As alarms rang globally about the spread of the new coronavirus in China, officials in Washington turned to intelligence agencies for insight into the threat the virus poses to America.
But according to recent congressional reviews of classified reports from December 2019 and January 2020, the most useful early warning didn’t come from espionage or interception. Authorities have instead relied on public reports, diplomatic messages, and analysis from medical experts. It’s called Open Source Intelligence, or OSINT.
The review found that better use of open source materials is needed to predict the next pandemic or collapsed government.
The authors of a review conducted by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee said there was “few indications that the intelligence community’s sophisticated collection capabilities were generating valuable information for policy makers.” .
This is what many current and former intelligence officials are increasingly warning about. The $90 billion U.S. espionage organization has fallen behind because it has not embraced open source intelligence gathering as adversaries, including China, ramp up efforts.
This does not detract from the importance of traditional intelligence. Spy agencies have a unique ability to infiltrate global communications and train agents. When the Biden administration finally released correct intelligence findings that Russian President Vladimir Putin intended to invade Ukraine, they had a high-profile success.
But government officials and experts are concerned that the United States is not investing enough people and money in analyzing public data and leveraging advanced technology to deliver critical insights. Commercial satellite imagery, social media, and other online data are giving private companies and independent analysts new powers to uncover public secrets. China is also known to have stolen or taken control of vast amounts of data for Americans, raising concerns in Washington about Beijing’s influence over widely used apps like TikTok. I’m here.
“Open source is the driving force behind whether or not intelligence agencies can protect our country,” said Kristin Wood, a former senior CIA official and now chief executive of commercial data platform Grist Mill Exchange. “We as a nation have not prepared a defense against the enemy’s stockpile of ammunition.”
Intelligence agencies face several obstacles to using open source intelligence. Some are technical. Executives working on classified networks often don’t have easy access to things like the unclassified internet and open data sources. There are also concerns about protecting civil liberties and First Amendment rights.
But some experts question whether government agencies are held back by a reflex belief that top-secret information is more valuable.
Connecticut Democrat and longtime member of the Intelligence Committee, Rep. Jim Hymes, said: social media pages.
A 2017 test conducted by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency pitted a team of humans against a computer programmed with an algorithm to identify Chinese surface-to-air missile sites using commercial imagery.
Both humans and computers identified 90% of the site, writes Stanford University professor Amy Zegart in her book Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, but the computer took just 42 minutes and the human team took 80. It took twice as long.
Reports produced using commercial satellites, online posts, and other open sources, such as the daily analysis of Russian and Ukrainian military tactics published by the War Research Institute, are widely read by lawmakers and intelligence officials. .
Frederick Kagan, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who oversees the production of these reports, said: “The need is to find ways to leverage that ecosystem rather than trying to buy it.”
Most of the 18 US spy agencies have open source programs, from the CIA’s Open Source Enterprise to the 10-person program in the Department of Homeland Security’s Intelligence Division. But top officials acknowledge that these programs are inconsistent in how they analyze open source information and how they use and share it.
“We are not paying enough attention to each other that we are not learning the lessons that different parts of the (intelligence community) are learning and we are not expanding our solutions,” the Potomac Officers Club said last year. Intelligence at sponsored industry events. “And we are not using outside expertise and information, some of the work that is available.”
Headquartered at the CIA, the open source enterprise is the successor to a foreign broadcast information service with generations of employees monitoring broadcasts and translating them for analysts.
Much of that work has changed in the last decade. Sensors automatically send out more signals in places that once had to travel long distances to pick up tapes of radio broadcasts in remote areas or areas where Americans weren’t welcome. To do. And machine translation has replaced most of the people who had to transcribe after listening to tapes.
But officials acknowledge that more needs to be done.
Since taking office as Director of National Intelligence, Haynes has initiated multiple open source reviews and plans to finalize recommendations later this year. According to people familiar with the reviews, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal government deliberations, some people involved in those reviews said open source enterprises were leading his OSINT efforts across the spy agency. It suggests that it is no longer specified as
The center has cut its budget for several years in a row, according to three people familiar with open source enterprises. They argue that this indicates that open source efforts have not always been prioritized at a consistent level.
The CIA recently appointed a new leader for the open source enterprise, creating a “mission center” dedicated to technology in 2021.
“We recognize that the importance of open source continues to grow as the vast amount of data available in the open grows,” the agency said in a statement. “The CIA is working not only to keep up with this trend, but to stay ahead of it, and to stay ahead of our adversaries who use open source information.”
There is no consensus on whether the United States should create new open source institutions or centers. Proponents say the new organization can adopt advanced technology and focus on creating more useful products, while opponents say it’s unnecessary bloat and that resources will be diverted from other institutions. I am skeptical that the
Former CIA Deputy Director of Intelligence, Carmen Medina, is currently researching ways for spy agencies to incorporate outside ideas and encourage their employees to be more creative and intuitive.
She proposes a pilot program in which a cell of open-source analysts will compete for years against the usual output of those with top-secret clearances.
Medina and others who have held briefings for White House officials in top positions said, for the most part, open source groups are competitive and use widely available information for better analysis. I think there is even the possibility of doing
“You can’t make sense of today’s world by just packaging little things,” she said.
