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(S) Third Annual Fossway Working Party Emphasizes Second Party
Collaboration
FROM: Gordon Lewis
Program Manager, Fossway (S22A3)
Run Date: 12/04/2006
(S) The third annual Fossway Working Party was held from 10-12 October. It brought together
numerous contributors to the project, which seeks to develop analytic concepts of the future and
prove their value through real-world implementations. The Working Party included opening
remarks and keynote addresses from Cindy Farkus (SID's Assistant Deputy Director for Analysis
& Production ), Tim Nader (Chief SIGINT Development), Pat Dowd (TURBULENCE), and
(Global Capabilities Manager for International Crime and Narcotics).
(S) The primary goal of the Working Group was to showcase Fossway's development efforts over
the past 12 months, to highlight areas where internal and external partnerships are feasible,
and to talk about the future direction of Fossway. This year's Working Party focused primarily on
four key themes:
1. Enrichment;
2. Temporal and Geospatial Analysis;
3. Graph Analytics, and
4. Large Scale Analytics.
(S) As with previous working parties, the themes were structured in a way to maximize
discussion and participation from the attendees. In particular, a special emphasis was placed on
our evolving and expanding relationship with our 5-eyes community. Aside from the multiple
presentations from both GCHQ and CSE at the working party, Fossway has been the benefactor
over the course of the past 12 months of two CSE integrees
.
GCHQ integree to R6, has also played an invaluable role by not only bridging our
activities to R6, but also to his parent organization at GCHQ, B17. From "down under,"
(DSD) will be joining Fossway for a three-month tour in early July 2007. (We hope the
Kiwis are reading this article!)
(S) Fossway's primary drivers continue to be:
1. countering strategic surprise;
2. discovery of "unknown unknowns;" and
3. establishing the ability to perform "massive analysis" at scale.
It has become increasingly clear that these goals are only achievable through close partnerships
and collaboration.
(S//SI//REL) Fossway will continue to emphasize the development of analytic tradecraft, with
key focus areas to include temporal and geo-spatial analysis. The deployment of analytic
capabilities that can be realized in the large graph engine will migrate to SYNAPSE (convergence
of MAINWAY and the Enterprise Knowledge System (EKS)), moving it out of the "tradecraft
development" arena and into operations. Fossway's efforts will form one of the core pieces of
that evolving architecture. We believe this represents a significant step toward the resource
configuration needed to cope with analysis of global SIGINT metadata in the 21st Century and
the development of capabilities to produce pre-emptive intelligence.
(U//FOUO) For background, see an earlier article: (TS//SI//REL) FOSSWAY: Massive Analysis
Attacks .
"(U//FOUO) SIDtoday articles may not be republished or reposted outside NSANet
without the consent of S0121 (DL sid_comms)."
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DERIVED FROM: NSA/CSSM 1-52, DATED 08 JAN 2007 DECLASSIFY ON: 20320108