The protection of “sources & methods” is a political gambit, not a legitimate claim for immunity. This testimony to the Moynihan Commission on Secrecy lays out the hypocricy in detail.
Jan Herring, as National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Science & Technology (S&T) at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), tried in the 1970's to adddress the “severe deficiencies” in access to open sources of information. Historically, it has been the S&T analysts that understood the availability and value of open source information in all languages. He failed within government, but did not give up. He went into the private sector and created the Academy of Competitive Intelligence (click on his photograph to learn more) with Ben Gilad and Leonard Fuld, two of the half dozen “top guns” in the English-seaking competitive intelligence community world-wide. If Stevan Dedijer is the father of business intelligence (qua decision-support), then Jan Herring is surely the father of business intelligence in the USA, and a global pioneer in training people to use unclassified analytic sources and methods of inestimable value to any group.
Unlike most, Jan Herring also understand the vital relevance of intelligence to the devleopment of strategy. Below is one of his seminal papers on this topic. See also his short paper on Business Intelligence.
