Category: Communities of Practice

According to a 16 February piece in the New York Times by Mark Lander, “President Obama ordered his advisers last August to produce a secret report on unrest in the Arab world, which concluded that without sweeping political changes, countries from Bahrain to Yemen were ripe for popular revolt, administration officials said Wednesday.”  Participants included experts from the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), State Department and, probably, experts from outside the government. The report was classified because of its political sensitivity. Although President Obama consulted with experts from the IC, the report was produced outside of IC analysis and reporting processes.

This is actually the third such independent report that the Obama administration has asked to be produced outside of IC channels. The other two were produced under the leadership of Brookings Institute scholar and former CIA Officer, Bruce Riedel and dealt with South Asia. Riedel’s reports were produced largely from open sources and indeed were later turned into quite important books [Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of Global Jihad; and The Search for Al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology, and Future]. There is every reason to suspect that the August report on unrest in the Middle East was also a product of mainly open source material.

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From my friends at Intelligence Online….

Used extensively by protesters in Egypt and Tunisia, Facebook and other social networking websites contain a wealth of useful intelligence.  However, knowing how to exploit that information is another matter. During a hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on February 4, Senator Dianne Feinstein complained to Stephanie O’Sullivan, number 2 at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, about the U.S. intelligence community’s failure to anticipate the Egyptian crisis by analysing information that was freely available on Facebook. On January 28, British MPs made the same complaint about Britain’s intelligence agencies to Gus O’Donnell, Prime Minister David Cameron’s cabinet secretary. Agencies on both sides of the Atlantic are now busy playing catch-up with the Facebook generation.

Phi Beta Iota: The tragedy of the unintelligent US Intelligence Community will not be fixed until one of two things happen: the President realizes he is being screwed; or the DNI realizes he is overlooking the ONE THING he can get right this time around.  From 1988 onwards, with every Commission from Aspin-Brown onwards, each DNI has been told in no uncertain terms what needs to be done.  For Jim Clapper, one of the finest thinkers we've every known, to refuse for one minute to take the simple step of asking the long-standing leaders of the OSINT movement–Steele, Markowitz, Dumaine, with Hock, Reuser, Benavides, Edwards, Bjore, and a few others completing the inner council–is difficult to comprehend.

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Continue reading “US Intelligence Unwitting of Most Open Sources”