USIB INFORMATION HANDLING

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80B01676R000600180035-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 13
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 6, 2006
• Sequence Number: 35
• Publication Date: September 23, 1965
• Content Type: MF

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23 September 1965
__ ?-~ ...v-aaXIa-ALL in ze'LlIgefce
BULYZICT USIB Information Handling
X CI s a. Memorandum from George Bundy to ICI,
dtd. 15 July 1965
b. Memorandum for the President from
Chairman, PFIAB, dtd. 15 June 1965
BACKGROUND
1. Since 1966, USIB has, after.a very slow become increasingly concerned about the problem of start handling
information,
and counts on its l ing
a teet3
(CODIB) for assistance in this (field. 8 on D"M
2. The major Community attack on this problem was a
detailed survey made by a group especially formed in 1961
by CODIB known as the Staff for the Community Information
Processing Study (SCIFS). USIB acted on the SCIPS Report
in April 1964. Nine CODIB task teams are now in the process
of carrying out IB's directive.
3. On completion of the SCZPH Report, I Invited
Dr. William Baker to be briefed on its findings as part of
our effort to evaluate the worm-
;f~ersconally interested in the of SCIPS. Be thus became
report .Community's reaepe>Ite to that
4. In March 1963, at the request of Br. Hacker, Its
Chairman , I was asked to brief the Com%m jono Panel
of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory board.
That Panel was interested in the various projects and
efforts underway in the C+ tunity designed to ameliorate
the information handling problem.
.IJCDF #245725, Pa
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5. The nt action before SIB is an out
that l~riefin nth of
and such other related exploratory work as
rr. Bakers Panel any have done.
. As a result of the Baker Panel's work, the President's
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board subajtted a report
tecoendati to the President (Reference b.). Theseaad
re-commendations were approved by the President. You, as DCI,
have been asked by Yr. McGeorge Bundy to coordinate Community
action on two of them, and to submit to his and to the
President's board by 1 October 196: , a Progress report
ref lect$,g actions taken (Reference a.).
7. 1 have coordinated my actions with Mr. Bross,
D/DCI/NIPB.
a. To E'~ Y!!1er w4+t. 14..
that you prop tt~elthe_ .. _s . "~ 7 -e request, I recommend
approval of the attached draft
memorandum to Your
Mr . Bundy by SIB colleagues, and then send it to
Attachment
ec: B/DCI,/NIPE
CIA Member. U8113
Executive Secretary,
Executive Secretary,
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23 September 1965
MEMORANDUM FOR: The Special Assistant to the President,
National Security Affairs
The Chairman, President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board
SUBJECT: U. U.S. Intelligence Community Capabilitie s for the
Handling of Intelligence Information
REF :RENCES: (a) Mr. Bundy's Memorandum of 15 July 1965; same
subject
(b) Mr. Clifford's Memorandum for the President of
15 June 1965; same subject
1. This memorandum responds to the request in Reference (a) for a progress
report on actions taken concerning Recommendations 1 and 2 of Reference (b).
2. Specific actions taken by the Intelligence Community include:
a.' The Director NSA has designated a senior officer to assist me, and
has made available NSA personnel experienced in TIPS.
b. Briefings, as required, have been given on TIPS and RYE by NSA
to personnel of the USI3 agencies.
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C;rv"tom ~ ...
c. The USE3 Committee on Documentation (CODIB) to which USIB
looks for coordination in this field, has:
(1) With respect to Recommendation 1:
Formed a Working Group, under CIA chairmanship, to
ascertain specific requirements for training, to develop
a responsive curriculum, and to determine whether or
not any existing university or institute offers what is
needed. The assistance of a group of outside consultants
is being arranged, including that of Dr. Don R. Swanson
(as suggested by the President's Board).
(2) With respect to Recommendation 2:
Formed a Working Group, under NSA chairmanship, to
extend the TIPS time-sharing system concept to include
a Community-wide experiment in an on-line, common
data base. Both CIA and DIA have identified personnel
and initiated the two month training effort required to
develop a capability to put systems on the equipment
associated with TIPS.
d. The Central Intelligence Agency has begun negotiations with NSA
to provide information exchange experience through data links
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to two different components.
e. Chairman COMB has offered the assistance of the Committee to
Mr. William T. Knox, Chairman, Guidance and Evaluation Panel,
and has informally passed to him names of individuals within the
Community considered qualified to provide staff support to the
Panel.
