The US intelligence community is slowly coming to the realization that most of its vital information does not have to be stolen from a secret vault in an enemy country but is available by surfing the Web.Since 9/11, the exploitation of so-called "open-source intelligence," has increased among intelligence agencies, but many obstacles remain. Primary among those is a bureaucratic culture in which analysts dismiss documents not marked "classified" or "eyes only." USA Today reports that this intelligence, known within the intel community as OSINT, is becoming a fixture among the Intelligence Community.
Open sources can provide up to 90% of the information needed to meet most U.S. intelligence needs, Deputy Director of National Intelligence Thomas Fingar said in a recent speech. Harnessing that information "is terribly important," he said. "It ought to be a normal part of what we do, not being fixated on secrets dribbling into the computer's in-box."
But progress has been slow.
Robert David Steele, a former CIA and Marine Corps intelligence officer, gives the intelligence community a D+ for its use of information available from the Internet, commercial satellite imagery and other open sources. "There's still a cult of secrecy — nothing is seen as important unless it's classified," says Steele, founder of OSS.Net, a commercial intelligence provider for private companies and the government.
Information from unclassified sources has been responsible for dialing back heated rhetoric about Iran's nuclear program, among other things, the newspaper reports. Publicly available photos from the country's Natanz nuclear facilities provided vital clues to its capabilities.
Throughout much of the 20th century, open-source intelligence gathering focused primarily on translating foreign newspapers and broadcasts. As more and more information was available online, the nation's 16 intelligence-gathering agencies were slow to adapt. Such basics as desk-top Web access was unavailable for most intelligence agents, and even today 19,000 FBI agents are unable to log on to the Web from their offices or cubicles (11,000 agents have Internet access), according to USA Today.
Although they may have been slow to arrive to the party, the nation's intelligence agents are quickly adapting to exploit Web 2.0 hallmarks such as YouTube, MySpace and personal blogs. The CIA also is working with Google to help them better search for and share intelligence.
Valuable information from open sources has been exploited as long as the US has had an intelligence community, and even before. During World War II port watchers in the pacific tracked ship movements, and information on encryption was gleaned at German trade shows after the war, writes Jennifer Sims in the book Transforming U.S. Intelligentce. During the Cold War, though, the emphasis on secret information became ingrained, as the CIA and other intelligence agencies focused on the highly secretive Soviet Union.
Sims says failure to fully exploit OSINT is potentially debilitating, especially now that US adversaries are not nearly as good at keeping information hidden.
"[A] fixation on secret sources now amounts to a debilitating cognitive bias," Sims writes. "A number of US adversaries are less secretive than the Soviet Union was, and they do not necessarily know how to keep their actions out of the public eye."
