Slashdot Mirror
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."
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."We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
The governments use of the word Open Source is different than what we mean...
To the intelligence community, something like Time Magazine is an open source of information. Open, because everyone can have it.
A phone tap, classified information from another agency, a spy, etc are closed sources of information.
This does not mean that they are reading Slashdot, or reviewing the Linux source code. (I'm sure 'they' ARE, but thats not what this term means...)
Unfortunately, our spies and our satellites have lost touch with reality, for they collect less than 10% of the relevant information that we must digest to understand the complex multi-cultural world that is now capable of producing very wealthy and suicidal terrorists.
There's a good reason for the above mentioned figure... While I agree that there's a lot of useful information on the net, there's also a lot of crap.
Any intelligence agency looking to filter out the 99.9% of nonsense that's out there to glean the remaining .01% of useful information faces an incredible challenge. That's not to say that it's impossible, just very, very difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. For every real threat being posted on the net, there are tens of thousands of harmless, steam-blowing rants posted. And how do you decipher between the two? Do we now get into investigating every idle threat someone posts on a bb, or in a chat channel? The sheer scope of this project would daunt even the most dedicated Government sanctioned snoop.
Just as an example, sift through the comments of a /. article at -1, and you're guaranteed to find at least one or two flame-ridden rants about god knows what. Or look at your own past history. How many 'harmless' comments have you made about the stupidity of this or that idea, or how you'd like to kill that person for doing this? You know its harmless. Anyone who knows you probably thinks the same. But how does someone completely outside of your community know?
The article does make a few valid points, however:
Shocking as it may seem, our intelligence community does not routinely strive to identify the top people in the world (not just Americans) on the various topics of concern -- from terrorism to the environment to human trafficking to corruption to disease and public health -- with the result that our analysis tends to be shallow and incestuous, relying on the same consultants again and again.
I think just about anyone who lives outside the US looking in (as I do) would agree with this statement; one has only to observe the lack of knowledge American citizens display with regards to the rest of the world to see that this attitude is quite widespread, and probably does affect intelligence gathering. Raise your hand anyone who's seen the (Canadian) 22 minutes special "Talking to Americans". It's rather depressing actually, to think that so many people, including prominant politicians, could believe that Canada works on a 20 hour clock, or that we're going to change the country's name to Chicago (I'm not exaggerating either... quite a few people were taken in by this).
The Recommended Open Source Initiatives proposed in the article are interesting, though idealistic. One example: Digital History Project ($5M) to digitize and translate key Islamic, Chinese, and other foreign language historical, political, economic, cultural, social, and technical materials.. Having been involved in translation projects (French to English and vice versa) myself, I think he has seriously underestimated how much this would cost..Translation is an incredibly difficult and time-consuming activity; it's not a simple matter of babelfishing an article. Localized phrases and slang do not translate well from one language to another.
Before you can even begin to sift through the plethora of information, you'll need people that are very net and tech savvy. Combining tech skills with those of an intelligence agent is just the beginning. I won't even go into the thorny privacy issues that could be touched on here... that's just a political bomb waiting to go off.
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
I remember 5 years ago sitting in the Navy/Marine Corps Intelligence training center as a young PFC(Private First Class) and having drilled into our head that we must look at open sources to develop a full intelligence picture. Even our closing practical app exercise included simulated CNN and reuters news bits for us to analyze. Exercises I was involved with when in the fleet included those. On 9/11, our intelligence officers first orders included one to keep the TV on and tuned to CNN and MSNBC 24/7 for the forseeable future.
As for not translating korean stuff, well I remember these were unclassfied, if you can ever track down some of the north korean radio transcripts, they are worth a laguh and a look into the North Korean mindset.
While open source intelligence may not get the attention it deserves at the highest levels, it isn't as badly neglected as this article seems to think.
I'm not sure how detailed I can legally get on this point, so I'll be general. Some of this reluctance to use false sources may be due to false alarms such things have caused in the past. Some of our enemies will manipulate the open sources in an attempt to cause us to react to a perceived threat. It worked for us in WWII with the whole landing at Calais deal, and worked against us recently in the middle east(thats the bit I can't be more specific on).
In the article:
Shocking as it may seem, our intelligence community does not routinely strive to identify the top people in the world (not just Americans) on the various topics
of concern - from terrorism to the environment
to human trafficking to corruption to disease
and public health - with the result that our
analysis tends to be shallow and incestuous,
relying on the same consultants again and
again.
I am not sure how many of you have looked into getting a clearance. There are some serious ethical choices that you need to make in order to get one. Some of these include:
1. Restricted travel.
2. Not being able to associate freely with non US citizens.
3. (probably the most important for the academic types). Depending on what clearence you get and from which agency anything that you go to publish will have to be peer reviewed by people in the intelligence community before it can be published.
THe reason that this is important is that the intelligence agencies can not just talk to any Tom, DIck or Harry about somethings. Many of the academic leaders can not justify the restrictions on personal freedom, so they choose not to work in the intelligence community.
It would be great for them to pull resources off of everybody but, they are limited to what they can talk about and it would be easier for those opposed to our interests to learn what we are up to.
I agree that it would be great to be able to do this but there are several things that need to be resolved before hand.
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
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:
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.
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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.