The IC’s biggest open-source intelligence challenge: Mission creep

From establishing the use of chemical weapons by Syrian forces against innocent civilians in 2012, to documenting war crimes by invading Russian forces in Ukraine in 2022, the past decade has seen the explosion of open-source intelligence (“OSINT”). The discipline draws upon an ocean of (putatively) publicly available data – now ranging from selfies to car registrations to satellite imagery – to perform a kind of forensic analysis that would have been nigh impossible in previous eras. Having redefined practices from citizen journalism to military targeting, OSINT’s increased prominence has been accompanied by growing calls from scholars, practitioners, and senior officials for the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) to more concertedly take up the craft. Otherwise, so the thinking goes, these agencies run the risk of obsolescence, as governments find their erstwhile monopoly on sophisticated intelligence gathering eroding, alongside their ability to avoid strategic surprise.

For senior U.S. decisionmakers, the choice may boil down to a simple binary: double down on the game the IC plays best, or wade into a relatively new game that anyone can play. In terms of resourcing, authorities, and analytic credibility, however, forays into the latter could come at the expense of the former. By dint of its sheer scale, scope, authorities, relationships, organization, and history, the IC’s potential reach into the depths of secrecy is unparalleled. It is this very reach that may stand at greatest risk from unbounded attempts to find what hides in plain sight.

Read article in Just Security