Quote Originally Posted by JeffC
I see that DHS is farming out it's OSINT duties to the SITE Institute. I'm inclined to support that model for the entire IC - i.e., farm out OSINT collection and analysis to small niche firms that have the skills, the people, and the agility to do it properly.
Your statement implies that the IC does not have the skills, people or agility to conduct effective analysis of open sources. I beg to differ. (although I would definitely state that neither DHS nor the Bureau have those resources - they are both still struggling to develop their emerging intel capabilities into something approaching minimally capable)

In sum, any properly trained and experienced intelligence professional is fully capable of effectively exploiting open source material. The fundamental tradecraft of the intelligence analyst remains the same whether the material is unclass or on the high side.

The primary struggle is with collection. Given the overwhelming amount of information available through a broad spectrum of media in a babble of languages, dialects and local jargon, collection structures have yet to meet the needs of analysts serving agencies with widely differing collection priorities. That problem is critical enough to justify contracting out certain specific types of collection.

However, although analytic products obtained from third party vendors are also valuable information sources (and the government has long used such vendors to conduct special studies), regular analytic production should not be outsourced - for what should be very obvious reasons.