CIA taps huge potential of digital technology

At CIA headquarters in Langley, the office of the director of digital innovation sits next to the agency's in-house museum filled with artefacts from its history.

Featuring heavily are gadgets such as early secret cameras and bugging devices that would not appear out of character in a Hollywood film.

The line-up makes the point that even though the CIA is an intelligence agency whose central mission has been to recruit people to provide secrets, technology has always had a crucial role, BBC News reports.

Andrew Hallman - who runs the recently created Directorate of Digital Innovation - has the job of making sure that the new digital world works to the CIA's advantage rather than disadvantage.

A major focus of Mr Hallman's effort is to use data to provide insights into future crises - developing what has been called "anticipatory intelligence".

This means looking for ways in which technology can provide early warning of, say, unrest in a country.

"I think that's a big growth area for the intelligence community and one the Directorate of Digital Innovation is trying to promote," Mr Hallman says.

The volume and variety of data produced around the world has grown exponentially in recent years - a process about to accelerate as more and more items as well as people are connected up in the so-called internet of things.

The ambition is to take this wealth of data and combine it with analytical models fine-tuned with insights from social sciences to spot where an issue such as food scarcity might be emerging and might, in turn, lead to instability in a region.

This might also involve looking at social media to perform "sentiment analysis" that can help understand if the mood in a population is turning sour.