3. With reference to the expansion of the. TIPS concept into a Community-
wide intelligence information network suggested in Recommendation 2, NSA,
DIA, and CIA, all intend to participate in the TIPS experimental project, now
being tested at NSA, to show the feasibility of Community-wide access to selected
highly structured files of more than one agency interest. All promising leads
will be pressed in keeping with the spirit of this recommendation. With respect
to the suested Soviet biographic problem area, many of the basic and very
extensive biographic files of the Community are unformatted and not specifically
appropriate for experimentation with TIPS at this time.
4. 1 want to assure you that the Intelligence Board is fully aware of the
critical need for better information systems design. We therefore welcome
the establishment of the special Panel. We consider it important that the Panel
members, once selected, be fully briefed on the Intelligence Community's
operating and projected systems.
W. F. RABORN
Director
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THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
July 15, 1965
Attachment (a)
.SECRET
Executive Registry
S - _2
MEMORANDUM FOR THE DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
SUBJECT: U. S. Intelligence Community Capabilities
for the Handling of Intelligence Information
Enclosed herewith is a report and recommendations
which the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
submitted to the President under date of June 15, 1965.
The President has approved the three recommendations
contained in the report.
It is requested that Recommendations 1 and 2 of the
report be carried out by,the intelligence community
under your coordination, and that you submit to this
office and to the President's Board by October 1, 1965
a progress report reflecting the actions taken.
With respect to Recommendation No. 3, this office
will look to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board and the Special Assistant to the President for
Science and Technology, for periodic reports concerning
the activities of the Panel to be established pursuant
to that recommendation. To assure proper linkage of the
Panel with the broader interests of the Bureau of the
Budget in automatic data-processing generally, it is
suggested that the Director of the Bureau of the Budget
designate a representative of the Bureau to maintain
liaison with the Panel.
McGeorge Bundy
Enclosure
cc: The Secretary of State
The Secretary of Defense
The Director, Bureau of the Budget
The Special Assistant to the. President
for Science and Technology
The Chairman, President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board.
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No. _L _.ot o copiaa. 8e e- _
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Attachment (b)
f Ee=WASHINGTON UUvo,q
PRESIDENT'S FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE ADVISORY BOARD
June 15, 1965
MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT
SUBJECT: U. S. Intelligence Community Capabilities
for the Handling of Intelligence Information
This report is based on a study made by the Communications
Panel of.the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
The study included consultations with knowledgeable
representatives of the departments and agencies making up
the U. S. intelligence community, and briefings supplied by
the Committee on Documentation of the United States Intel-
ligence Board (USIB) which, under the chairmanship of the
Director of Central Intelligence, has been pursuing the
current exercise known as SLIPS (Staff for Community
Information Processing Study).
Our Panel's study leads us to the following conclusions
and resultant recommendations for action in an?area of
U. S. intelligence activities which we consider to have a
most important bearing on the national defense and security.
The principal objective of these recommendations is
the prompt initiation by the U. S. intelligence community
of positive steps toward the achievement of an improved
capability for the efficient storage and retrieval of the
intelligence product, through an appropriate combination
of machine and human techniques for the management and control
of the massive volume of intelligence information involved.
CONCLUSIONS:
. 1. Information-handling methods occupy a pervasive
position in the whole administrative framework of the U. S.
intelligence community. Present methods for handling the_
huge quantity of intelligence information, which is generated
from day-to-day by a vast array of collection resources,
area determining factor in the effectiveness of our entire
intelligence system to meet national security needs at
policy and command levels of the Government.
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2. The systems problems involved are so massive
;,.n in many cases so expensive, in both money and human
resources, that customary routines have often been
rigidly embodied and retained. The systems problems of
intelligence information access will continue to be of
the most difficult type, heightening the importance of
great improvements in the depth of understanding and
of skills in tackling the wide variety of such problems
which confront all levels of Government personnel
concerned with access to the national intelligence base.
