Sir, kindly guide on –
1- How can OSINT ops be successively conducted on closed information states like China or North Korea? (Attaching a file I had downloaded)
2- Is the information that China generally makes public through its stare-run agencies reliable and sufficient?
3- Is there any research paper or unclassified information over the organisations collecting OSINT for China?
4- Please suggest sources on the Military Uses of OSINT.
Questions repeated & answered after graphic.
1- How can OSINT ops be successively conducted on closed information states like China or North Korea? (Graphic provided)
There is no such thing as a closed state. Information does not recognize national boundaries. The problem is that secret intelligence agencies are lazy and unwilling to do the hard work of foreign language OSINT. Some of CIA's greatest successes within the Office of Scientific & Weapons Research (OSWR) under Dr. Gordon Oehler came from reading the open Soviet technical literature and carefully mapping relationships among authors. If you combine OSINT with mathematics, I believe you can get to no less than 80% of what you need, and more often than not, 90-95%.
Part of the problem is the tendency to avoid holistic analytics and true cost economics. Below is a table of the top ten threats to humanity and the top twelve policies (and related budgets) that we should be studying for all countries.
Any intelligence community that is not willing to focus on decision support (in the USA we focus on really stupid shit like regime change, drone assassinations, and rendition & torture) spanning all threats, all policies, all challenges, will inevitably not be worth what we pay for it. Consider this:
Now compare General Zinni's finding with the valuation for OSINT that I provided you in Answers on OSINT for Official in India 2 and consider also the fifteen slices of HUMINT-OSINT, among whom the most important are lsubject matter experts including legal travelers. Now look at the eight tribes of information that no country properly exploits:
In my experience each country is exploiting less than 5% of what it already knows through these eight tribes of its own, and virtually nothing from the same tribes in all other countries, friendly, neutral, and hostile. Now look at the Multinational Decision Support Centre (MDSC) graphic in Answers for Official in India 2. Given the right combination of collaborative countries, there is nothing about Pakistan (or India) that I cannot get to — or China or Iran or Russia. Our greatest challenge is not other states, our greatest challenge is the criminal enterprises known as the City of London and Wall Street, and the secret societies that integrate white and black collar criminals and are all too often tightly integrated with the secret intelligence communities in each country.
I am quite sure that the US intelligence community is not taking advantage of citation analytics in English, and much less so citation analytics in Chinese, Farsi, Korean, or Russian. I am equally certain that our overseas intelligence operations are not taking advantage of commercially available indigenous capabilities including free lance journalists, academics, private investigators, and commercial business development sources because our default — this was my second graduate thesis consists of Embassies in which the diplomats have no money to spend and are outnumbered by personnel from other agencies that have learned not to trust the Department the State; and the only people with money, generally working from official installations under official cover, are the spies, who are both obvious and insist on dealing only with traitors taking money. Add to this the fact that we do not provide daily tactical signals intelligence support for overseas clandestine operations, and you have a clown show.
2- Is the information that China generally makes public through its stare-run agencies reliable and sufficient?
The short answer is no but the long answer is that all information including deliberately manipulated information has value, especially when compared with other sources. Here in the USA it is now legal for the Department of Justice to lie to the courts and for the Department of Defense to lie to Congress, never mind that we are also propagandizing our own public with lies. Janes Information Group does a phenomenal job of reporting on the actual military budgets of every country, and there are a multitude of commercial sources covering all aspects of nominally secret research, development, and acquisition — in the US our problem is that OSINT is not seen for what it should be, the foundation for everything else AND no one is held accountable for being stupid — the Cabinet does not know how to do the process of intelligence (decision-support) and decisions are made on the basis of bribes and blackmail, not facts or needs.
The Chinese are paying more attention to my work than the Americans. This makes me very sad.
China Moves to the Front in OSINT Targeting
3- Is there any research paper or unclassified information over the organisations collecting OSINT for China?
Just search for OSINT China and you will get to the pretenders. Realisitically to do China properly we need ten thousand subject matter experts from across 100 collaborating countries. Absent an Open Source Agency and a leader of that agency who understands that OSINT is HUMINT and cannot be done without multinational multiliingual depth, the USA will continue to fail and I don't anticipate India will do much better.
