[FPSPACE] article in USA Today's paper on OSINT...

[Peter Pesavento]

There are a number of misnomers in this article.  I will point out three
that I saw right off the bat.

 

First of all, OSINT-Open Source Intelligence-has been exploited throughout
the Cold War (and even much earlier);  second of all, open source materials
have been used in the PDB-the President's Daily Brief-since at least the
1960s (based on my seeing what has been in some, that I have read).

 

Another is that I have read in articles (such as published in the CIA's
"Studies in Intelligence" have over the years mentioned that around 90% of
what they analyze is from media outlets-newspapers, TV, books, magazines,
pamphlets, and so on.

 

More can be found at the National Security Archive webpage (sponsored by the
George Washington University), Globalsecurity.org, the Federation of
American Scientists,  among other such sources.

 

But I think that this USA Today piece has overall interest to our general
audience here.  Everything that they apply, space historians can apply to
Russian materials, and US materials on the history of the Space race, and
the Moon race.

 

The articles that I have authored, or co-authored, on the Soviet/Russian
space program can be considered to have used OSINT techniques heavily.

 

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/surveillance/2008-03-31-internet-spies_N.h
tm?loc=interstitialskip

 

Today's spies find secrets in plain sight

 

By  <http://www.usatoday.com/community/tags/reporter.aspx?id=513> Peter
Eisler, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON - For 40 years, U.S. presidents have begun each day with a
top-secret, personal briefing on security threats and global affairs
obtained largely from covert spy missions, clandestine satellite
surveillance and other highly classified intelligence sources.

Now, however, the President's Daily Brief and other crucial intelligence
reports often rely less on secrets from risky espionage missions than on
material that's available to just about anyone.

Intelligence officers have gleaned insights on Iran's nuclear capabilities
from photos on the Internet. They've scooped up documents, including a
terrorist training manual, at international conferences and public forums.
They've found information in foreign university libraries and newscasts.

Such material is known as "open-source intelligence" or, in the
acronym-laden parlance of the 16 federal agencies that make up the U.S.
intelligence community, OSINT. The explosion of information available via
the Internet and other public sources has pushed the collection and analysis
of that material to the top of the official priority list in the spy world,
intelligence officials say.

The change hasn't been easy in a bureaucracy that often measures success by
its ability to steal secrets. Federal commissions repeatedly have criticized
the intelligence community for not moving more quickly and aggressively to
exploit open-source information.

It's a challenging task, given the mountains of material to sift through.
Every potentially useful nugget must be vetted because enemy states and
terror groups, such as al-Qaeda, sometimes use the Internet and other open
channels to put out misleading information.

Yet officials say agencies are overcoming such obstacles and unearthing
increasingly valuable troves of intelligence.

"It's no longer unusual to see open-source material in the President's Daily
Brief . (and) it's often a very important component of the information
that's incorporated into our intelligence analyses," says Frances Townsend,
who until January was President Bush's assistant national security adviser
for homeland security and counterterrorism.

Whether it's developments in Russian politics, the spread of avian flu, the
rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Asia or the technological capacity of
enemy states, "there's been a significant shift toward relying more on
open-source information," Townsend adds. And "a lot of what we know about
our (terrorist) adversaries comes from statements and videos they put on the
Internet." 

The intelligence community is investing heavily to improve its collection of
open-source information.

The CIA has set up an Open Source Center, based in a nondescript office
building in suburban Washington, where officers pore over everything from
al-Qaeda-backed websites to papers distributed at science and technology
symposiums, says Douglas Naquin, the center's director.

Other agencies, such as the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency, are
training scores of analysts to mine open sources and giving many of them
desktop Internet access. That's a big change in a world in which computers
in such agencies have long been designed to prevent data from flowing to or
from the public realm.

At the same time, national security officials also are grappling with the
flip side of the open-source phenomenon: making sure sensitive information
held by the government, businesses and even individuals doesn't slip into
the same sort of public outlets that U.S. intelligence agencies are
scrutinizing.

Intelligence officials see it all as a necessary evolution.

Open sources can provide up to 90% of the information needed to meet most
U.S. intelligence needs, Deputy Director of National Intelligence Thomas
Fingar said in a recent speech. Harnessing that information "is terribly
important," he said. "It ought to be a normal part of what we do, not being
fixated on secrets dribbling into the computer's in-box."

But progress has been slow.

Robert David Steele, a former CIA and Marine Corps intelligence officer,
gives the intelligence community a D+ for its use of information available
from the Internet, commercial satellite imagery and other open sources.

"There's still a cult of secrecy - nothing is seen as important unless it's
classified," says Steele, founder of OSS.Net, a commercial intelligence
provider for private companies and the government.

Agencies still aren't investing enough in training and technology to use
open sources, he says, so analysts lack language and computer skills, and
many use outdated hardware and software that make searches slow or
cumbersome. 

"There are lots of problems," Steele says. "It's hardware, it's software,
it's mind-set, but most of all, it's lack of leadership vision." 

