Rich Content

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.

The Donovan notes that if the CIA is reading, so are enemy governments. Count on it. In the Bullpen notes that the CIA is data mining blogs for signs of intelligence. You never know what you might find, but this may result in more opinion intel rather than hard intel.

Searching blogs for intel might provide insight into the general opinion and sentiment of a given population or group. Sometimes we need that intel to help make policy decisions, and it's just as important as other intel about means and methodologies or technology. Part of the problem with trying to figure out what is going on in some parts of the world is a lack of contacts and ability to get a pulse of daily life in those countries.

Security Watchtower notes the application towards China. Winds of Change wonders if we should be terrified or encouraged by this development. And did they take up the idea of the CIA blogging internally.

Outside the Beltway notes that there are quite a few subject matter experts who are providing analysis for free online. It definitely makes sense to harness the expertise found online, though there are more than a few folks who go around professing to things that they are not experts on. The CIA would have a bear of a time trying to separate out the wheat from the chaff.

Blue Crab Boulevard is looking over his shoulder - and at his server/referrer logs.

Technorati: cia, intel gathering, humint.