President Bush and U.S. policy-makers are receiving more intelligence from open sources such as Internet blogs and foreign newspapers than they previously did, senior intelligence officials said.
The new Open Source Center (OSC) at CIA headquarters recently stepped up data collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content, said OSC Director Douglas J. Naquin.
Thank you for this search. We select and respond to searches for two reasons:
1. 80% of the knowledge is not published, the searches allow us to provide some form of response.
2. We discover other cool stuff while checking the larger web, and that helps us learn.
Global Futures Partnership (GFP) is now and will forever be centered on Carol Dumaine, one of two CIA employees still standing that we think the world of–the other is Andy Shepard. There are no doubt a handful of others that merit special regard, but they have been locked in the closet with socks in their mouths so they are unknown to us.
More Than Espionage: Open-source intelligence should be part of solution
Washington Times January 27, 2010 Pg. B3
By Andrew M. Borene
Here's some food for thought: White House policymakers and Congress can help develop an increasingly robust national intelligence capacity by investing new money in the pursuit of a centralized open-source intelligence (OSINT) infrastructure.
Phi Beta Iota: In 1992 it was the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and The MITRE Corporation that destroyed the emergent Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) movement. CIA refused to deal with OSINT unless everyone associated with it was a U.S. citizen with a SECRET clearance (we do not make this stuff up), and MITRE misled the US Government in such a way as to promote their Open Source Information System (OSIS) that ended up providing analysts mediocre high-side access to six open sources (LEXIS-NEXIS, Oxford Analytics, Jane's Information Group, Predicast and two other non-memorable sources). The US Marine Corps, which was the proponent for OSINT based on the lessons learned in creating the Marine Corps Intelligence Center (MCIC), argued for an outside the wire center of excellence that would have access to all sources in all languages (in part because the “experts” flogged by contracting firms may have been expert once, but are not “the” expert on any given topic for any given day–for that we prize European and Chinese and Latin American graduate students about to receive their PhD).
During his tenure as Director of the Community Open Source Program Office (COSPO), Dr. Joe Markowitz, the only person ever to actually understand OSINT within CIA, closely followed by Carol Dumaine, founder of the Global Futures Partership, tried four years in a row, with the support of Charlie Allen, then Deputy Director for Collection (DDCI/C), to get an OSINT program line established. Four years in a row, Joan Dempsey, then Deputy Director for Community Management (DDCI/CM) refused. The secret IC is incapable of creating an Open Source Agency (OSA) as called for by the 9-11 Commission, and any money it puts in that direction will be wasted unless the Simmons-Steele-Markowitz recommendations briefed to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) are respected.
Dr. Markowitz is also the author of the OSINT portions of vital Defense Science Board reports such as Transitions to and from Hostilities, and is unique within the CIA alumni for understanding both the needs of defense and the possibilities of OSINT. COSPO was an honest effort–CIA/OSC is not.
CIA and LEXIS-NEXIS still do not get it–they both want a monopoly on a discicpline they do not understand and cannot monopolize. The US Government is a BENEFICIARY of OSINT, not its patron, and any endeavor that is not outside the wire, transparent, and under diplomatic and civil affairs auspices, is destined to fail, just as CIA/OSC has failed all these years, just as LEXIS-NEXIS, Oxford Analytica, and Jane's Information Group have failed on substance all these years. They profit from government ignorance, they do not profit from actually connecting the government to sources that are largely free, not online, and not in English.
1. Needs to be redone and reissued without Doug Naquin’s signature. The delegation of authority to him is in violation of both ICD 300 and ICD 301.
2. The Vision is flawed because it focused only on security. Whole of Government needs for OSINT span the full range of ten high-level threats to humanity and the twelve core policies that need to be harmonized, listed below to demonstrate the paucity of the CIA OSC version of vision.
Any Open Source Officer (OSO) who cannot recide these from memory and relate them to the mission of the US National Intelligence Community as outlined in the National Intelligence Strategy, should be assigned to less-demanding administrative duties.
The above can be used in conjunction with Secretary Gates’ statement that the military cannot do it all, and the Defense Science Board studies (all available at www.phibetaiota.net under References/DSB), to make the case for OSINT being a “360 degree” service that must meet the Mission Area needs of all of the elements of the Federal, State, and Local governments as well as regional constellations of mixed government and non-governmental organizations focused on challenges of common concern, e.g. Darfur, piracy, etcetera.
The illustration on page 5 is severely flawed in that it fails to integrate the OSINT needs and capabilities of all the federal non-security consumers at the same time that it assumes Homeland Security Enterprise will cover the non-security aspects of information sharing, and it ignores the Rest of the World both domestic and international.
The illustration on page 7 is severely flawed—a historic tendency of FBIS/OCS in that it assumes all OSINT is accessible via technical means. Humans and direct face to face interaction with Humans, is not part of the FBIS/OSC understanding.
The objectives on page 8 are laudable and not achievable as the IC OSINT enterprise is now organized and led. The integrated linguist activity is a particularly urgent need that is not understood nor properly defined in terms of online and human capabilities that could be harnessed.
Doug Naquin, the senior Central Intelligence (CIA) officer responsible for Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and for the Open Source Center (OSC), the half-baked replacement for the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), is a good person trapped in a bad system. He not only does not know what he does not know, but is held in multiple strait-jackets by CIA security, CIA legal, and CIA culture.
In November 2005 we recognized the severe damage that Doug Naquin–with the best of intentions–was doing to the US military, and we tried to stop him. Below is the letter that was sent to the Deputy Director of National Intelligence, General Michael Hayden, USAF. He ignored the letter.
Naquin is still doing damage. Apart from misrepresentations to the Combatant Commanders (COCOMs), the personnel exchange is sending unqualified FBIS/OSC people out to the military where they not only have no clue, but they also try to spin everything to CIA's advantage. The Department of Defense (DoD) needs to realize that the OSC is not a “full-spectrum” OSINT shop; that it can barely handle CIA's own internal requirements (and by some accounts, is considered argely worthless among the CIA analysts as well)
This letter was on target. It is still on target. It is time for Doug Naquin to do what he does best: stay on campus at CIA and stop messing up the US military with misprepresentations, failures to perform, and exported personnel that are not worth the C Rations it takes to feed them.
