Intelligence Primer

"And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." – John 8:31-32

The first principle of intelligence work is that anything worth writing down should not be written down. The discerning reader will notice the beginning of a paradox—and I remind them that authors contradict themselves for a number of reasons: usually carelessness, occasionally necessity.

What this primer is not: while countless words have already been wasted on the harms of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation — of forgeries, fakes, deceptions, and denials — this work focuses on the inverse: the potential dangers arising from the dissemination of particular types of true information.

What Intelligence Is Not

Intelligence ≠ Information

Unlike mere information intelligence serves instrumental purposes and cannot survive independent of goals or objectives. As such, intelligence differs from information in four key respects: it is specific, actionable, time-bound, and tailored for decision-making. While it is often erroneously claimed that knowledge is power, information alone possesses about as much utility as a Kindle™ strapped to a donkey's back.

Consider the following useless truism: "There are drug dealers in the Bronx." This statement provides no actionable content despite being factually accurate. Compare it to this to the following fictional example:

Pedro HERNANDEZ (SSN: 283-17-4558, M/H, DOB 07/06/1987, 5'8" 176lbs, brown/brown) transporting ~25kg of 'Smurf Blue' 4-Fluorofentanyl HCl Admixture (estimated street value $1.2-1.75M wholesale/$4.68-6.25M retail) 12 DEC 2025 2200hrs, black 2001 Ford Transit Connect NY 2RZX1245, to Bronx Freight Services 1456 E 145th Street rear Bay 3. Subject armed w/ Glock 19 9mm, 15 primary (std mag). Service alley 145th/146th keypad passkey: 7418# (bypassable w/ high-power magnet). NYPD 40th Precinct 8-15 minute response time.

This hypothetical demonstrates that not only does most true information lack any intelligence value – the same information may be impotent or fertile depending on the recipient's situation and capabilities. This hypothetical would be considered substantive intelligence to the DEA or rival drug dealer but is practically useless to the vast majority of people – demonstrating intelligence's dependency on goal alignment and capabilities (ends, ways and means).

Intelligence ≠ Science

Intelligence is fundamentally anti-scientific. In intelligence work, information is valued for its immediate or future tactical, strategic, or operational implications—never for its own sake. Unrestrained curiosity, a golden virtue among scientists, is often considered a mortal sin among security professionals. Even curiosity must be instrumentalized. As such, intelligence differs from science, not in it’s methods, but in its purpose and constraints. While both disciplines may employ rigorous analytical techniques, intelligence work operates under different constraints — purposefully limiting peer review, knowledge sharing, common methodologies and replicable results and is fundamentally concerned with providing decision makers with actionable insights that serve specific operational objectives within defined timeframes; which often require acting on incomplete information rather than waiting for comprehensive verification or consensus. As such, intelligence organizations evolve around the precept of security and axioms of tradecraft, which involves concealing the content, methods, and results of intelligence activities. Institutional memory is deliberately constrained, knowledge willfully destroyed or never permitted to exist in the first place. This directly mandates a restriction of information flow, inherently acknowledging that broader dissemination increases risk. This prevents the accumulation of dangerous repositories of radioactive information that future minds might stumble upon. By design, even senior leadership remains uninformed about most vaults of information, understanding only curated fragments of the broader intelligence picture. That said, there will always be slivers of truly corrosive information floating in the minds of a privileged few—intelligence that, if shared, might dissolve governments like sugar cubes in morning tea.

Intelligence ≠ Secrets

It is a common misconception, even among intelligence professionals that intelligence is synonymous with secrets. While most secrets, such as your neighbours affair, your sexual proclivities and/or your search history — provide little to no intelligence value to anybody as they cannot be meaningfully tied to operational objectives. Conversely, much public information—academic journals, newspaper articles, patents, court filings, policy documents, and educational content—can be weaponised in skilful hands. This explains why leading intelligence services invest increasingly in Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). The most dangerous truths can often be stated outright and dismissed off-hand, while jealously guarded secrets can often be trivially triangulated from public sources. While protective marking systems are intended to reflect the specific consequences of compromise, in reality, the over-classification of mundane trivia is the norm, the degree to which the inverse is true has been left as an exercise to the reader. Regardless, the category of intelligence is reserved for information which has direct utility towards operational objectives, not its classification status. For example, analysis suggests that intelligence sourcing breaks down approximately as follows:

• ~60%+ from open sources (social media, patents, court filings, legal discovery)

• ~25% from signals intelligence (despite undifferentiated mass of dragnet data, most raw data has negative utility as well as high storage and management costs)

• ~5-10% from liaison with other intelligence organizations (Leading intelligence professionals share information promiscuously — w/ relationships ranging from friendly to transactional, with even hostile players swapping data akin to prisoner-of-war exchanges.)

