OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE - The Challenge for NATO - OSS.net

how to deal with new and indistinct boundaries among and between intelligence
organizations and functions, and increasing ambiguity in roles and missions. Any intelligence
officer who has ever worked at a senior level knows that senior policymakers and
government officials abhor ambiguity; they want timely, accurate intelligence. As Peter
Schwartz, a recognized futurist, founding member of the Global Business Network, and
author of The Art of the Long View, told his audience at the Colloquium on the 21st Century,
"We will see not only changing rules of the game, but new games. There is an emerging
competitive information marketplace in which non-state intelligence will be `cheap, fast, and
out of control.'"[5]
Enthusiastic proponents of open source intelligence argue that the information revolution is
transforming the bulk of any nation's intelligence requirements and reducing the need to rely
upon traditional human and technical means and methods. But Robin W. Winks,
distinguished Yale University historian who served in the Office of Strategic Services during
World War II and in its successor, the Central Intelligence Agency, concluded, "Research and
analysis are at the core of intelligence . . . . [Most] `facts' are without meaning; someone must
analyze even the most easily obtained data."[6]
The emerging debate between investing in technology and developing competent analysts
concerns itself basically with the value and role of open source intelligence. To understand
some of the forces that are shaping the debate, we need to weigh the relative benefits of
primary and secondary sources, two discrete subsidiary classes of open source material.
Primary sources, generally taken to include print and electronic media, have always provided
information of value to the intelligence community in current intelligence, indications, and
warning as well as background information used by analysts in their work. What the so-called
information revolution has done is to increase the ability of users to gain access and to
manipulate the information, and although most intelligence managers do not believe that the
number of primary sources has expanded greatly, the number of secondary sources has
increased exponentially. To compound the analyst's problem, the objectivity and reliability of
many secondary sources are often questionable. We will need more experience before we can
accept expansion of secondary sources as a benefit to the management of national security.
The largest general open source collection in the world is the Library of Congress. To replace
the original library, which was destroyed during the War of 1812, Congress in 1815
purchased the private library of former President Thomas Jefferson, greatly increasing the
collection's size and scope. The Library of Congress now includes works in more than 450
languages and comprises more than 28 million books, periodicals, and pamphlets as well as
manuscripts, maps, newspapers, music scores, microfilms, motion pictures, photographs,
recordings, prints, and drawings. The library's services also include research and reference
facilities, which coordinate with or amplify local and regional library resources.
There are also several thousand databases available from commercial organizations;
LEXIS/NEXIS, Dialog, Reuters, and The New York Times come to mind.[7] Any discussion of
contemporary open sources must now include the Internet and the World Wide Web
(WWW). The World Wide Web (developed in 1989) is a collection of files, called Web sites
or Web pages, identified by uniform resource locators (URLs). Computer programs called
browsers retrieve these files.
The term "Internet" describes the interconnection of computer networks, particularly the
global interconnection of government, education, and business computer networks, available
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