3. There is a necessary relationship of the United
States Intelligence Board SCIPS study to the existing
practices of information handling which are variously
applied within the respective agencies engaged in the
U. S. intelligence effort, particularly in regard to such
matters as file format and file control methods. However,
the present great demands for effective handling of infor-
mation within the intelligence community. require that
additional actions go forward concurrently with those
presently approved by the United States Intelligence Board.
4. The additional actions which are required provide
the only foreseeable means of extending to the massive
operations of the intelligence community the advantages.
of high-speed machine processing of both numerical and non-
numerical information in a way which has already been
applied in such specific areas of intelligence as cryptanalysis.
Unless strong and immediate actions are undertaken in this
area, there is danger that the efficiency of the production
? and..dissemination of intelligence within the intelligence
ccr=anity will decline progressively, and that the already
high costs involved will climb so steeply as to jeopardize
national support of the broad intelligence effort.
5. Positive action is required now to supplement the
longer-range Task Force projects being pursued by the United
States Intelligence Board. A large share of the needed
technical support will come from automatic data-processing
machinery and methods, and from the resources of modern
science and technology which are presently available to
assist in meeting intelligence community needs for
document handling all the way from initial production
to final distribution. The need for new intelligence
community actions for the handling and routine processing
of intelligence information is not regarded as a direct
consequence of the rise of the electronic computer.
The need for such actions is more deeply the result of
the growth of the intelligence community effort and the
greater growth of the information which it must handle.
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The'role of the computer is in offering a new way to assist
in'the reduction of greatly increasing problems in the
intelligence field. The existence of these problems and
;tee need to do things about them would have confronted
the intelligence community in any event.
6. All the technical areas-which must contribute
to the problems of handling intelligence information are
advancing very rapidly at present. The intelligence
community, with its strong nucleus concerned with the use
of computers in cryptanalytic and communications operations,
has a real advantage in undertaking early and skillful
planning in the information-handling area. (It would,
however, be a mistake to assume that this experience can
be easily applied to the use of computers in the handling
of intelligence information.) The required planning and
actions can be not only of great value to the intelligence
community, but can be a broad and effective stimulus to
improvement in other Federal Government computer operations
whose importance is reflected in the President's recent
message to the Congress on the use of automatic data-
processing equipment.
7. The problems of the intelligence community in
connection with information access and retrieval include,
but are not restricted to, those common to all who must
maintain very large bodies of information in accessible form.
This is even true in the handling of information from un-
classified sources. The importance of negative information,
and of patterns of information, requires that access to
J:n:telligence information produce a completeness of response
b-yond that which is expected from many large files of
stored information. Like statistics, intelligence cannot
be satisfied with the highly anecdotal., but requires that all
available items of information are allowed to contribute
their part to the final summary or other intelligence
product.
8. As a consequence of intelligence community require-
ments for high recall, the mechanized and automated means
of access to many sorts of intelligence files cannot be
required to meet simultaneously, rigid requirements as to
relevance. Accordingly for some time to come the mode of
gaining access to intelligence information will be through
combined machine-human systems that will seek the machine re-
trieval of stored intelligence information in order that
its relevance may be established by human examination.
It is this combined machine-human factor which generates
systems problems of great difficulty and dimensions.
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9. Ways and means must be sought by the intelligence
community to enlarge the proficiency of personnel presently
en aged in information-handling activities, either through
(a) the retraining of personnel so engaged, or (b) the
addition of new personnel having experience with systems
work, preferably (but not necessarily) in the information
sciences and technologies.
10. The scope of the intelligence community's
problems in the information-handling field is such that
it requires the guidance of a Panel of Technical Experts
in the development of methods and facilities for information-
handling and access.
11. In the area of experimental approaches to the
adaptation of machine processing to the storage and retrieval
of intelligence information, an encouraging beginning has
'been made within the National Security A ency where the
Technical Information Processing System TIPS) study is
presently under way. This experiment, although on a limited
scale and confined to a selected number of organizational
units and information files within the National Security
Agency, is producing important lessons for the achievement
of a realistic system for the interrogation of a computer
by remote users requiring access to a common information
base,
RECOMMENDATIONS:
We recommend that the following actions be undertaken
immediately within the intelligence community:
Recommendation No. 1: That selected personnel among
the departments and agencies making up the U. S. intelligence
community be provided specialized training and advanced
studies at a university center or centers where systems
thinking and systems skills are understood and imparted,
and which at the same time possess adequate background in
conventional bibliography and other more classical approaches
to literature and information management.
