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GCN Home > 03/20/06 issue

Intelligence units mine the benefits of public sources

Open Source Center draws, analyzes info from a variety of public databases

By Patience Wait, GCN Staff

Sometimes the most useful information is in plain sight—as long as you know where to look for it.

In the ongoing struggle against Latin American drug smuggling, for instance, an article in a local Mexican newspaper might report that a semi belonging to Company X was stopped at the U.S. border in Texas and a quantity of cocaine was seized. The article includes the name of the truck driver.

That information might be useful at the border crossing in San Diego, where trucks belonging to that same company also cross. Or the driver might be identified at the wheel of another rig a couple of weeks later. In either case, some extra scrutiny may be warranted.

That’s the sort of information the Open Source Center is compiling and pushing the intelligence community to use, said Eliot Jardines, assistant deputy director in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

“Getting the [intelligence community] to accept open source as the source of first resort is my number one goal,” Jardines said. “In the past we tended to value information in proportion to how hard it was to get.”

(While the phrase “open source” is used most commonly in the IT community to refer to software whose source code is publicly available, in the intelligence community it refers to any data source that is available to the general public.)

The data can be free—such as local property records, voter registrations and political-campaign contributions—or it can be for sale, such as credit reports, commercial satellite imagery and New York Times articles. The data might already be in database format, or it may have to be converted, as are transcripts of TV and radio broadcasts. All of it, however, is grist for the mills of analysts throughout the intelligence community. The center is the clearinghouse for much of it.

“We like to make a distinction between collection and acquisition,” Jardines said. Traditionally, the IC has owned the means of collection, with an emphasis on covert intelligence gathering. But open-source intelligence revolves around acquiring information that someone else has collected, organized and published, he said.

More news on related topics: Knowledge Management, Management, Software Applications


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