The W/E BLOSINT Brief

This Week BLOSINT Brief (WBB) contains the following information:

1. The Americans are smart enough to go forward with enhancing OSINT as Open Intelligence to the Academic field.

“U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Thursday that the committee has approved $1 million for open source intelligence and intelligence analysis at Sam Houston State University.
The bill is now ready to be considered by the full Senate.
“America’s military and intelligence services are constantly on guard for potential threats against our homeland,” Hutchison said.
SHSU will use the funding to expand open source intelligence collection and analysis efforts and training for Foreign Military Studies Office elements at the El Paso Intelligence Center.” Source: The Huntsville Item

2. MySpace is going on with Qizmt [kiz-mit]
“MySpace on Tuesday will release as open source a technology called Qizmtthat it developed in-house to mine and crunch massive amounts of data and generate friend recommendations in its social-networking site.
Qizmt is a distributed computation framework based on the MapReduce programming model for processing large data sets in processor clusters.” Source: PCWorld

3. The U.S. Intelligence Community and Foreign Policy: Getting It Right (a Brookings Institution report that makes a lot of good points, especially about the IC reducing its reliance on Classified sources) via IntelFusion

4. Robert Steele, the longtime proponent of a robust open source intelligence program, has a new web site which notably includes an archiveof intelligence-policy related documents, several of which I had missed.  The collection is accompanied by his own occasionally tart commentary. via Secrecy News

5. Intelligence Event: “Intelligence for the Twenty First Century. Intelligence for Everyone.” Madrid 22nd-23rd September 2009, Interligare 1st International Forum, via Public Intelligence Blog

OSC Conference

Good idea in osint realm: “For those of who you don’t know the work of the OSC, they have in my opinion single-handedly elevated the profession of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) collection and analysis from getting no respect inside the Intelligence Community (IC) to one that every agency is designating as a must-have.

The conference was only open to current members of the IC plus invited speakers, and the speakers came from very diverse backgrounds. In fact, I was the only speaker who focused on the Russian Internet from a cyber warfare perspective (i.e., the Internet as an attack platform and Social Networks as target-rich environments). Others were academics, journalists, and a few security and intelligence professionals, and everyone focused on a different area. It was very stimulating with lots of audience interaction both during the sessions (lots of time provided for Q&A), during the breaks, and afterwards.

Fortunately, Sensa Solutions who handled the logistics for the OSC has posted some of the presentations on their Website. I particularly enjoyed Persephone Miel (Which came first, Russian Media or Russian Reality) andMikhail Alexseev (Internet Search Traffic and Ethnic Relations in Russia), but they are all worth reading.” via IntelFusion