• ~2-4% from human sources (the smallest percentage but most potent and volatile)

Even Human Intelligence (HUMINT) is routinely practiced by consultants, recruiters, journalists, and businesses worldwide, whether they recognise it as such or not. Through making friends not running agents, utilizing ordinary students, businessmen, and locally engaged staff and using flattery, food, alcohol, and offering favors or commercial opportunities in exchange for information or access. Thereby establishing voluntary contact with diverse sources— travelers, students, media personnel, ultra high-net-worth individuals (UHNWI’s), politically exposed persons (PEP’s), and government figures—who possess relevant access, skills, and psychological attributes is entirely legal and standard practice. As such, the vast majority of intelligence contacts receive no operational training in tradecraft and remain wholly unaware of any intelligence affiliation. Only rarely are individuals subordinated to intelligence discipline and obligations. To fully dispel any lingering Hollywood mythologies: consider the example of one confidential contact who operated an entire intelligence network consisting solely of their own relatives.

What intelligence is

Conventional Definitions

The Oxford English Dictionary also reiterates these misconceptions regarding intelligence as information, secrets, or the analytical product of intelligence professionals and their respective institutions. This latter circular reasoning is particularly pernicious as it obscures a fundamental truth: intelligence is a function, a verb, a tool—not a profession, title, or static noun. When intelligence condenses into a noun—a person, place, document, or procedure—it acquires an expiration date and sours like raw milk.

Names, numbers, and nomenclature

Internally intelligence is typically categorised based on the target (foreign vs. domestic), subject matter (e.g., political, military, economic, scientific/technical), the phase of the intelligence life-cycle (collection, analysis, dissemination, etc.), collection method/source (e.g., HUMINT, SIGINT, OSINT), and perhaps least informatively special markings, classification and handling status (e.g. S//NOFORN, U//FOUO, TS//SCI, S//RD-CNWDI, etc). However, these conventional frameworks prioritizing technical collection methodologies, albeit ubiquitous, are largely, but not entirely, a result of bureaucratic stovepiping designed to win the last-cold war and not deep and intuitive understanding of the evolution of operational requirements in the 21st century. That said, the various the collection sources and methodologies, and other intelligence activities — beyond the conventional GEOINT, IMINT, MASINT, such as less politically correct; ████, ████, ████-INTs — cannot, for obvious reasons, be expanded upon in this primer.

A Double Edged Sword

For decades, the bedrock of national security has been acquiring, processing, protecting, and exploiting information to gain strategic advantage. Success was largely measured by our ability to "know more"— uncovering secrets, predicting threats, and out-maneuvering adversaries through superior knowledge. This operational mantra, while fundamental, has been built on an unspoken premise: that true information, once acquired, is an unalloyed good, a tool inherently beneficial to national interest. Consequently, the solution to any intelligence threat was always more intelligence. Historically, we believed that controlling more true information made us safer. However, in the modern world, this is a strategically naive presumption.

While traditional intelligence, focused on acquiring and protecting information from adversaries, remains necessary, it is insufficient. In an era where information itself is a double-edged sword, more intelligence doesn't always guarantee greater safety. Our voracious appetite for information, a remnant of a Cold War paradigm that made no distinction between raw data and actionable intelligence, is now a liability. In addition to emerging unconventional hybrid threats, our very own capacity to generate sensitive intelligence creates a heavy burden and a potential hazard. Not only does the risk of defection, compromise, or assassination increase proportionally with knowledge; even our defensive deliberations—the very act of discussing vulnerabilities to harden them—can, if unmanaged, inadvertently highlight lucrative targets for adversaries. Our own intelligence, particularly scientific and technical intelligence (STI), and counterintelligence activities become increasingly hazardous as they inevitably contribute to producing information valuable to an enemy. While intelligence has alway been a critical strategic and weaponizable asset, which when compromised by an adversary is a major vulnerability – we must recognize that our greatest intelligence threat comes from within.

