Open-Source Intelligence Challenges CIA, NSA, Spy Agencies

Spying used to be all about secrets. Increasingly, it's about what's hiding in plain sight [non-paywalled link]. From a report: A staggering amount of data, from Facebook posts and YouTube clips to location pings from mobile phones and car apps, sits in the open internet, available to anyone who looks. US intelligence agencies have struggled for years to tap into such data, which they refer to as open-source intelligence, or OSINT. But that's starting to change. In October the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all the nation's intelligence agencies, brought in longtime analyst and cyber expert Jason Barrett to help with the US intelligence community's approach to OSINT. His immediate task will be to help develop the intelligence community's national OSINT strategy, which will focus on coordination, data acquisition and the development of tools to improve its approach to this type of intelligence work. ODNI expects to implement the plan in the coming months, according to a spokesperson.

Barrett's appointment, which hasn't previously been reported publicly, comes after more than a year of work on the strategy led by the Central Intelligence Agency, which has for years headed up the government's efforts on OSINT. The challenge with other forms of intelligence-gathering, such as electronic surveillance or human intelligence, can be secretly collecting enough information in the first place. With OSINT, the issue is sifting useful insights out of the unthinkable amount of information available digitally. 'Our greatest weakness in OSINT has been the vast scale of how much we collect,' says Randy Nixon, director of the CIA's Open Source Enterprise division. Nixon's office has developed a tool similar to ChatGPT that uses AI to sift the ever-growing flood of data. Now available to thousands of users within the federal government, the tool points analysts to the most important information and auto-summarizes content. Government task forces have warned since the 1990s that the US was at risk of falling behind on OSINT. But the federal intelligence community has generally prioritized information it gathers itself, stymying progress.

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