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Article published Jul 29, 2007
Intelligent intelligence


July 29, 2007


Arnaud de Borchgrave - President John F. Kennedy once said he got "far more out of the New York Times than the CIA." Those were the days when major U.S. newspapers and the three networks maintained foreign bureaus staffed by prize-winning foreign correspondents all over the world.

In those halcyon days, Open Source Intelligence, or OSINT in the espionage vernacular, could be culled from highly knowledgeable foreign correspondents, many of them scholars who had written books about the history and culture of their wide-ranging beats. No more. At the end of World War II, there were 2,500 U.S. foreign correspondents; today, less than 250.

Newspapers, magazines and networks — victims of both a weak dollar and corporate bottom-line bean counters — have cut back foreign news coverage to the point where it no longer qualifies as OSINT. ABC slashed its staff foreign correspondents from 37 in the 1970s to four, according to veteran newsman Ted Koppel. Once-over-lightly foreign reporting — with the exception of major events like wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and 20-minute TV magazine pieces — is not what the intelligence community categorizes as OSINT. Reporters are now increasingly "parachuted" into hot stories abroad for a few days and then home to avoid exorbitant hotels bills.

A recent two-day, Washington conference on OSINT, organized by Eliot Jardines, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for open source, brought 1,200 people together from 40 countries. It was a mix of media, academia, business and the intelligence community.

All facets of OSINT were discussed, notably the constant drama of constant trivia that has afflicted U.S. media since the end of the Cold War (e.g., almost two years of O.J. Simpson that kept America's collective eye off the international ball; infamous skater Tonya Harding, who got more airtime in a comparable news period than the fall of the Berlin Wall that collapsed the Soviet empire; Rep. Gary Condit, whose affair with a murdered staffer was dislodged by Osama bin Laden and the September 11, 2001, terror attacks; Paris Hilton, whose mind-numbing, one-hour interview on "Larry King Live" reminded the millions who watched that addle-brained celebrity has now displaced merit-based fame).

For obvious reasons, open source information is no longer the traditional collection from open sources. This aspect of the intelligence business has become infinitely more complex. There are now 26,000 individual newspapers in the world that have to be monitored because one or two might contain a piece or two of a global terrorist puzzle. To complete the global Tower of Babel babble, there are 26,000 radio stations; 21,000 TV stations; 108 million Web sites; 75 million blogs; 56 million MySpace squatters; 100 million hits a day on YouTube; 8,000 news and information portals; 200 million photos on flickr.com, increasing by 5,000 per minute; 45,000 daily podcasts, and 2.5 million Web-enabled devices.

The pipe input into the Internet doubles every six months. Some 627 petabytes crisscross the globe daily on the Internet (one petabyte equals 1,024 terabytes, or 2 to the 50th power, which comes out to 1,125,899,906,842,624). That's several thousand times the entire contents of the Library of Congress — every day.

Cold War problems were a lead-pipe cinch next to today's counterterrorism challenges. As Tom Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, said, "For almost half a century it was a question of what do we do to keep nations on our side and what we do to pry the others away." Now the intelligence community has 15 minutes to supply answers to immediate questions. Decisions will be made whether the intelligence community can weigh in or not. The magnitude of the challenge can be gauged by the inexperience of many analysts hired since the September 11 attacks. Half of some 45,000 analysts in 16 intelligence agencies (total personnel just under 100,000) have less than five years experience. They were part of the explosive growth of the intelligence community after September 11.

Now the intelligence community needs to tell its political masters something critically important they didn't know — a lot more than Googling a profile for a living, or checking a Wiki entry. OSINT supplies the deeper knowledge that provides real insight into why, for example, a 21-year-old French Muslim living in the Paris suburb of St. Denis, whose grandparents were born in Algeria, found his way to Iraq to fight Americans and returned to France to set up a terrorist cell. A French professor who specializes in Islam would have access to such a youngster now in prison in France, not the CIA station chief in Paris.

With OSINT, the intelligence community wants to make accessibility a normal way of doing business. Too many things are stamped Top Secret, Secret or Classified, that don't need to be. Even newspaper clippings sent from one Intel agency to another have wound up classified.

OSINT is now a matter of consulting the best experts available. A Cold War National Intelligence Estimate used to take 480 days to reach agreement among 16 agencies. It is now down to 80 days — still far too long, says Director of National Intelligence Adm. Mike McConnell.

As Mary Margaret Graham, deputy DNI for collection, says, "Open Source is a discipline of collection, not intelligence per se, but an enabler of intelligence." The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) where this reporter dwells as a senior adviser, has just published the findings of a one-year experiment in "Open Source as a Force Multiplier in Intelligence."

CSIS' Transnational Threats Project, which this writer directs, recruited 15 experts on Islamist extremism in Europe from the Middle East (including Israel), North Africa, Europe, the United States and Canada, and networked them 24/7 with a state-of-the-art, electronic collaborative software tool. They were known as TIN members — for Trusted Information Network.

