Open source intelligence — which is derived from open, unclassified sources — should be recognized as a mature intelligence discipline that is no less important than other established forms of intelligence, the House of Representatives said last month in the FY 2022 defense authorization act (sec. 1612).
The Housedirected the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligenceto develop and implement “a plan to elevate open-source intelligence to a foundational intelligence for strategic intelligence that is treated on par with information collected from classified means (for example, human intelligence, signals intelligence, and geospatial intelligence).”
Considering that those classified disciplines have large dedicated agencies of their own (CIA, NSA, NGA), it would seem to be a major undertaking to “elevate” open source intelligence to the same level and to treat it comparably.
Significantly,the House directiveis driven not by some abstract preference for open sources but by “the intelligence priorities of the commanders of the combatant commands.” The thinking appears to be that open source intelligence — that can be shared widely or even (sometimes) publicly disclosed — offers practical advantages to military commanders that other, highly classified forms of intelligence typically lack.
A related sign of dissatisfaction with unchecked military secrecy can be found inanother provision of the House authorization bill这就要求Space Force to “conduct a review of each classified program . . . to determine whether the level of classification of the program could be changed to a lower level or the program could be declassified.”
In recent years, open source intelligence has been managed by the elusive Open Source Enterprise (OSE) which is administratively housed at the Central Intelligence Agency. To the bewilderment and frustration of many users, the OSE退役自己的网站in 2019 and made its products exceptionally difficult to access.
In response,last year’s intelligence authorization act(sect. 326) required a plan “for improving usability of the OSE” as well as other steps to enhance the utility of open source collection for intelligence. But so far, there is no externally visible sign of any change for the better.
Earlier this year, the CIAdenied a Freedom of Information Act requestfor an unclassified OSE publication on North Korean ballistic missile tests. The CIA did not dispute that the document is unclassified, but it said the report was exempt from disclosure anyway. An appeal of the denial is pending.
The US military’s interest in open source intelligence is longstanding and arguably dates back to colonial times. The Army’sMilitary Intelligence Professional Bulletindevoted an issue to the subjectin 2005.
A 2006 Army Field Manual (since superseded) presentedinterim doctrine on the collectionof open source intelligence.
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