In 2024 in the United States, The Defence Intelligence Agency, aka. DIA, will deliver an innovative piece of technology called Primary Open Source Tasking Management Aggregation Network, aka. POSTMAN. It’s funny, it was like they were looking over my shoulder when I was writing my novel, “From Terror to Valor: Echoes and Shadows”.
The fictitious story of Jack Debaut, creating predictive tech using machine learning, seems to have a real-life bedfellow in POSTMAN. I won’t spoil the story in my novel for you, so let’s talk about the real-world technology. The DIA is deploying POSTMAN for the intelligence community by the end of 2024.
As an engineer, I can relate to the problems associated with disparate systems as data sources for large platforms. Using APIs and other communication technologies harbors both operational and security risks. Moving from my enterprise engineer seat to the seat of a CIA engineer like in my novel, the problems surrounding security risk dramatically increase.
Big Data Grows Up As POSTMAN Catches Up
Big data has grown up under open source collaborations and has enabled AI as we know it today. The DIA (US Military Intelligence) has embraced open source technologies in its own journey. It now has its next generation deployment because of this forward-looking attitude.
POSTMAN is not shy about what it does. It streamlines work in manual analysis of data from sometimes, hundreds of years, into hours and days. Relevant sentiment detection, biomaterial detection, attack vector analysis and other cool stuff like sentiment analysis to help determine a threat level will undoubtedly feature in this ground-breaking tech.
What also makes it ground-breaking is that the US Intelligence community is not hogging it for themselves, they are going transnational within the framework of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. A single platform will safely consume intelligence data from the intelligence communities of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.
Transnational Signal Intelligence For The 21st Century
So, a US transnational data analysis engine that does not belong to a social media company is a relatively new concept, which makes POSTMAN even more impressive. An extensive project like this comes with risk, and to navigate those risks requires a high level of skill and commitment.
From Terror to Valor: Echoes and Shadows, available on pre-order for September 11th release.
To pull it off in terms of features like heuristic recognition of language beyond basic sentiment, recognition of elements (direct and indirect/fuzzy), and correlation to attack profiles, is truly remarkable. I cannot say that government work is glamorous or highly paid, but right now, it has a cool tech feel to it.
How this technological advancement in signal intelligence develops after deployment is unknown. However, if it fulfills even a fraction of what I think it could do, then the intelligence community in the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance should guard it fiercely.
It will be more valuable than gold, more useful than any tech-bro king, and do what AI should have done from the beginning. It should cross vast amounts of data, interrogate it, and return relevant data for further investigation without fail. By doing the mundane well, human beings can focus on the important, knowing they work on quality assured data sets.
The cumulative result will not make a tech-bro king insanely rich, but it will make our democracies secure as we once again harness this new preventative edge, and continue to innovate against tyranny.
About the Author
John is a versatile author known for his gripping fiction narratives in the thriller, action, and suspense genres. With a background as a journalist since 2016, and expertise in cloud technologies as an engineer; John brings a unique blend of storytelling prowess and technical acumen to his work.