This suggests that intentional restraint, not just in information dissemination but also in collection and creation, becomes a strategic intelligence choice to mitigate potential harms.

Tradecraft

These fundamental misconceptions arise due to the foundational zugzwang at the heart of this primer. While intelligence employs scientific methods, it is also the art of selective ignorance, not just keeping intelligence from your adversaries, but your friends, your colleagues and even yourself. As much as intelligence is about collecting and hoarding secrets, it is the art of knowing what not to know. This strategic restraint and intentional ignorance is baked into the discipline of intelligence. Tradecraft is not merely fixed rules around selective disclosure, graduated classification, need-to-know and need-to-hold, and compartmentalization; It is a professional quality demanding constant improvement, unwritten rules, tacit knowledge, vigilance, and creative adaptation. To minimize the risk of accidental or deliberate compromise, or exploitation, sensitive information should only be disclosed to and retained by individuals strictly as required for the efficient execution of their specific duties, as every person with access represents a potential point of leakage.

While often tied to other threats, compliance with tradecraft principles is paramount, and analysis indicates that nearly two-thirds of hostile provocations do not arise from positive acts of counter-espionage but rather due to careless mistakes, accidental blunders and other violations or non adherence to the principles of tradecraft. The primary danger isn't always overt espionage but rather any unauthorized disclosure of intelligence, deliberately or carelessly, directly or indirectly, even without direct unauthorized access of official documents carrying protective marking. The goal is to safeguard the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information, recognizing that any unapproved release or unwelcome publicity by any actor for any reason poses a direct threat to operations and security. As such restricting information flow directly reduces vulnerability as well as the cost and likelihood of compromise by limiting the number of potential points of failure.

This is a conscious decision to limit the depth of knowledge and the intimacy of relationship and, consequently, the amount of intelligence or operational knowledge exchanged, even when a source, method or contact might be willing to engage in deeper collaboration. The logic of a water tight cell system is that the less any one person knows, the less they can let slip - or be forced to tell. As such, tradecraft represents the necessary precondition for any intelligence organization. All subsequent conditions—membership, functions, procedures—must conform to the brutal necessities of tradecraft and operational discipline.

Definition

For this primer's purposes, intelligence is a function defined as:

The intentional dissemination or potential dissemination of any true information that materially alters competitive dynamics by causing, enabling, or preventing harm to entities with opposing interests.

The goal is not to replace traditional intelligence concepts – as such this definition would be too broad to be analytically useful - encompassing social media, scientific publications, even weather reports. Rather to provide a comprehensive umbrella term which serves to refine and augment our understanding of intelligence. A reminder that hostile intelligence often gleans more accurate insights from certain Twitter accounts than on the reports of its own residencies; that enumerable specialized fields of science and technology are inherently dual use; And that the Mongols’ invasions of Japan was thwarted twice by kamikaze or “divine winds”. The following framework merely systematizes phenomena that intelligence professionals already encounter daily and provides vocabulary and analytical tools for threats that are currently handled ad hoc.

Thereby providing a framework that accounts for the subtle often hidden strategic roles of information and enables better understanding and management of the invisible, intentional and unintended, direct and indirect consequences of increasingly sophisticated intelligence threats.

Intelligence Vectors

According to this definition intelligence work must tactically analyze not just explicit data, sources and methods but also subtle direct and indirect modes of information creation and transfer of which there are surprisingly few core modalities:

1. Data Risk represents classical intelligence and the most obvious threat—raw information that directly enables harm and necessitate classification. Examples include genetic sequences of lethal pathogens, schematics for 3D-printed firearms, tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), or source code for self-replicating viruses. All civilian and defense research produces such artifacts which, when lost, enable adversaries to replicate achievements, creating the bitter irony of battling our own inventions. The core reminder, however, is that that this data is dangerous, precisely because it is true.

2. Metadata Risk: Details like authors, recipients, communication methods, and even the broader information ecosystem can expose sensitive insights - poses a significant risk, revealing hidden values, beliefs, or capabilities through indirect cues. As former NSA head Michael Hayden stated: "we kill people based on Metadata."

