Intelligence-Driven Incident Response, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2. Basics of Intelligence

It consists of gathering facts. … It consists of forming hypotheses on the basis of these facts, of testing these hypotheses for traces of one’s own ignorance or bias, of cleansing them if possible. The goal is to build better hypotheses than already exist and to establish them as relatively more true: it is to reveal a sharper picture of what happened and to make a closer approach to actuality than anyone has yet contrived.

Sherman Kent

Intelligence analysis is one of the oldest and most consistent concepts in human history. Every morning people turn on the news or scroll through feeds on their phones, looking for information that will help them plan their day. What is the weather report? What implications does that have for their activities for that day? How is the traffic? Do they need to plan for extra time to get to where they need to go? External information is compared to an internal set of experiences and priorities, and an assessment is made of the impact on the target subject—the individual in question.

This is the basic premise of intelligence analysis: taking in external information from a variety of sources and analyzing it against existing data to provide an assessment that will affect decision making. This occurs at the individual level as well as at higher levels; this same process is implemented at the group, organization, and government level every single day. There is one big catch though—unlike many forms of day-to-day analysis, ...