COLLECTION AND USE OF OPEN-SOURCE INTELLIGENCE

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Loeb, Vernon. "Back Channels: The Intelligence Community -- Non-Secrets." Washington Post, 1 Feb. 2000, A13. [http://www.washingtonpost.com]

According to Robert D. Steele, former CIA operations officer and chief executive of Open Source Solutions Inc., "three of the Pentagon's joint commands have appointed action officers to manage the collection of openly available, non-secret intelligence.

"'There is growing interest among the theater commanders-in-chief in operationally oriented open-source intelligence,'" Steele said. "'The continuing difficulties faced by the CINCs in obtaining timely intelligence, including commercial imagery, from the Beltway bureaucracies have led them to begin creating their own direct-access capabilities for open-source intelligence.'"

See Steele, Robert David, below.

Loeb, Vernon. "Spying Intelligence Data Can Be an Open-Book Test: Firm Finds a Market for Publicly Available Information." Washington Post, 22 Mar. 1999, A17.

Robert D. Steele, chief executive of Open Source Solutions Inc., in Fairfax, Virgina, "thinks there is one aspect of the intelligence game that he plays better than his former employer: gathering up publicly available information." Steele and his partner, Mark Lowenthal, "don't contend that open sources can replace clandestine human and technical sources. But the intelligence agencies exhibit a bias for their own secrets, they say, and lack internal systems for fully mining business experts, academic authorities, scientific journals, foreign government reports and burgeoning commercial databases, not to mention the Internet."

See Steele, Robert David, and Lowenthal, Mark, below.

Lowenthal, Mark. "Open Source Intelligence: New Myths, New Realities." Available at: http://www.defensedaily.com/reports/osintmyths.htm. Intelligencer 10, no. 1 (Feb. 1999): 7-9.

This is an excellent analysis of the problems surrounding the collection and use of open-source intelligence in the information world of today.

The author argues that the the Community Open Source Program Office (COSPO), "the IC's attempt to arrive at a more coherent approach to the open source issues, both technology and content," failed to achieve its mission. The reasons for that failure can be found in an "in-grained" Intelligence Community "prejudice ... against open sources," and an overemphasis on "finding an ever elusive technology that would solve the open source problem of multiple and diverse sources."

McGill, G.M. (Mert) "OSCINT and the Private Information Sector." International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 7, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 435-443.

"The amount of information available electronically through open sources, information with countless intelligence applications, is staggering.... The intelligence community must take advantage of every possible resource at its disposal, including the wide array of open source information that is readily available and relatively inexpensive." The author's primary suggestion is for the government to release information in "raw" form through a network like the Internet; private-sector information providers would, then, package or add value to this data.

Mercado, Stephen C. "Reexamining the Distinction Between Open Information and Secrets." Studies in Intelligence 49, no. 2 (2005).

The author argues that "(1) secrets are not identical to intelligence; (2) the distinction between overt and covert sources is more blurred than commonly imagined; (3) open information often equals or surpasses classified material; (4) slighting OSINT is no way to run an intelligence community; and (5) the private sector is no substitute for the government in applying open sources to address today’s intelligence challenges." He concludes that "Washington needs to assign greater resources to open sources. Whether we create a national OSINT center or leave FBIS and its counterparts right where they are is less important than the issue of dollars and people."

Mercado, Stephen C. "A Venerable Source in a New Era: Sailing the Sea of OSINT in the Information Age." Studies in Intelligence 48, no. 3 (2004): 45-55.

"[T]he Intelligence Community needs to build a better ship to sail the sea of open sources. FBIS, the largest and best equipped of the disorganized collection of offices engaged in OSINT, is too small a craft with too few hands to navigate the waters and harvest the catch.... Above all, the Intelligence Community requires a sustained approach to open sources. As with other collection disciplines, one cannot conjure OSINT programs out of thin air. Assembling a substantial number of officers competent in Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Korean, and other languages and expert in fishing in the OSINT seas, then giving them the sources and methods to do their work, would be no small feat."

Clark comment: The author makes many on-the-mark points in this excellent article. The problem is that he is a decade too late. CIA and FBIS management missed the boat in the early 1990s when the CIA's Community Open Source Program Office was formed without FBIS as the lead element.

Military Intelligence 31, no. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 2005): Entire issue. ["Open-Source Intelligence."]

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