These data risks however represents merely the tip of the intelligence iceberg. Here are a number of increasingly subtle and non-obvious pathways by which even abstract, tangential or even emotional inert information can cascade into strategic liability. Consider a few lesser known threat vectors:

2. Concept Risk emerges when general ideas, abstract frameworks, or techniques create vulnerability without detailed specifications. General operational concepts or strategic principles that create risk even without detailed technical specifications (e.g., nuclear fission bombs, CBRN delivery methods, cyber exploitation techniques). For a sophisticated adversary, the mere proof-of-concept demonstration can constitute an idea hazard and serve as a role model or template for emulation or reverse engineering. Even organisational structures, business models, or behavioural patterns to an adversary with sufficient means, motivation and opportunity.

3. Attention Risk emerges, for example, when drawing adversarial attention to existing capabilities or vulnerabilities, thereby increasing threat salience and likelihood of hostile exploitation. This targeting risks highlights potent avenues for harm through simple disclosure, for example releasing Zero-day vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure. The Streisand Effect demonstrates how attempted suppression can backfire, causing unintended signal amplification. In counterintelligence this manifests as a common dilemma; that focusing our defensive deliberations on our greatest vulnerabilities, renders our conclusions more valuable for exploitation to a potential adversary. Conversely, irrelevant information can serve as chaff, diverting attention from critical vulnerabilities. This mechanism is used in steganography to conceal secret messages and in lawfare, when the defense team may document dump on the Prosecution.

4. Signaling Risk functions through indirect information transmission about the senders hidden capabilities or intentions without explicit disclosure through action or even inaction. Our actions – what we research, what we don't, what we disclose, what we hold back – can inadvertently signal hidden qualities or vulnerabilities. This operates powerfully in deterrence dynamics, where geopolitical games depend on signaling credible commitment to inflexibility. too much intelligence undermines strategic ambiguity and weakens the ability to maintain credible deterrence or operational deception (e.g., adversary learning of red lines, undermining chicken game scenarios). Information about what one chooses to publicly discuss or even not discuss can be leveraged, in this way the manner or context in which benign information is delivered can provoke dangerous implications — even when the content itself is innocuous.

5. Evocation Risk: It's not just intelligence itself, but how intelligence is presented that evokes a particular response. A raw, unedited combat video, even if truthful, can incite rage and recruitment more effectively than a factual report. Choice of medium, format, style, intertextuality (prior knowledge and mutual information), tone, syntax, semantics, symbols, allegories, metaphors/similes, word choice, narrative, and genre/tropes, complexity, dialect, and even selective channel noise, entropy and ambiguity and intentional omissions/ellipses, designed virality or even lack thereof. Inducing psychological states or cultural reactions via tone or framing.

Finally, the most notoriously overlooked and therefor consequential form of intelligence threat is the mosaic risk.

5. Mosaic Risk occurs when harmless, seemingly insignificant, disparate facts, and/or public information becomes consequential when combined. This principle underlies open-source intelligence, threat modeling, and counterintelligence. The process involves identifying and correlating subtle cues that, when properly assembled, reveal sensitive operations or vulnerabilities. Examples include behavioral profiling through social media, cryptocurrency de-anonymization through transaction correlation, or prosecutors' quiet evidence accumulation. Wherein the outline of a thing can be inferred wholly from it’s absence.

The greatest intelligence successes and failures often emerge not from spectacular classified system breaches, but from patient assembly of overlooked fragments scattered across the information ecosystem.

Modern Intelligence Failures

While modern warfare has evolved beyond traditional uniforms, flags, and boundaries—spanning land, air, sea, space, cyber, biology, and cognitive domains with no distinction between combatants and civilians. This evolution challenges our cold war intelligence infrastructure designed for information scarcity and conventional threat actors in a modern world of informational overabundance, artificial intelligence, and hybrid warfare.

Our feudal security establishment operating like internal fiefdoms, with complex, contradictory forces riddled with inefficiencies, needless complexity, immense red tape, internal conflicts, and rivalries. Often manipulated for political ends and careerist motivations at great human cost. Unpalatable truths persist undigested for years like tumors, as internal reports that are suppressed, buried, never to see the light of day, or spin-doctored out of existence. While we have already address that national security always overrides the pursuit of truth in intelligence, in practise political considerations override security concerns – an unspeakable sin.

