Open Source Intelligence

Artifice_Eternity writes: "Time magazine is running a story highlighting the US government's neglect of open source intelligence, or OSINT. OSINT includes stuff on the Internet and in various newspapers and periodicals, as well as "gray literature" (limited-availability publications like dissertations, local phone directories, etc.). It also includes foreign-language experts, and commercial data (satellite maps, news archives, scientific research). The mass of data to be crunched indicates how intelligence is an information processing problem in today's world."

Comments

Open Source Intelligence?

[laetus]

I think this is carrying the "open source" moniker a bit too far.

What we're talking about is simply publicly available information.

This guy is advocating gathering it and sifting it for useful nuggets of intelligence, a goal with which I agree.

Open Source Intelligence -- ?

[ciurana]

I first read the article on Sunday afternoon. It caught my attention because, like many on /., I made the right associations and tried to match "intelligence" with "open source" in the espionage sense. I was disappointed after reading 2/3 of the article, and didn't finish it. This was written by someone mostly grandstanding. The author focused too much on gathering data from all sources without giving enough thought to interpretation of those data.

I had the privilege (misfortune?) to work with a few intelligence types. When you talk to the people in the field, not to the public figures, public affairs wags, or the pundits, you will almost universally get the same two answers, rated in order of importance:

1. Intelligence analysis
2. Human level intelligence (HUMINT)
3. Fewer whiz-bang gadgets

The open intelligence article advocates only points 2 and 3, and barely touches on 1. Just like in coding, where the problem is not writing code but writing code that does something useful, intelligence is all about interpreting the data so that policy and actions may be appropriately channeled.

Dr. Ray S. Cline (former deputy director, CIA; look him up) once said that the world needed fewer spies and more critical thinking (I'm paraphrasing here a bit). Everyday disasters and attacks that could have been prevented still happen because there are too many toys and budgets and bureacratic fiefdoms to protect and there aren't enough ears who understand the bad guys' language, not enough cooperation between three-letter agencies, and not enough brains focused on making sense of the data gathered through various channels.

Thus, while part of the problem is gathering data, making sense of it is what will prevent another catastrophe like the terrorist attacks last September.

E

Re:Neither Open Source nor Intelligent

[Fnkmaster]

What's funny is that you and/or Slashdot editors are reading in your own contextual meaning of "open source". I just rechecked the article and there is no analogy drawn to the software world or "Open Source software". Open sources (i.e. publicly available information) and the corresponding intelligence data is just being referred to as "open source intelligence". The author makes no sort of philisophical claim or analogy to similar practices with software source code.

And while I agree that it's US centric, I think you are blowing that issue out of proportion. It's written for an American audience, and like I said, it makes no pretense that such projects have high-minded philisophical goals, beyond perhaps sharing some of the agglomeration of "open source intelligence" with the public or other friendly nations.