He warned that by 2020 all communications would be encrypted, which he said amounted to "potentially the most significant degradation of intelligence capabilities in modern times".
"Unlike more directly observable sequestration impacts, like shorter hours at public parks or longer security lines at airports, the degradation of intelligence will be insidious," Mr. Clapper said.
Add to that the long degradation of American intelligence gathering, what some dissident intelligence officers call a retreat from traditional espionage under a succession of directors of the Central Intelligence Agency, even as Washington spent record amounts for spy satellites.
Clapper warned that the across-the-board budget cuts forced by the process known as sequestration could have a serious impact on intelligence-gathering. "The scope and magnitude of the cuts will be long-lasting," he said, noting that the degradation of the intelligence community will be "invisible" until there is a failure.
Fitz suggests that the ability to use Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to predict service degradation and prevent issues, is a smart way of allowing IT teams to reinforce system uptime and focus on bigger issues.
The terrorist threat is growing, the politicians and intelligence services say, due in part to the degradation of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and the rising numbers of Isis fighters returning to Europe.
We have seen over the past several years a degradation in some important areas of our intelligence capabilities.
"Assessments conducted by the intelligence community indicate that climate change could have significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to poverty, environmental degradation, and the further weakening of fragile governments," the document stated.
They complain that classical theory does a poor job of explaining graceful degradation of function, holistic representation of data, spontaneous generalization, appreciation of context, and many other features of human intelligence which are captured in their models.
