Introduction
OSINT and Intelligence Reform
– History
– Requirements
– Collection
– Processing
– Analysis
– Covert Action
– Counterintelligence
– Accountability, Civil Liberties, and Oversight
– Strategic Warning
– Strategic Sharing
– Emerging Prospects
— Digitization
— Visualization
— Peer-to-Peer (P2P)
OSINT and Electoral Reform
OSINT and Governance Reform
OSINT and Strategic Budgetary Reform
Notes 1-44
Volume II, Chapter 6, pp. 95-122. Edited by Professor Dr. Loch Johnson, the dean of the intelligence practitioner-scholars, this set, while expensive, is the best available total overview of the craft of intelligence.
Executive Summary
– Definition and scope
– Open source intelligence and joint or coalition operations
– Private sector information offerings
– OSINT and the emerging future intelligence architecture of NATO
Introduction to Open Source Intelligence
– Definitions
– OSINT in context
– OSINT and information operations
– OSINT and national security
– OSINT and the larger customer base for intelligence
– OSINT and the levels of analysis
– OSINT and coalitions
– OSINT and saving the world
– OSINT as a transformative catalyst for reform
Open Sources of Information
Open Source Software and Software for Exploitation
Open Source Services
The Open Source Intelligence Cycle
Applied Open Source Intelligence
– Open source intelligence tradecraft
– Mission relevance of open source intelligence
— Missioon area applications
Conclusion
– Money Matters
— Funding trade-offs
— Contracting mistakes
— Metrics for measuring return on investment
—–Cost of secrecy
—–Relative value
—–Return on sharing
— Commercial strategy
— Budget and manning implications
– The value of sharing
References
Acronyms
Notes 1-30
This handbook is both much shorter than, and completely different from, the five-volume set on Strategic Intelligence. Edited by Professor Dr. Loch Johnson, the dean of the practitioner-scholars, it includes a Chapter 10 my updating and adaptation of the NATO Open Source Intelligence Handbook to be of gneeral=purpose utility to the public practitioner.
Hamilton Bean, “The DNI's Open Source Center: An Organizational Communication Perspective.” The response to this well-intentioned article is available under Articles & Chapters, click on the Frog below to go direct.
There are other excellent reviews, so I just want to add that this book as well as his non-fiction book Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror is on my list of top 40 books on Earth Threat #9: Terrorism.
Also, Winn Schwartau was there first, see the following books from the 1990's; Winn, Peter Black, and I were among the first to talk about taking down America in 24 hours; Winn testified to Congress, and as they did with Peak Oil and the thermite evidence from 9-11, they ignored reality.
This is an excellent book for those that do not follow the broader press (I ignore the “mainstream” press, the NYT, Washington Post, and LA Times are largely worthless–the Boston Globe continues to please from time to time). The author has ably catalogued the disgrace to our nation, and the betrayal of our loyal troops, from the outsourcing of virtually every function including some combat operations.
I will honor the author by quoting Ralph Peters, one of the top US military strategists alive, who has said that we have outsourced so much that we have ultimately outsourced our honor (this includes our outsourcing to 42 dictators–there are only 2 we do not love) and to several despotic or illegal narco-regimes, including Colombia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan.
The author is careful to identify some real heros that excel at supporting our troops, but on balance he provides a very bleak narrative that could be used to set the stage for Congressional hearings. In my view, Title 10 needs a complete overhaul, to create four joint forces after next: Big War built around Air Force; Small War built around Army and Marines; Peace War built around Navy and Coast Guard, and Homeland Defense, built around a National Guard that shifts toward law enforcement and does NOT go overseas for anything less than World War IV.
I might have leaned toward four stars on this book, which is certainly a useful contribution, but it falls into the second tier for being a clear hit job—and shallow to boot. Gaps in the author's reading (or writing) appeared from the very beginning. Lost first star there.
He defines strategic intelligence as focused on threats and the use of force. Despite his mention of Adda Bozeman, he does not seem to have understood that the heart of strategic intelligence is deep and sustained study and understanding of foreign cultures, histories, languages, genealogies, and ties that bind–financial, religious, tribal, ethnic, etc. Lost second star here.
There are ten high-level threats, twelve remediation policies, and eight global challengers, and all 30 of these factors must be studied as a whole and in relation, in the present, near, and far term. Anything less is not strategic intelligence.
His coverage of 9-11 is also deficient. While he properly criticizes CIA for failing to actually ramp up both clandestine penetrations and analytic talent, and he faults the FBI for not sharing with CIA, he fails to mention the 9 specific warnings from foreign governments that the White House chose to exploit to achieve “our Pearl Harbor”–the Israeli's even sent a video crew to capture the known-in-advance event for their archives, while Dick Cheney organized an “exercise” with a command center NOT in the target building where the command center was originally built at great expense.
On Iraq, I found the author irritating–almost whining–in his never-flagging effort to tar the CIA. Evidently he is not aware of, or does not wish to credit, the defection of Salaam Hussein's son in law and the 25+ line crossers Charlie Allen is said to have sent in, as recounted in Bob Woodward's State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III all of whom came back with the same story: kept the cookbooks, destroyed the stocks, bluffing for regional influence's sake.
I agree with the author on some key points:
1) DNI should not have been created, this just created another layer of bureaucracy so we could promote the losers who got us here one more time.
2) CIA is out of touch with reality. While the author glosses over the importance of open sources of information, he is evidently completely unfamiliar with what properly done OSINT can do, to include tribal genealogies and orders of battle, financial-family ties and asset mapping, and so on.
3) The author is certainly correct to whale away at CIA security. On the one hand, they did not want my wife's report on the 300 foreign intelligence officers she met at one of my conferences, including the LtGen from the KGB (“did you sleep with any of them? No? Forget about it.”) and on the other these are the morons who harassed a GS-15 who dared to call Kazhikistan to solicit local views, to the point that she quit CIA and is now very happy as the Chief of the Intelligence Analysis Division at one of the Combatant Commands. I was barred from the campus by these fools for properly returning a classified document from USMC to CIA, taken with permission and transported both ways via authorized couriers.
4) The author is correct on the fossilized layers of “management” and bureaucracy, and he does provide a good review of shortcomings, but I for one, with experience across three of the four Directorates back in the day, consider this book to be a case of “several hundred bleats too many.” Yes, CIA is a mess. Yes, CIA should not have 800 SES positions and 200-400 compartments that do not share with another. It is all that bad? No. I could turn CIA around in 90 days just by recruiting Amazon to mobilize all the top authors and readers on every topic; by creating external non-secret multinational intelligence-policy councils on every topic of importance as I am doing now with the Earth Intelligence Network; by asking DoD to make the Coalition Coordination Center into a Multinational Information Sharing Hub that does OSINT as well as multinational HUMINT and close-in emplacement of US-provided technical devices. Somewhere in there I would fire two thirds of the contractors, half of the security people, two thirds of the lawyers, and most of FBIS. This is not rocket science.
The book ends weakly, with a mention of horizon scanning, which Singapore has turned into a 21st century new craft of intelligence, but the author evidently has not read Tom Quiggin's Seeing the Invisible: National Security Intelligence in an Uncertain Age, and is unfamiliar as well with the broader literatures on information society, modern intelligence, strategy & force structure, emerging non-traditional as well as catastrophic and disruptive threats, anti-Americanism and blow-back, and the negative impact of domestic politics on sound foreign and national security policy.