2I n example of the type of specialized training
center we have in mind is the Library School at
the University of Chicago, headed by Dean Don W.
Swanson. His background in mathematics and physical
sciences, and his current emphasis on increased
systems thinking in library education, accent the
combination of educational capabilities and background
which are considered necessary for purposes of
meeting the objective:of this recommendation.
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Arrangements involving this and perhaps other
institutions might be made so that both senior
administrative personnel and more junior operating
people could acquire new abilities and attitudes
which in the times ahead will be demanded in the
discharging of responsibilities for the enormous
file and distribution systems of the intelligence
community
Recommendation No. 2: That the Technical Information
Processing System TIPS project, now under way within the
National Security Agency, be expanded to include partici-
pation by other member agencies of the intelligence
community in an experimental operating system constituting
a first step toward interagency (and interbuilding) information
handling. Since results should be sought from the experi-
ment as promptly as feasible, the participation of other
agencies should be achieved by September of 1965; the
capability for extensive handling of the Russian biography
problem should be available in the community-wide, system
by the summer of 1966; and by the summer of 1967 it should
be possible to exchange outputs from various mechanized
sources in the fashion pioneered by the TIPS project.
,~Unly through such experimental operational trials
can the intelligence community come to grips with
the wide variety of program problems involved,
including those of security compartmentation, the
encryption of communications between the computer/
information base and the user locations, and other
problems. In order to make such a trial effective,
it may be necessary to expand the scope of the
information maintained in the TIPS system and, if so,
this should be done with caution as to the total
amount of material thus added. The intention should
be to establish a system that will in fact be used
by workers in at least a few agencies as a better
way to meet day-to-day tasks; however, the system
should be regarded as experimental and there should
be no attempt to insure that in its experimental
form its operation can be economically justified.7
Recommendation No. 3: That there be'established-'
a Panel, under the joint sponsorship of the Special
Assistant to the President for Science and Technology
and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board,
having responsibility for: (a) providing guidance
to the intelligence community in the forwarding of
methods and facilities for information handling and access;
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(b) evaluating in technical terms the true-meaning of the
enormous and somewhat heterogeneous growth of the intel-
ligence community's information pool.
LFhis recommended action is an urgent consequence
of the USIB's Community Information Processing
Study involving actions which, although helpful,
are far from meeting the needs accented by the study.
It is emphasized that the proposed panel of
technical experts would not be tasked with the
too obvious assignment of simply applying modern
machine methods to the existing, specialized,
and rigidly-maintained activities of processing
and distributing information within the intelligence
community. The panel would have the over-all task
of guiding the necessarily large, and presently .
ignored, planning for the realistic and long-term
development of mechanized facilities for the
processing of information in the manifold forms
in which it is encountered within the intelligence
community. Thus, the composition of the panel
and its individual skills should permit a con-
current approach to the overwhelming volumes of
photographic, electrical and typographical material
with which the intelligence system is presently
flooded. It is noted that in such parts of the
Government as the Bureau of the Budget, and in the
Departments of State and Defense, attempts are
being made to introduce automatic data-processing
and information-handling systems into complex
Government operations -- and the panel of technical
experts could provide invaluable linkage among
these detached efforts which now find some coherence
only through the science and technical information
people in the Office of Science and Technology and
the Federal Council for Science and Technology.
Finally, it is evident that the concept of the
range of activities of the expert panel includes
not only drawing on all the information-handling
programs and activities in other parts of the
Government, but also being available for over-all
counsel in ways which might be especially useful
to the Bureau of the Budget in understanding the
role of mechanized information handling throughout
the Executive Branch of the Government'
For the Board
Clark M. Clifford
Chairman
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SEN.) R W!JL,CHECK CLASSIFICATION TOP AND BOTTOM
UNCLASSIFIED CONFIDENTIAL X SECRET
RET
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
OFFICIAL ROUTING SLIP
CIA Member, USIB
kw
FROM: NAME, ADDRESS AND PHONE NO.
ADDI UNCLASSIFIED 7E32 CONFIDENTIAL
FORM NO. 237 Use previous editions
(40)