The intelligence community is learning to value "open-source" information

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/national/2008/09/12/spy-agencies-turn-to-newspapers-npr-and-wikipedia-for-information.html

Spy Agencies Turn to Newspapers, NPR, and Wikipedia for Information

The intelligence community is learning to value "open-source" information

By Alex Kingsbury

Posted September 12, 2008

A few days ago, a senior officer at the Pentagon called his intelligence
officer into his office. The boss had heard a news report about China while
driving to his office and wanted some answers. It wasn't a tough assignment,
given the news coverage, but there was a hitch. "There was plenty of
information in the public domain about the topic," recalls the intelligence
officer, a 10-year veteran. "And yet, if there wasn't some classified
information cited in my report, the boss would never believe it was
accurate."

The officer calls it "the seduction of the 'top-secret' stamp."

That's a common refrain in the intelligence community when the subject of
so-called open-source information comes up. It's the kind of anecdote
recounted over and over again this week at the intelligence community's
second annual conference on the use of open-source information.

Another anecdote involves public informationbcommonly newspaper reportsbthat
is paraphrased or quoted verbatim and then stamped "classified" to make the
report more appealing to superiors.

Yet it's a practice that might be changing. The use of nonclassified
information, whether news accounts or other publicly retrievable information,
is gaining credibility within the intelligence community. And officials say
there can be good reasons for putting some of that open-source information
under the secrecy umbrella. "The information might be unclassified but our
interest in it is not," Gen. Michael Hayden, head of the CIA, told the
conference.

More than 15,000 people in the intelligence community now use the
limited-access opensource.gov portal for information. "By using open-source
information, we can distribute it more widely among our customers in the
State Department than we could if it was classified. Not everyone who works
with the State Department has top-secret clearance," says James Bell, acting
director of the Office of Research at the State Department's Bureau of
Intelligence and Research.

In addition, open-source information is sometimes simply easier to access.
Soldiers in Iraq, for instance, occasionally lacking maps of their area of
operations in Baghdad, regularly used satellite imagery from Google Earth to
plan operations last spring. Also on the intelligence community's radar: the
new version of Picasa, a Google-owned application for digital photographs
that allows users to use facial recognition software.

Indeed, the Open Source Center, an office overseen by the director of
national intelligence, now has more requests for information than it can
handle, according to officials. Says Kim Robinson, a senior executive at from
the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, "Open source is starting to be
institutionalized."

Open-source information is both a curse and a blessing to intelligence
professionals. On the one hand, it makes information far more accessible,
sometimes more timely, and easier to disseminate. That means that more people
can be more informed in a shorter amount of time, even despite concerns about
the reliability of some of the informationbWikipedia, for instance.

On the other hand, it means a loss of power for those very intelligence
agencies. "The intelligence professional is no longer the most, or the only,
authoritative source of information," says Don Burke of the CIA's Directorate
of Science and Technology.

Burke's now in charge of Intellipedia, a classified, interservice version of
Wikipedia for spies and analysts. When he began at CIA in 1988, Burke says,
there were no personal computers on analysts' desktops. Now in its second
year, Intellipedia, some of which is open source, has more than 35,000
registered users and some 200,000 pages of information, according to the CIA.