Insight into Iranian nukes 

Perhaps the greatest evidence yet of the intelligence community's new
embrace of open-source information emerged in December, when top U.S.
officials noted that photos available through public media factored into a
new assessment by U.S. intelligence analysts that Iran had suspended efforts
to build a nuclear weapon in 2003.

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program reversed
previous analyses, which had said Iran had an ongoing nuclear arms program. 

The shift was based partly on public photos from Iran's Natanz nuclear
facility, including pictures from a media tour and United Nations
inspections, according to the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence.

By settling important questions about such matters as the size of certain
pipes within the facility, the photos provided important clues to its
capabilities.

The pictures weren't available when earlier assessments of Iran's nuclear
program were developed. And if they had been, the CIA's Open Source Center
and other initiatives to cull publicly available information still were in
their infancy.

Even now, intelligence agencies struggle with harnessing all the open-source
information that's available and grabbing useful nuggets, Naquin
acknowledges. "The volume is overwhelming."

Since 2005, when the center opened, the government has increased spending
substantially on technology and training to help analysts find useful
information, Naquin says, though precise dollar and staffing figures are
classified.

"With so many sources out there (to monitor), we're required to use
technology much more than we have in the past to help pinpoint useful
information," he adds.

A slow change 

Intelligence agencies have used open source information for decades, but it
amounted mostly to monitoring foreign news broadcasts. As the information
age dawned, those agencies were slow to seize on all the material that began
pouring into the public domain.

As far back as 1996, a congressional commission created to study
intelligence issues noted that tremendous amounts of open-source information
had become "readily available," but the intelligence community had been
"inexplicably slow" in using it.

Nearly a decade later, little had changed, according to another commission
assembled by the White House to assess the intelligence community's failed
pre-war assessment that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. 

Open sources "offer vast intelligence possibilities," said the commission's
2005 report. "Regrettably, all too frequently these 'non-secret' sources are
undervalued and underused."

Steele, the former Marine and CIA officer, notes that the intelligence
community's investment in using open sources still is a tiny fraction of
what's spent on collecting secrets, and he says the proportion should be
reversed.

"I'm not a librarian saying open sources are cool and we can do this," he
says. "I'm a very good former spy saying open sources are cool and we can do
this."

Some intelligence officials still see secret information as more reliable,
but increasingly "there's much more cultural acceptance" of open-source
material, says Charlie Allen, undersecretary of intelligence at the
Department of Homeland Security.

"It began to change dramatically in the late '90s, and it really took hold
after 9/11," says Allen, who pushed to expand open-source collection during
decades as a top CIA official.

"Open source is the world of the future."

Open-source successes, such as the new assessment of Iran's nuclear program,
have helped push that change. In another instance, Naquin says, an
intelligence officer picked up a terrorist training manual that was
distributed at a public event in Southeast Asia.

Acknowledgements of open-source coups are rare, because officials don't want
to reveal the sort of information they find useful.

Plus, open-source information does not often lead to "eureka" moments in the
intelligence world, says Wayne Murphy, assistant director in the FBI's
Intelligence Directorate. More often, its main use is to "add perspective
and context" to material gathered through classified means.

Additionally, he says, such information helps officials better focus
classified missions on material that can't be obtained elsewhere.
"Increasingly . we are asked to look at open source first, then show the
added value we get by applying (classified) assets."

'Know your enemy' 

Ellen Tudisco, chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency's open-source
office, acknowledges that there has been "a sort of legacy attachment to
classified sources." However, she says, "we've come to realize that you can
know your enemy by looking at what they say, and they say it in open
sources."

The DIA's experience reflects both the growing acceptance of open-source
information and the hurdles intelligence agencies face in trying to use it.

In the 18 months since her office was created, Tudisco's staff has grown
from two to 15.

She says it will take at least nine more months to reach the goal of giving
all DIA analysts ready access to the Internet and teaching them to work
securely in the unclassified world.

The FBI faces similar challenges. About 11,000 FBI personnel now have
desktop Internet access, says the FBI's Murphy.

Another 19,000 still need it, and Murphy says it will take until the end of
2009 before they all get the necessary equipment and are trained to make the
most of it.

"Just giving someone a computer and an Internet account doesn't make them an
open-source analyst," Murphy says.

The FBI also is one of several security agencies that are re-evaluating
their approach to seeing that sensitive government and private-sector
information doesn't leak out through the same sort of open sources that the
intelligence community is trying to exploit. That means setting new
priorities for protecting data.

"When secrets are harder to keep . what do we really have to protect?" asks
Joel Brenner, counterintelligence executive for the director of national
intelligence.

It's a question that government, businesses and individuals all must face,
he adds, noting that the FBI is working not only with the Pentagon but also
with private industry to identify what sort of information needs to be
protected and how best to do it.

"Now, counterintelligence is a problem for everyone who has secrets to keep
and . lives on a network," Brenner says. "And that's all of us."