CIA Getting Intelligence from Blogs
 |
James Joyner | Wednesday, April 19, 2006 |
The CIA is getting a lot of useful intelligence leads from blogs, reports Bill Gertz in a page 4 story in The Washington Times.
President Bush and U.S. policy-makers are receiving more intelligence from open sources such as Internet blogs and foreign newspapers than they previously did, senior intelligence officials said. The new Open Source Center (OSC) at CIA headquarters recently stepped up data collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content, said OSC Director Douglas J. Naquin. “A lot of blogs now have become very big on the Internet, and we’re getting a lot of rich information on blogs that are telling us a lot about social perspectives and everything from what the general feeling is to … people putting information on there that doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Mr. Naquin told The Washington Times.
Eliot A. Jardines, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for open source, said the amount of unclassified intelligence reaching Mr. Bush and senior policy-makers has increased as a result of the center’s creation in November. “We’re certainly scoring a number of wins with our ultimate customer,” said Mr. Jardines, who became the first high-level official in charge of the government’s nonsecret intelligence in December. “I can’t get into detail of what, but I’ll just say the amount of open source reporting that goes into the president’s daily brief has gone up rather significantly,” Mr. Jardines said. “There has been a real interest at the highest levels of our government, and we’ve been able to consistently deliver products that are on par with the rest of the intelligence community.”
Mr. Naquin said recent OSC successes have included the discovery of a technology advance in a foreign country. Also, most data on avian flu outbreaks come from open sources, he said. “Have we got coups out of it? Close to it,” Mr. Naquin said. “But certainly we’ve had more insight than we’ve ever had before.” The OSC uses powerful computers and software technology to “sift” the Internet for valuable intelligence. It also buys information from commercial databases.
In the past, open-source reports were used mainly by intelligence analysts. “But now our customer base literally ranges from the president to local police departments,” Mr. Naquin said. The Fairfax County police use OSC products, as do police departments in San Diego, New York and Baltimore. The center also provides support to the U.S. military.
A Defense Department official said Chinese military bloggers have become a valuable source of intelligence on Beijing’s secret military buildup. For example, China built its first Yuan-class attack submarine at an underground factory that was unknown to U.S. intelligence until a photo of the submarine appeared on the Internet in 2004.
Interesting. It makes sense that blogs, especially those from abroad, would be monitored for useful insights. Further, there is now a growing number of legitimate subject matter experts doing open source intelligence analysis, for free, on their blogs. It would be foolish of our intelligence services not to take advantage of that.
Related: Bloggers Now Weapons in Information War
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
Follow James on FriendFeed | Twitter | Digg
- None Found
- Caption Contest
- Nathalie Blanchard Facebook Smile Leaves Her Depressed
- Glenn Beck, Community Organizer
- OTB Latenight – Cherry Poppin’ Daddies
- Hacked Climate Scientists Emails Reveal Truth
- Obama, the Recession, and Polls
- Giuliani Running for Senate, Not Governor
- OTB Latenight – The Jesus & Mary Chain
- Fox Fake Crowd Videos
- Congress to Investigate Fake Districts
- Are You NKay? :: Big Brother Is Watching Us :: April :: 2006
- A Blog For All linked with Rich Content...
Imagine the civilian possibilities of the technology. MSM could stay in their Baghdad hotels and still have access to on the spot reporting in the field by reading milblogs. The mind boggles.
CIA Getting Intelligence from Blogs
We're doomed.
I'd say McGehee has never read CIA reporting...my experience is that blogs tend to be an improvement, in both analytical quality and writing style.
And I just noticed I'm getting some lengthy visits from someone at Russia's Federal Security Service (former KGB). Fun.
There was a time not too long ago when people on the right stood tall for constitutional rights ,rejected government intrusion and held the law enforcement/espionage agencies of the federal government in high suspicion. Gun laws, Waco, Ruby Ridge, Ellian Gonzales(SP) come to mind. It's fascinating to see how much you are willing to accept now and how the right and left have apparently changed places.
I�d say McGehee has never read CIA reporting...
I'd say I forgot the "[/snark]" tag. ;-)
Besides, I was playing off the other meaning of "intelligence."
Comments are Closed
