The issue of utilizing open-source intelligence came up with varying viewpoints during a Feb. 28 House Intelligence Committee hearing about the state of the U.S. intelligence community and how it can be improved.
Open-source intelligence is information that is publicly available through media outlets, the Internet, and other public mediums.
Amy Zegart, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, advocated for creating a U.S. government agency specializing in open-source intelligence.
“We need to have a dedicated capability not only to harness the insights of open-source and develop tradecraft, but importantly to interact with the outside world. And I think that piece is different and that’s new,” she said.
“You have this whole global ecosystem. How can we actually make use of this ecosystem? How can we reduce duplication of what our intelligence agencies are doing?” she continued.
“So I think for that reason among many an open-source agency is probably the right answer but it’s not the only answer. And I think that there can be other integration mechanisms including through DNI to make sure that every element of the IC open-source intelligence is part-in-parcel of analysis.”
Later in the hearing, Zegart cited nuclear open-source intelligence as an “opportunity, even in nuclear threats, to work more closely with open-source producers,” though she cautioned that the intelligence community should work with “responsible” entities.
“There is a tradecraft to open source. There is a creativity to open source. Not everybody can be an expert in reading satellite images, for example,” she said. “So it’s not just a pick-it-up-as-you-go in every arena.”
Therefore, an open-source agency could “provide training for responsible partners,” said Zegart. She cited that “in the nuclear realm, roughly 50 percent of the leading people in open-source nuclear threat analysis are former government officials.”
At the end of the day, an open-source agency would be “training the trainers,” said Zegart.
However, Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haas cautioned against there being a government agency solely dealing with open-source material.
“Look, we can talk about what’s the best way to bring open-source analysis into the IC. But at some point, we got to end the siloization or the stove piping. It’s got to be integrated. For better and for worse, what the IC cares most about is secret stuff. That’s why there’s an IC. That’s the sexy stuff,” he said.
“So I would focus, again, on the integration. You can have a mechanism to bring this stuff in. It makes no sense to have a separate analytical agency only dealing with open sources. We have think tanks that do that. We have universities that do that. We’ve got to find a way to bring it together, not keep the analysis separate based upon the source of the information that’s being analyzed.”
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