Open source online intelligence mining still in infancy, official says

The arm of the CIA that combs the Internet and other public sources for unclassified but insightful intelligence is still in its infancy, its director acknowledges, five years after the Bush administration created the agency to overcome analytical limitations that in 2003 helped bring on the Iraq War.

After President George W. Bush sent troops to invade Iraq based in part on what turned out to be flawed information that the country was rebuilding its nuclear capacity, the U.S. government charged a new Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission with recommending steps to improve the nation's intelligence gathering. One such step was the creation of an open source directorate that would apply sophisticated information technology to gather fleeting, online materials for permanent availability across the intelligence community.

"We've made progress, but we're still nascent," said Douglas Naquin, who has directed the DNI Open Source Center, based at the CIA, since its inception in 2005. Naquin spoke on Wednesday at a discussion about the future of open source intelligence hosted by information-aggregation provider LexisNexis.

Today, "there is more collaboration across agencies -- and we have proven economies of scale, in terms of things like training and IT acquisitions," he said. "In the next five years, we see us involved in the entire value chain from raw data to finished product.

"We have to be more extroverted. . . . We have to get people out of their cubicles," Naquin added. "Success from a national security perspective revolves around the word integration" across the intelligence community, nongovernment research centers and media sources.

But Chet Lunner, former deputy undersecretary of intelligence and analysis for the Homeland Security Department, warned the government against relying on too much of what is reported on the Internet for accurate insights.

"Just because it's printed doesn't mean that it's true," he said. "I'm afraid we have to be somewhat more cautious than we have been. . . . All that Twitters is not gold," Lunner added, referring to the massive online bulletin board where anybody can update the online universe about personal and societal events.

Another challenge facing open source and classified intelligence professionals alike is the demise of secrets, other participants said.

"We're going to have to do a much more careful cost-benefit analysis" to determine which of the reports these analysts produce should be safeguarded, said former CIA Assistant General Counsel Suzanne Spaulding. The ascendancy of the anti-secret website WikiLeaks has uprooted many of the policies, networks and tools that the government invested in to segregate classified information.

"The cost of protecting it means we have to apply it to a far smaller universe of information," said Spaulding, now a principal with the Bingham Consulting Group.