security is a departmental mission. My actual mission is to provide intelligence and information support to that. We do that in three basic ways. First, we provide the strategic, analytic context for border security, in close partnership with other elements of the department and our interagency partners. We’re looking at things like whether it is getting better or worse, what different kinds of things are we seeing and what are the trends? There’s a lot of talk, for example, about spillover violence—can we even define that, and establish enough of a baseline to know when we’re starting to see things that are outside the norm? It’s also doing looking at topics like this: What if things really have changed and we just don’t realize it yet? What if we’ve entered a new paradigm in terms of violence on the north side of the border? What would that look like, and how could we tell? It’s just to help people think things through and inform the information that we collect, and prove or disprove our hypotheses.
The second piece is that we have a lot of people operating along the border, with different missions and authorities to do border security, law enforcement, and investigations and interdictions. How do we support all those people by sharing the most information we can in ways that are most useful and actionable? What we’re trying to do, in cooperation with DEA and EPIC, is to pull as much information together as we can, to get greater insight into what’s happening on the border, and to push that information out—a lead to an ICE investigator, for example, or a notice to CBP to look out for a red pickup truck crossing at a certain time and place. It’s to enrich everyone’s ability to do their job.
The third piece is working mostly with CPB to create an architecture within the department for tasking, collecting, processing and disseminating sensor data related to the border. All the components have different processes and systems, but we’d like to be able to share that information, and ideally to tip one to the other. They all developed on their own, and now we’re trying to link them together in a way that will support the entire department and enable the components to be mutually reinforcing. Ideally, we want to be able to share data with our other partners, including the Mexicans, in a way that is compatible.
Q: What results have you seen from the extensive network of state and local fusion centers, and what have you learned from them about sharing information with other levels of government?
A: There are 72 fusion centers, and right now we have 75 I&A intelligence officers deployed at the centers, as well as nine regional directors. What we are seeing is that they are all unique, since they are state and city owned. Some do terrorism, while others do “all threats, all hazards.” Some are big and some aren’t. They grow at their own pace, but we’ve seen steady improvement. Many of them now are at the point where they are able to take information we have provided them, combine it with information that they already have or receive from local law enforcement, and put out their own products. Some of them are quite good. Another important thing is that it’s not just that we push stuff to them and they send it back to us, but that they send it out to all the other fusion centers. They are becoming a truly national network—mutually reinforcing each other, sharing best practices and information. A lot of times, they have more granularity of data in their local area on a particular issue or problem. In several instances, we have highlighted their products in the secretary of homeland security’s daily briefing book, because they have been doing a good job. We spend a lot of time training them in areas such as writing products, analytic tradecraft and ensuring that privacy and civil rights/liberties concerns are understood and implemented. We’re starting to see the fruits of that. We’ve been working with the FBI to make sure we’re all being mutually reinforcing, and the FBI is currently considering whether to put some of their own intel officers in the fusion centers that have become mature enough to improve that linkage. The other thing we’re wrestling with now is what we call the “fusion center performance plan.” How do we assess and measure the progress against the key disciplines that we’ve established as their goals—being able to receive information and analyze, share and disseminate it.
Q: What can industry do to enhance its contribution to domestic intelligence?
A: We have a lot of the same issues and challenges facing other members of the intelligence community in dealing with huge volumes of information, and figuring out ways to share with a geographically dispersed group of customers. We have a lot of challenges in the department in terms of enabling our systems and data repositories to talk to each other, but those are issues for any large agency. As I mentioned, NGA has been very forward-leaning in bringing their industrial base to bear on our issues as well. The interesting thing from our perspective is to turn that on its head and ask what we can do for industry, because the private sector is one of our five customer sets. We have built up over the years good relationships with the elements of industry that are involved in the critical infrastructure sectors. But we have a broader responsibility to industry, and working with our partners in infrastructure protection, we have started to do much more engagement with people like shopping mall owners, sporting consortiums and stadiums, which could potentially be targets of attacks, to help them think through their prevention, identification and mitigation efforts. We’re always looking for ways to be of more service to key elements of the private sector that aren’t necessarily under the 18 critical infrastructure sectors. There are a lot of them out there, and we know we’re not reaching all of them, but we’re working on it.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to add?
A: Coming up on my second anniversary in this job, I still hear comments sometimes about whether we really needed the DHS. The longer I’m here, the more I realize that we did. Most of the components existed before, and were doing their jobs. But as we become better and better as a department where people work together, and where information in one place can support operations in another; we’re getting more bang for the buck from the jobs the components do every day. It’s very rewarding to see that. I grew up as a military brat, and every Thanksgiving we would give a toast to all the military people who were serving away from their families. But now I’ve made my family add a toast to all the first responders, police officers and emergency workers who are doing that every day. They have an immediate impact on people’s quality of life, safety and security, but a lot of people don’t realize it. That’s a message that I’m pushing on the Hill. I’m a veteran, I love our military services, and I don’t want to see their budgets cut. But we need to start thinking about how the homeland security piece is as—or even more—important to the day-to-day well-being of people as the national security apparatus, and we should assign to it the same level of importance in our minds. ♦