One thing we learned in supporting Scotland Yard's innovative OSINT endeavor is that spys don't do real estate and that analog records of who owns what are quite valuable. HUMANS are needed to access in-country analog sources and those HUMANS need to be fluent in Chinese and totally blended.
As long as people continue to conflate OSINT with social media and passive information sources, we will continue to be stupid and ineffective.
4- Please suggest sources on the Military Uses of OSINT.
You really need to do your homework inside of my lifetime of work. Start with my collection below. While you wait for the book to arrive, study the articles, chapters, and monographs that are free online, including:
Steele, Robert. “Open Source Intelligence: What Is It? Why Is It Important to the Military?,” in Loch K. Johnson and James J. Wirtz (eds.), Strategic Intelligence: Windows into a Secret World, NC: Roxbury, 2004, pp. 112-119.
Steele, Robert. “Information Peacekeeping & the Future of Intelligence: The United Nations, Smart Mobs, and the Seven Tribes,” in Ben de Jong, Wies Platje, and Robert David Steele (eds.), Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging Concepts for the Future, Oakton, VA: Open Source Solutions, Inc., 2003, Chapter 13, pp. 201-225
Steele, Robert. “Peacekeeping Intelligence Leadership Digest 1.0,” in Ben de Jong, Wies Platje, and Robert David Steele (eds.), Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging Concepts for the Future, Oakton, VA: Open Source Solutions, Inc., 2003, Chapter 13, pp. 389-435.
Steele, Robert. “Threats, Strategy, and Force Structure: An Alternative Paradigm for National Security,” in Steven Metz (ed.), Revising the Two MTW Force Shaping Paradigm, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College Press, 2001, Chapter 9, pp. 139-163. RDS BackUp PDF: SSI MET2 CH 9 THREATS STRATEGY
Steele, Robert. “Information Peacekeeping: The Purest Form of War,” in Alan Campen and Douglas Dearth (eds.), CYBERWAR: Myths, Mysteries, and Realities, Fairfax, VA: Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Associations, June 1998, pp. 277-293.
Steele, Robert and Mark Lowenthal. “Open Source Intelligence: Private Sector Capabilities to Support DoD Policy, Acquisitions, and Operations,” Defense Daily Network Special Reports, 11 May 1998.
Steele, Robert. “Private Enterprise Intelligence – Its Potential Contribution to National Security,” Intelligence and National Security, 10/4, October 1995, pp. 212-228.
Steele, Robert. “Intelligence Support for Expeditionary Planners,” Marine Corps Gazette, September 1991, pp. 73-79.
Steele, Robert. “Intelligence in the 1990’s: Recasting National Security in a Changing World,” American Intelligence Journal, Summer/Fall 1990, pp. 29-36.
Gray, Al (Ghost-Written by Robert Steele), “Global Intelligence Challenges in the 1990’s,” American Intelligence Journal, Winter 1989-1990, pp. 37-41.
PRINT: Steele, Robert, REINVENTING INTELLIGENCE: 30 Years in the Wilderness (Trump Revolution 46) (Amazon CreateSpace, Earth Intelligence Network, 2019).
KINDLE: Steele, Robert, REINVENTING INTELLIGENCE: 30 Years in the Wilderness (Trump Revolution Book 46) (Amazon Kindle, Earth Intelligence Network, December 2019).
FREE ONLINE: None; individual items online.
I am assuming you have studied my most recent lecture on OSINT for the Ministry of Defence in Denmark.
2017 Robert Steele: OSINT Done Right
As an afterthought: anyone thinking about OSINT for the military should be thinking about how to support the reinvention of the military, not how to support the old military that is unsustainable and cannot win wars. This is my book with that focus.
PRINT: Steele, Robert, REINVENTING NATIONAL SECURITY: Grand Strategy, Global Reality, and the U.S. Army — Everything Our President Is Not Being Told (Trump Revolution 45) (Amazon CreateSpace, Earth Intelligence Network, November 2019).
KINDLE: Steele, Robert. REINVENTING NATIONAL SECURITY: Grand Strategy, Global Reality, and the U.S. Army — Everything Our President Is Not Being Told (Trump Revolution Book 45) (Amazon Kindle, Earth Intelligence Network, November 2019)
FREE ONLINE: None but see https://tinyurl.com/Steele-GOARMY.
SEE ALL
See Also:
