Intelligence/ Moving to new information technology systems

A day after President Barack Obama's State of the Union address, a top Pentagon intelligence official gave what might be described as a State of Intelligence speech describing U.S. advantages in the field as increasingly challenged by asymmetric threats.

Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers put insecurity in cyberspace on par with terrorism as the biggest immediate threats to U.S. national security -- and touched on how IT can help cope with those challenges -- in a Jan. 21 appearance at the Atlantic Council in Washington.

Cyber threats are "increasing in frequency, scale, sophistication and severity of impact," Vickers said, naming Iran and North Korea as nation states with emerging capabilities in cyberspace. "The range of threat actors, the methods of attack, the targeted systems and the victims who suffer from these attacks have also been expanding."

The former CIA officer listed a handful of technological challenges facing the intelligence community and the Defense Department: the wide availability of commercial imagery for intelligence gathering; new encryption methods that complicate U.S. spying; and advances in biometrics and supercomputing, the latter of which he said was also an opportunity for the IC.

U.S. intelligence challenged by technology, cyber