The labyrinthine bureaucratic apparatus serves as a self-perpetuating mechanism, shrouded and obscuring it’s own bloat, overloaded with contradictory information, various departmental records, kafkaesque divisions and sub-divisions all keeping their own records resulting in a cacophony of unresolved loose ends.

Like most government institutions, resembling your local DMV far more than the omnipresence omniscient shadow government depicted in Hollywood movies. The deep state is real. Call it what you want, call it the civil service, state bureaucracy, the hidden apparatus of state function, the fact of the matter is that presidents and prime ministers come and go, directors and deputy directors come and go – but the civil servants, who make the sausage, stay the same. This dynamic means real work is often done by naive junior staff despite lacking experience, while senior officers remain passive in their drowsy complacency and perpetual focus on bureaucratic minutiae – marching their pens to the latest orthodoxies of the department of state or foreign ministry. Rare instances of internal self awareness, legitimate self-criticism, and acknowledgment of redundancy are never taken to heart - due to intense bitter rivalries between the factions, as each sought to show who really was the “boss” of the embassy or forward operating base and demonstrate the superiority of his own sources of information to the boss back home.

Conclusion

“This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.” – Matthew 13:13

Modern societies often equate openness, transparency, and free information flow with virtue, while linking secrecy to corruption, malpractice, and taboo. This cultural naïveté obscures a critical reality. While society intuitively acknowledges exceptions—such as the protection of minors, norms against spoilers, legal and medical confidentiality, and trade secrets — these exceptions are often treated as outliers rather than signs of a deeper principle. This is a profound blunder.

The fundamental question—whether more knowledge inherently enhances or harms operational security — remains a case by case question. Even if we assume knowledge is generally beneficial, we must, as professionals, acknowledge the innumerable demonstrable cases wherein increased knowledge actively worsens outcomes.

While any fool knows that authentic intelligence is a requirement for success and faulty intelligence a death knell for failure, even asymmetric intelligence generates it’s own set of risks; introducing moral hazards and operational dilemmas, risking cognitive overload and analysis paralysis, or even learned helplessness and demoralization.

This insider knowledge of sins often leads to profound occupational moral injury —a systematic erosion of innocence that manifests as a profound cynicism, constant paranoia and emotional vacancy. Access to intelligence notoriously creates an incurable intellectual superiority complex leading to progressively isolation siloes of individuals who lose capacity to learn from anyone except those with similar or greater access – and have to constantly lie carefully and consistently to those without clearances. For example, the Cassandra Complex — individuals possessing acute threat awareness due to insider intelligence that others cannot acknowledge experience chronic psychological stress and social alienation.

Possessing any genuine intelligence, even fragments, transforms passive observers into active target — for example, Joseph Stalins second wife Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva, whose intimate knowledge of the mechanics of Bolshevik purges led a OGPU staged the suicide (officially attributed to appendicitis) – even the individuals who discovered the body as well as two doctors who had declined to sign the false death certificate were sentenced to death and executed. This primer defines intelligence risks as arising from the dissemination —or potential dissemination —of any operationally significant information that may cause harm or enable hostile actors to cause harm. We systematically categorize these threats according to vectors, demonstrating how even sanitized or open-source intelligence can create substantive vulnerabilities. While this primer is not intended as an operational manual detailing specific protocols, responsibilities, standards, sources, or methods, we establish a common taxonomy for understanding these often-overlooked vulnerabilities. Crucially, we challenge assumptions, such as intelligence being primarily a force multiplier, and note that the strategic dissemination of true information can achieve military or political objectives.

While it would be wise to deliberately withhold the strongest justifications, as outlining them could undermine established norms, the general premise remains: the very act of understanding intelligence hazards inherently carries it’s own security risk. While too little intelligence is a dangerous thing, and complete ignorance is no defence at all. Our mandate expands beyond unearthing secrets to identifying and mitigating intelligence hazards, and advocating for strategic restraint in the pursuit of knowledge. Intelligence without restraint is hubris – it is both the cure and the toxin, the sword and shield.

That is why Section 14 conducts classical research and analysis using novel sources & methods designed for modern hybrid conflicts.