Mark Munsell, chief technology officer at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, told FCW in an interview published Tuesday NGA is looking to commercial businesses as it works to declassify images to collect data and support its intelligence mission.
“Taking advantage of all the new commercial businesses out there today that are either launching satellites and collecting unclassified information or taking advantage of open source information that has a geospatial tag of space and time associated with it so we can aggregate that information with it and then correlate it with other information other intelligence information that we have,†he said.
When asked about the challenges facing NGA when it comes to data aggregation, Munsell cited the problem of identifying the right environment to converge the information.
He also mentioned the policy aspect with regard to classification levels, interoperability challenges, the agency’s effort to employ more digital practitioners and initiatives to build a secure environment for data scientists and software engineers.
