I have never, in 18 years of OSINT advocacy, seen a more professional and intelligent endeavor to understand and report on what we are trying to do. This is absolutely world-class, and my admiration is unbounded. This creative individual has a lifetime free pass to our conferences. His technical, legal, and people skills are of the highest order.
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Kent's photo links to the ten video interviews he did at OSS '06, the last conference before it was stolen and consequently destroyed by an individual that broke his promise (one of several) and is fortuitously no longer responsible for anything of significance. All of the interviews are recommended, but then Congressman Simmons, now running for Senator in place of Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticutt, is especially noteworthy. No one in government has, in the twenty one years we have been fighting this fight, gotten a better grip not just on the idea of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) as a separate discipline, but on OSINT as a means of revitalizing American education, improving decision-support to every Congressional jurisdiction (most get NOTHING from the secret intelligence world), and helping the President and the Cabinet Secretaries manage Whole of Govenrment Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Operational Campaigns.
Among those interviewed that we hold in very high esteem are Michael Andregg, Carolyn Stewart, Mats Bjore, Ralph Peters, Robert Young Pelton, Stephen E. Arnold, and Peter Morville. There is also an interview with Robert Steele, who is not tagged within this website.
Below is a direct link to Kent Bye and a collage of clips from each of the people he interviewed. We consider this the single best most brilliant piece of citizen journalism on the concept of OSINT.
Below are the currently available links for audio only for all those interviewed:
Below links directly to the Simmons interview, use the photograph link above to select any of the others. NOTE: the video portion appears to have been disabled for all of them, you get audio only right now, we are working on this with Kent, it is vastly better to see these individuals in full multi-media form.
There is no other person who has created a national open source intelligence capability, with recognition from the Royal War Academy for doing so; then gone on to rationalize McKinsey knowledge management in the Nordic region, then created the foremost international commercial intelligence practice in InfoSphere AB, and concluded with the creation of Silobreaker, a combination of sources and tools that takes the information industry to a new level. Mats Bjore is the ultimate Long Range Reconnaissance Philosopher-Warrior.
PLATINUM Lifetime Award, Mr. Mats Bjore, Sweden
There is no other person who has created a national open source intelligence capability, with recognition from the Royal War Academy for doing so; then gone on to rationalize McKinsey knowledge management in the Nordic region, then created the foremost international commercial intelligence practice in InfoSphere AB, and concluded with the creation of Silobreaker, a combination of sources and tools that takes the information industry to a new level. Mats Bjore is the ultimate Long Range Reconnaissance Philosopher-Warrior.
Then Major Bjore came to the 1992 conference, absorbed all he could, and returned to Sweden to create the first military open source unit of consequence. He has been the originator and primary international practitioner of Commercial Intelligence, which is an order of magnitude more holistic, substantive, and profitable than Competitive Intelligence or worse, Business Intelligence (internal data mining). While OSS.Net, Inc. retains all rights to the sales phrase “Information costs money, Intelligence makes money,” Mats Bjore and InfoSphere have epitomized the concept in their being. He is also a principal in the creation of SILOBREAKER, follow the Frog to experience that free online analytic toolkit. Below is his contribution to OSS '02.