OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE – An Open Discussion

By Michael B. Kraft

A group of U.S. experts on open source intelligence today said that the U.S. intelligence efforts are negatively affected by the cutbacks in the number of newspaper correspondents overseas and the terrorists’ own use of the internet to gather information on the United States.

They made their comments at a crowded forum at the National Press Club today, June 17, titled “The Future of Open Source Intelligence,” sponsored by LexisNexis.

Mr. Daniel Butler, Assistant Deputy Director for Open Source in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said that open source intelligence gathering is basically good research and analysis and that the internet has been a “game changer” in gathering material. This raises new challenges in organizing and prioritizing the material to be analyzed, he said

Butler, a former Defense Department official and military intelligence officer, and other panelists noted that open sources include a wide variety of information, not only from the media but from academia and other sources. They also predicted that open source intelligence will be increasingly integrated into traditional intelligence analysis that heavily relied on classified sources.

In response to a question, Butler said that the open source program had been impacted negatively by the reduction in the number of foreign correspondents. He said the quantity, breadth and quality of overseas reporting has declined because of the decisions by many news organizations to cut back the number of their correspondents overseas. During the past several years several major newspapers and television networks have eliminated or minimized their foreign correspondents posts, mainly for financial reasons. Butler quipped that one only has to pick up the Washington Post every morning to see how much lighter it is.

Kevin O’Connell, who has served in the CIA, and in Defense Department and State Department analyst positions, said that reporting from foreign correspondents often provides a context and depth of understanding a country that is not always available to analysts who have not been there. * O’Connell, who also served in the Vice President’s office and at Rand, is now an adjunct professor at Georgetown University said that is important that our education system emphasis the development of critical analytical training. He is also President/CEO of Innovative Analytics & Training.

The terrorists are also exploiting open sources, said Kenneth Rapuano, a former White House Homeland Security Advisor in the Bush Administration, who resigned from his civilian post in 2006 to serve in Afghanistan as a Marine Corps officer on a special joint operations task force. He said that, although the popular image of the Afghan Taliban was that of guys in ragged clothes toting AK-47’s, U.S. forces found they had computer hard drives with information on the U.S. infrastructure, GAO reports and even Congressional testimony. Rapuano is now Director of Advanced Systems and Policy at the MITRE Corporation.

Dr. Mark Gabriele, trained as a computer science specialist, said the technology was changing quickly. Even though the cell phones and equipment in Africa lagged 10 years behind the United States, they were adequate for most purposes. Dr. Gabriele, previously with Rand and now with Booze Allen and Hamilton, noted that even the GPS is now an open source device.

Other panel participants were Mr. Doug Magoffin, Chief of the Defense Department Open Source Program, who spoke of the need to develop and recruit people with good language skills, and Mr. Alexander Joel, Civil Liberties Protection Officer, ODNI, who emphasized the efforts to develop guidelines to protect civil liberties.

* A personal observation: as a consumer of intelligence while in the State Department Office of Counterterrorism, I and many of my fellow officers closely read press articles for information and context that often was not contained in the official message traffic from embassies or the intelligence community. In an earlier career as a news agency correspondent overseas, it was apparent that correspondents often would have a wider range of local contacts and more freedom to move about than intelligence or embassy political officers.