With a budget of less than half a million dollars, Tom Sanderson, who moderated the TIN, and his deputy Jacqueline Harned, proved such a network can produce material inaccessible to the intelligence community. It can be used for myriad problems requiring expert illumination.

Commented Eliot Jardines, Open Source Director for the Intelligence Community, "Why collect clandestinely what we can get from Open Source?" Why indeed. When Mr. Jardines came aboard ODNI in 2005, with his deputy Sabra Horne, senior adviser for outreach, they had a blank slate. They then decided to gather Open Source expertise from academia, media, corporations, the IC, the military and government. The Washington Open Source conference more than met everyone's expectations.

Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.

[Esteban]

Nuevo documento en http://www.athenaintelligence.org/ titulado "Algunas claves psicosociales para el análisis y la explicación de los fenómenos terroristas". Autor: Luis de la Corte


http://www.athenaintelligence.org/op15.pdf

[Loopster]

Even Spies Go To Trade Conferences
By Robert O'Harrow Jr., Washington Post Staff Writer
September 13, 2008



The spies and contractors stood side-by-side, pressing by a crowd of
pitchmen at the Ronald Reagan Building.
It was an unusual gathering, a trade show and conference organized by the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence to promote using open
sources of information such as the Internet and television broadcasts as
part of the intelligence process.
Judging from the packed seminars and the crowds collecting corporate
brochures, mints and pens in the exhibition hall, most everybody was there
to do business.
Booz Allen Hamilton offered a service called InTrack to help collect,
monitor and process data collected from the Internet and other sources.
LexisNexis promoted a system for sending automated warnings of trouble
abroad. There were companies selling translation systems, Web search tools
and data-mining supercomputers. One of the more popular booths was Google's,
though exactly what it wanted to sell the intelligence community was not
clear.
"Demand is huge," said Premkumar Natarajan, vice president of BBN
Technologies, which sells to the government automated translation systems
that scan satellite transmissions of foreign television and radio programs.
"People always needed to know more. After 9/11, they acknowledged they
needed to know more."
The gathering reflected the intelligence community's evolution since the
Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Unlike Cold War-era spies, intelligence
analysts and government policymakers can no longer rely primarily on
cloak-and-dagger operations to keep track of global threats. Now, like
businesses and other organizations, they're increasingly turning to the
torrents of information available on the Internet and through other
non-classified sources.
The heavy presence of contractors, both in the exhibition halls and seminar
rooms, also shows the growing reliance on the private sector. About 70
percent of more than $50 billion in annual spending on intelligence now goes
to corporations for everything from major computer systems to heating bills.
As many as 37,000 contract employees work alongside up to 100,000 government
intelligence workers, according to a recent government survey.
Mark Lowenthal, a former assistant CIA director for analysis and production,
said the government trails far behind the private sector in creating new
technologies that are adopted by intelligence agencies. "Those guys have
more motivation and more skill," Lowenthal, who now runs the private
Intelligence and Security Academy, said about technology entrepreneurs.
The makeup of the corporate crowd in the exhibition hall, along with the
demand to get into the conference, spoke volumes about the growing
intelligence market and the changes in the craft of intelligence itself. A
thousand people were on the waiting list to attend.
One of the central messages from some vendors was that information on the
Internet now provides most of the clues that law enforcement and
intelligence officials need to do their jobs.
"It's virtually impossible to keep tabs on potential threats without finding
a way to efficiently and effectively monitor the internet for content and
persons of interest," said a brochure for RiverGlass, a technology firm.
Booz Allen's InTrack service seems to derive almost oracular insights of the
sort government leaders crave. The impact of a tsunami in Taiwan on global
communications? The fallout from a spike in tuberculosis? Links between
unexplained incidents and terrorism? "InTrack's mission is to collect,
monitor, process, and combine data with existing 'trusted' sources and
baseline patterns to perform robust analyses," the company's flier says.
At the LexisNexis station, a slick brochure touted a "data analytics
supercomputer" as an instant solution to intelligence dilemmas. The brochure
claims the system can manage hundreds of terabytes of data -- the equivalent
of many times all the holdings in the Library of Congress. "Unparalleled
linking technology and analysis uncovers key connections and relationships,"
it says.
The Google booth displayed a high-definition video of a virtual car driving
through an exact digital representation of San Francisco -- streets,
buildings and all. But Google exhibitors said they were not allowed to tell
a reporter why the company was there or what it did for intelligence or
anything else. Visitors from the Pentagon, Marine Corps and Army Joint
Information Operations Warfare Command stopped by.
Some conference participants and speakers said they aren't surprised by the
growing presence of contractors.
"The essence of what this is about is how to provide those critical insights
for officials facing life and death situations," said Jennifer Sims, a
speaker at the conference on Thursday and director of intelligence studies
at Georgetown University.

Aquí por supuesto seguimos viendo como la sección de Preguntas Frecuentes del CNI afirma sin pudor que apenas recibe información de fuentes abiertas... si es que debe de ser verdad eso que nuestros SSII son los más mejores del mundo mundial