CSE's expansion complete?

The latest staff figures published by the Public Service Human Resources Management Agency indicate that CSE had 1,601 staff members as of December 2006, down 29 from the figure reported for November. This slight drop in staffing may indicate that CSE has achieved its desired personnel level and the figure is now simply fluctuating up and down due to the vagaries of normal staff attrition and hiring.

In 2005 it was reported that CSE was expanding its staff to 1,650 "full-time equivalents" (blogged about here), which it expected to achieve in 2007. The recent staffing figures (in the 1600-1630 range) seem slightly below this target level, but the term "full-time equivalents" does not necessarily translate one to one into employee numbers since variables like part-time work and overtime can affect the count, so it may be that CSE has reached the 1,650 FTE level.

UKUSA humour

A little humour, formerly posted on the unofficial CFSRS website that used to be run by Leitrim 291ers:



See it while you can, before S**** A****'s lawyers tell me to take it down.

CSE on CTV

Another blast from the relatively recent past...

CTV Montreal ran a three-part documentary on CSE back at the end of October/beginning of November. The transcripts of the shows are on-line here:

Communications Security Establishment, Part I, 30 October 2006

Communications Security Establishment, Part II, 1 November 2006

Communications Security Establishment, Part III, 3 November 2006

In contrast to Canadian Government Executive's recent experience (see Adams speaks), CTV's Todd van der Heyden found officials at CSE a tad publicity shy:

FOR THREE MONTHS, WE TRIED TO TALK TO THE CSE. IN SEPTEMBER, THEY GAVE US A TOUR INSIDE THEIR FACILITIES...WITHOUT OUR CAMERAS. BUT THEN APPARENTLY GOT COLD FEET FOR THE SIT-DOWN INTERVIEW. THEY STOPPED RETURNING OUR CALLS.

Another advance to the rear for the "openness offensive"...

Data mining for national security

Some links to information on CSE and data mining (previously blogged about here and here):

• The Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems (MITACS) project, a network of academia, industry and the public sector, including CSE, that was created to "harness the power of the mathematical sciences to address the inherent complexity of modern industrial and societal problems for the benefit of all Canadians". Projects include Semi-Supervised Learning in Large Graphs:

  As part of ongoing collaborations with the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), we are applying unsupervised and semi-supervised learning methods to understand transactions on large dynamic networks, such as telephone and email networks. When viewed as a graph, the nodes correspond to individuals that send or receive messages, and edges correspond to the messages themselves. The graphs we address can be observed in real-time, include from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of nodes, and feature thousands to millions of transactions. There are two goals associated with this project: firstly, there is the semi-supervised learning task, and rare-target problem, in which we wish to identify certain types of nodes; secondly, there is the unsupervised learning task of detecting anomalous messages. For reasons of efficiency, we have restricted our attention to meta-data of message transactions, such as the time, sender, and recipient, and ignored the contents of messages themselves. In collaboration with CSE, we are studying the problem of counter-terrorism, a semi-supervised problem in which some terrorists in a large network are labeled, but most are not.... Another common feature of counter-terrorism problems is the fact that large volumes of data are often "streamed" through various collection sites, in order to provide maximal information in a timely fashion. A consequence of efficient collection of transactions on very large graphs is that the data itself can only be stored for a short time. This leads to a nonstandard learning problem, since most learning algorithms assume that the full dataset can be accessed for training purposes. Working in conjunction with CSE, we will devise on-line learning algorithms that scale efficiently with increasing volume, and need only use each example once.

• The National Program on Complex Data Structures project on Data Mining with Complex Data Structures, a team of academic researchers partnered with CSE and Generation 5 Technologies.
  
  
• Examples of recent Canadian work in the field:
  
  • Mining Transactional Data on Networks (PDF file), Hugh Chipman with Erika Nahm and Alberto Nettel-Aguirre.
    
  • Classification Models for Transactional Graph Data (PDF file), Erika Nahm. (Can't imagine where she might be working these days...)
    
  • Automated Social Network Analysis for Collaborative Work (PDF file), Larry Korba et al. ("The authors acknowledge the Communications Security Establishment for its support in this work.")
  
  
• CSE career opportunities in data mining
  
  
• A contrary view of the intelligence value of data mining: Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining (PDF file), Jeff Jonas and Jim Harper.