SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.
WASHINGTON — AI-powered machine translation, big data analytics, and now large language models are sucking up data from social media, smartphones and other “open source” to generate unprecedented amounts of open-source intelligence. That means the 18 agencies of the Intelligence Community need new contracting and technical approaches to tap the rising power of OSINT without being overwhelmed by it, IC officials said last week.
“It’s amazing what’s there. It also scares me,” said Randall Nixon, director of the Open Source Enterprise at the CIA, which leads the IC as “functional manager” for OSINT. “The next intelligence failure could easily be an OSINT failure, because there’s so much out there.”
It’s often overwhelming for analysts just to pull together the OSINT they already have access to and put it in context of classified information, said Casey Blackburn, assistant director for emerging technology at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “We need to integrate that open source into the environments where our people work,” he said. “As long as analysts … have to separate their attention between multiple different terminals of unintegrated information, we will never take full advantage of open source.”
“We can do it securely,” Blackburn emphasized. It’s not technology that’s the problem, he said: “It’s acquisition and process and something of policy that’s getting in the way right now.”
“We have to change our model, our approach, our way of obtaining information, our way of purchasing information,” agreed Jason Barrett, the IC-wide open source intelligence executive at ODNI. “It’s not up to the commercial sector at this point to come to us. It’s up to the government to start to change how we do our business.”
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