April 17, 2007:
While the U.S. intelligence
community officially recognized the importance of OSINT (Open Source
Intelligence) back in 2004, there has not been a lot of enthusiasm for using
this growing source of information.
The Internet has made OSINT a really, really huge
source of useful intelligence. It's not just the millions of gigabytes of
information that is placed on the net, but the even more voluminous masses of
message board postings, blogs, emails and IMs (instant messaging) that reveal
what the culture is currently thinking. It was corporate intelligence
practitioners who alerted the government intel people to the growing usefulness
of Internet based data. Corporations have developed, over the last few decades,
a keen interest in gathering intel on competitors, new markets, and all manner
of things that might affect them. The Internet has made this a much more useful
exercise.
However, corporate intel specialists are concerned
that government agencies, especially the CIA, are not taking sufficient
advantage of OSINT. Part of the problem is cultural. The intelligence agencies
have always been proud of their special intel tools, like spy satellites,
electronic listening stations, and spy networks. Most of these things are
unique to government intelligence operations. People who use this stuff tend to
look down on a bunch of geeks who simply troll the web. Even when the geeks
keep coming up with valuable stuff, they don't get no respect.
The fear is that, some foreign countries are
exploiting OSINT more effectively than the United States. No foreign intel
agency will admit to this, but there are indications that some nations are mining
the Internet quite intensively, and effectively.