-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [IP] New US intelligence center to exploit publicly
available information]
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 16:11:51 -0800
From: Ross Stapleton-Gray
Douglas Naquin, the [Open Source C]enter's director, said it will build on the work of the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which once monitored and translated foreign radio brodcasts but has since expanded its reach to other media. He said a key difference will be that the center aims to spread its findings and expertise across the US intelligence community, which consists of 15 agencies. ... The FBIS' strength has been in tracking media trends that show, for instance, how foreign publics are responding to particular US policies. But in recent years a group at the FBIS also has been applying data mining techniques to analyze massive volumes of informaiton on the Internet or commercial databases, Naquin said.
FBIS was my first job out of college, as a CIA grad fellow... my understanding is that it actually predated the CIA, having been originally formed during WW II to collect and report on Nazi radio broadcasting. But this is something of a second coming for Open Source for the Intelligence Community. In my last IC job, I served on the Intelligence Community Management Staff, which supported the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) wearing his IC coordinator hat. And around then (c. 1994), CMS was host to a new "Community Open Source Program Office" (COSPO), to do what's being described here for the new OSC. Here's the DCI Directive, in fact, that created it... NB the similarities with the newly-announced OSC: http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/dcid212.htm Certainly "open source intel" (so-called "OSINT") had been used for many years before that (and not just FBIS' collection... I remember when Lexis/Nexis was the exciting new wave, and was one of the early Internet agitators, especially after a presentation by Cliff Stoll, who was on a book tour for "The Cuckoo's Egg," and spoke at both NSA and CIA... he nearly broke an overhead projector glass with a yoyo). Some time after I left, in 1994, COSPO got shuffled around, then pushed down the org chart to live in the CIA's Directorate of Science & Technology, where FBIS is located. I believe that there was something of a merger, given the common focus. So this new thing is more a repeat of something that was done once already. And what had been the DCI's Community Management Staff now reports to Mr. Negroponte, since he (as Director of National Intelligence) wears the primary IC coordination hat, so I presume they may have a hand in what this new Center does, as well. What they'll find is a reluctance, from some quarters, to much dignify "open source intelligence" as its own "INT"... "We deal with *classified* intelligence... that's just *information*..." Though, of course, as a former intelligence officer who's worked without clearances for more than a decade, I can vouch for the value all of the rest of us place on "plain old information." ;-) I'm fascinated by the gulf between the "classified" and "unclassified" world (and am in fact doing some work now on how some classified information can be "written down" for use by uncleared researchers, e.g., redacted, dithered, or otherwise lessened in sensitivity). And I think it's to the significant detriment of many in the classified world that they can't move as easily as those of us outside of it, through the oceans of information now increasingly open and available. Ross ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen@leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]