Open Source Intelligence (OSINT): merged thread

[bourbon]

To Defeat Terrorists, Start Using the Library, by Scott Helfstein. Bloomberg, Aug 30, 2011.

The information glut that marks the 21st century is evidenced in some unexpected places. Last month, my organization, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, released a report that sharply disputed conventional wisdom about terrorism along the Afghanistan-Pakistani frontier.

The report argued that the Haqqani Network, a border- spanning tribal group with deep ties to Pakistan’s government, had been more influential than the Taliban in aiding al-Qaeda’s rise.

How did we support this thesis, which has vast implications for reconciliation efforts in the region as well as for the distribution of U.S. military aid? Not with data culled from clandestine operations in Pakistan’s tribal areas or from Osama bin Laden’s computer hard drive. The report was based on the public statements and writings of individual extremists over the past 30 years. Rather than ferreting out secret information, researchers merely took extremists at their voluminous word.

It seems terrorists, too, are susceptible to the syndrome known as Too Much Information.

[Bill Moore]

bourbon, thanks for sharing this article. While in no way meaning to degrade or insult the excellent work our intelligent analysts do, intelligence analysis based on classified information (which is frequently just as questionable as unclassified information) often lacks critical context, especially historical context. And as in any other organization ideas tend to go viral and become accepted wisdom, even when they're incorrect. It is harder to correct the record when the idea is based on classified that not all the analysts (or subject matter experts) have access to.

OSINT is an underused discipline in my view. I think part of the blame for our shortfalls is in our process, where commanders want dumbed down summaries on targets without context, so the intell community (not all of it, but definitely on the pointy end of the tactical spear) becomes target fixated, and they miss the bigger picture, a picture that may indicate their targeting process needs to be adjusted to have the desired effect.

[carl]

Bill and Bourbon:

It occurs to me that most all civilian PHD experts on various areas and peoples of the world get to be PHDs by studying open sources. Those same PHDs are then sometimes turned to by the military in order to pass on the knowledge they learned from open sources. I can see local commanders wanting dumbed down reports but why don't the higher ups put more emphasis on the open sources the civilian experts used to get to be experts?

[davidbfpo]

Hat tip to a "lurker" for this Swiss think tank's fifteen minute podcast:http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Digital-L...g=en&id=154122 and the speakers bio:http://www.i-intelligence.eu/about/team/

The summary says:

The growing availability of open source information has profoundly impacted intelligence agencies and how they have operated over the last 10 years. In today’s podcast, Chris Pallaris discusses the risks and opportunities that open source intelligence poses. He also describes what makes a good intelligence analyst in the open source era.

[AdamG]

The National Security Agency just declassified a hefty 643-page research manual called Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research (PDF) that, at least at first, doesn't appear all that interesting. That is, except for one section on page 73: "Google Hacking."

http://news.yahoo.com/search-spy-goo...140400536.html

[davidbfpo]

This is a very good website that shows what papers are where globally, with details on websites, language spoken etc. I thought I had posted a while back, after a RN speaker referred to it an academic/practitioner conference:http://newspapermap.com/

I wonder if there is a similar site for TV / radio stations, which can be accessed via the web? BBC Monitoring I expect offer a summary, for a fee!

[davidbfpo]

A Greek story:http://greece.greekreporter.com/2014...tion-revealed/