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January 24, 2006
Intelligence: Covert vs Open Source
The Plame/Wilson affair raises my blood pressure for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the way in which political partisans have played fast and loose with the concepts of "classified" information and "covert" operatives. I'm not an intelligence professional but I do know that these term have very specific applications; yet the original definitions of the terms matter not a whit to those who have a hot headline to write.
Indeed, crucial policy decisions and even some peoples' freedom might depend on when various previously classified pieces of data lost their holy status and descended back into the realm of wire service stories. At the basic level someone somewhere is making a judgment call and placing that "classified" label on selected information--but maybe we need to examine what the ramifications of that designation are.
CIA analyst Stephen C. Mercado (via Arts & Letters Daily) makes some very interesting points about the dangers of trying to direct the onrushing river of data into preconceived pigeonholes.
Overt and covert streams of intelligence are by no means completely parallel and distinct; they often mingle and meander over one another’s territory. Covert reports at times are amalgams of press clippings. And newspaper editors, for their part, frequently publish stories based on accurate leaks of classified material. Examples abound. Veteran CIA case officer James Lilley learned early in his career how Chinese agents had “swindled” his office with supposedly inside information on Chinese developments that later proved to be “embroidered versions of articles from provincial Chinese newspapers.”[4] Similarly, European con men reportedly passed off Soviet newspaper articles as intelligence from behind the Iron Curtain to operatives of the CIA and the West German Gehlen Organization in the 1950s.[5] More recently, journalist Bill Gertz of the Washington Times has leaked classified information in his stories. His published photocopies of actual intelligence documents underscore how the overt and covert streams mingle.
As an employee of the CIA Directorate of Science and Technology, Mercado argues that analysis of open source intelligence (OSINT) can be as useful, if not more so, than the covert stealing of secrets. He cites the blogosphere to illustrate: good case officers and their agents are a finite and expensive resource; yet as most of us know, there is a huge quantity of expertise available in blogs and on the internet in general. Intelligence collected by a good OSINT specialist can oftentimes match or exceed the product produced by covert means, at much less cost and with a more rapid response time.
This is a fascinating article; it's well worth your time.
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