2011 AFCEA National Intelligence Forum

Welcome to the 2011 AFCEA National Intelligence Forum

For over 30 years, AFCEA Intelligence, backed by a strong partnership of government and industry supporters, has sponsored highly regarded classified symposia and conferences for intelligence professionals.  Now the organization is bringing that same commitment and expertise to a new unclassified forum that will allow a broader audience to participate in a dialogue about how unclassified intelligence tradecraft and expertise can be effectively leveraged to warn of and respond to cyber adversaries.

The government, industry, and academia require an assured cyber-operating environment in which to do their work.  And yet for over a decade, we have not been able consistently to partner or put in place a comprehensive and effective approach to cyber security.  The result has been a primarily reactive and disjointed cyber intelligence posture that has not kept pace with the threat in the unclassified network domain.  In the cyber arena, over 85% of the infrastructure is industry owned and operated and over 90% of the threat activity is on unclassified industry networks that support the government.  An irony in the cyber domain is that protection cannot be achieved alone.  While there are pockets of excellence – they often are disjointed and our networks as a whole remain vulnerable.  The key question then is how to effectively construct a partnership across the entire cyber environment?

In attempting to answer that query, it is the hypothesis of this inaugural AFCEA National Intelligence Forum that unclassified intelligence tradecraft represents an underutilized end to end mindset and methodology for strengthening and enabling the nation’s cyber domain. To test this proposition, this conference will explore the nature and impact of the cyber threat today, see where and how unclassified basic intelligence tradecraft could be applied against cyber hacker activity, and discuss what cyber intelligence skill-sets and training are needed.  All of the discourse will culminate with where industry can optimally partner with the government to deliver actionable, non-attributable, unclassified intelligence to advance our current cyber situational awareness (SA) and to begin to provide true indications and warning (I&W) to the unclassified government and industry cyber domains. 

We invite you to review the agenda, see the expertise and experience represented by the conference speakers, and then register to join us for the AFCEA National Intelligence Forum in San Antonio, TX, on June 7-8, 2011.