BREAKING:
Pro-Palestinian Columbia Law Professor Katherine Franke expresses doubt over Shafik’s leadership and has apprehension regarding her upcoming testimony at Wednesday’s Congressional Hearing.pic.twitter.com/Z2ex5NYlFs
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) April 15, 2024
Day: April 15, 2024
Transitional council in Haiti is formally established despite gang violence Voice of America – VOA News
Ukrainian Mi-24 Hind gunship traveling at low level behind the front pic.twitter.com/45K6af1LNS
— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) April 15, 2024
Robert Redford as a CIA researcher on the run from assassins in Three Days of the Condor (Paramount Pictures))
Although largely overlooked in spy thrillers, Open Source Intelligence, or OSINT—vacuuming up publicly available reports, books, and data—remains an enduring and high value component of any spy organization. Perhaps we can blame James Bond, who only read The Times of London, for OSINT’s perceived second class standing among the intelligence disciplines. Though to be fair, the peripatetic 1970s-era conspiracy spectacle Three Days of the Condor, despite starring a young and bookish Robert Redford, clearly did little to burnish the reputation of open source.
“I am not a spy. I just read books,” Redford’s CIA character, an open source practitioner, bemoans, wondering why on Earth somebody wants to kill him. And to be blunt, he does seem rather bland alongside Max von Sydow’s cold and dapper assassin.
Although there is no denying espionage and covert action possess a certain cloak-and-dagger charm in their mystery and clandestine derring-do, open source has a long history of intelligence successes. And as the recently released report, Open Source Strategy for 2024 -2026, promises, the role of OSINT has a bright future in U.S. intelligence. Prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Central Intelligence Agency, the report outlines a strategy that includes what could be described as an aggressive expansion of effort and capability with CIA Director William J. Burns serving as “Functional Manager” of the campaign.
The way forward, as Burns explained it, is a distributed and cooperative effort spanning the entirety of the IC to include all 18 intelligence organizations. “As the IC’s Functional Manager for OSINT, I know the critical role that OSINT plays in defending our country and values,” he said in a prepared, albeit boilerplate statement. “In this pivotal moment, when OSINT is increasingly important and growing in demand, an IC-wide OSINT strategy is key to helping the IC move forward in a coordinated and determined way.”
We’ve heard this for some time now. Fact is, the spy agencies have always valued “intelligence gleaned from highly classified sources, rather than information that’s openly available on the internet or elsewhere,” as the Federal News Network put it last August. “Right now, our customer really believes that the only valuable content that the IC produces comes from super classified sources,” Ellen McCarthy, a former chief of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, was quoted as saying, “and that’s just frankly not the case.” Gathering and making sense of, say, rumors of violent protests by rural Chinese factory workers, gleaned from provincial news reports by a skillful Mandarin-reading CIA analyst, can be just as valuable.
U.S. intelligence agencies seem to be finally coming around to that view. The strategic focus described in the report includes four areas for action: