NGA heightens cyber security by mapping mountain of data

The world is a complicated place.

And as America’s spy agencies capture more and more information about cyber hackers and security threats around the world on a daily basis, the world gets ever more complex.

In a nutshell, this explains why over the past five years the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has grown so big, so fast, and has become an indispensable asset of the Department of Defense.

The NGA’s growth and importance to national security are trends that will only accelerate in the years ahead as America’s growing fleets of spy satellites and drones scoop up vast loads of images, videos and phone calls — Himalayan-size massifs of data that the NGA stores and analyzes

That’s why the NGA wants to build a new state-of-the-art facility, to be called NGA West, that will replace its cramped, aging St. Louis operation at 3200 S. Second St. in South St. Louis, near the Anheuser-Busch brewery.

St. Clair County is one of four venues being considered. Two other sites under consideration are in St. Louis County, while the fourth site is in North St. Louis at the abandoned Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, which today is overgrown by an inner-city forest.

NGA often is described as a map-making agency. In truth, it stands at the center of a constellation of 17 powerful, if little-known, agencies that anchor America’s intelligence-military-industrial complex. Also serving as a major anchor is the National Security Agency, or NSA, whose colossal data-crunching computers and eaves-dropping powers made headlines several years ago with the help of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NGA, in the words of journalist James Bamford, “is now the eyes to the NSA’s ears, collecting billions of images around the world every year with tools ranging from drones packed with 192 cameras to school-bus-sized satellites orbiting deep in space.”

With an annual budget of about $5 billion and a workforce of 15,400 people in suburban Washington, D.C., St. Louis and Arnold, Mo., the NGA specializes in intelligence-gathering of all kinds, from super-secret spycraft to public kinds of information about crises around the world, such as the public website it launched in late 2014 in response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa. The website features unclassified, continuously updated geospatial imagery, plus computerized mapping tools, Bamford wrote in January for Foreign Policy magazine.

Robert Cardillo, NGA’s director, has described NGA’s agenda as “human geography — the overlay of cultural, sectarian, tribal and other demographic features on top of physical features.”

Cardillo noted that Islamic State militants are very active on social media and “we leverage it to figure out where they were, what they were doing, how does that video connect to that location.”

In effect, the NGA is the Swiss Army knife of data collection, and, as a result, the federal government is investing heavily in it. The NGA’s family tree includes such agencies as the Central Imagery Office, the Defense Dissemination Program Office, the Defense Mapping Agency and the National Photographic Interpretation Center.

“The technology boom that led to big data, mobility and cloud computing raised the stature and importance of NGA to both the intelligence and Defense Department communities,” wrote journalist Jason Miller in a 2014 article explaining the agency’s soaring prominence.

The NGA’s spectacular growth coincides with some big wins in recent years, the most prominent being its ability to build a near-perfect replica of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

NGA gathered the details for the full-scale model with the help of laser radar and imagery that were so precise that its analysts figured out how many people lived in bin Laden’s lair, their gender and even their heights. The replica and other important data played a critical role in the success of Operation Neptune Spear — SEAL Team 6’s successful mission in May 2011 to kill bin Laden. Not only did the SEALs take out the architect of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York city with zero casualties, but they walked away from the al Qaeda leader’s lair with a treasure trove of computer hard drives, thumb drives and other important information.

The NGA is part of a cybermission team that includes the Pentagon and other intelligence agencies. Client agencies approach NGA with information about potential cyber targets. The NGA uses that information to determine the cyber attacker’s location, according to a June 2014 article in Signal Magazine.

“When you actually find a location where cyber activity might be occurring, when you see it, it really does enable much better understanding of what might be going on,” said Lisa Spuria, NGA’s analysis director, in an interview with Signal. “We bring the location information — the finding information — as well as visualization, being able to see it.”

NGA satellite imagery can reveal whether a new road near a suspected Iranian uranium enrichment site suspiciously dead-ends at a mountainside. Such imagery can also help NGA analysts detect effluents, such as liquid waste, and exhaust vents that suddenly appear out of the ground, revealing suspicious activities, but also potential weak spots that would provide the perfect target for a well-placed missile shot should the U.S.-Iranian nuclear deal fall apart.

In 2010, the NGA moved into its new headquarters building near Springfield, Va., on the grounds of Fort Belvoir. The ultramodern, $1.7 billion edifice houses 2.77 million square-feet of office space, making it the third-largest government building in Washington, D.C. after the Pentagon and Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center.

What’s more, the NGA is looking for a place to store “hundreds of billions of objects” that will take up four exabytes of information, or about 400,000 times the printed material held by the Library of Congress. These objects include everything from high-definition videos of Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq, to maps of the melting polar ice caps.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing the site selection process for the new St. Louis regional facility, is set to release the environmental impact statements for all four sites on Oct. 9, with public hearings to follow two weeks later. The NGA will make its final choice for a site by March 2016.

NGA West will house 800,000 square-feet of office space and cost $1.6 billion to build. Construction alone will create an estimated 15,000 jobs, while it will provide a home to at least 3,100 NGA workers, with plans to bump that up to 5,000 employees over the next decade. This will be the biggest building ever erected in the metro-east, covering nearly four times as much square footage as St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

The NGA could be the first of other large intelligence agencies, such as NSA and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, to relocate nearby, creating a hotbed of brainpower with big ripple effects for the area in terms of thousands more jobs federal government and civilian contractor jobs.

“If they (NGA) are here, you would have a concentration of the brightest logistics minds and intelligence minds and technology minds in the United States,” said Ted Shekell, O’Fallon’s economic development director. “It would be a mini version of Silicon Valley as it relates to the federal government.”

This story was originally published September 22, 2015 at 10:28 AM with the headline "NGA heightens cyber security by mapping mountain of data."