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
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
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
Intellipedia, the intelligence community’s version of Wikipedia, hummed in the aftermath of the Iranian presidential election in June, with personnel at myriad government agencies updating a page dedicated to tracking the disputed results. Read the rest of this entry »
“There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.” – Victor Hugo
The availability of geospatial data sets is exploding. New satellites, aerial platforms, video feeds, global positioning system (GPS) tagged digital photos, and traditional geographic information system (GIS) information are dramatically increasing across the globe. These raw materials need to be dynamically processed, combined and correlated to generate value added information products to answer a wide range of questions. Read the rest of this entry »
From IntelliBriefs: The recent discovery of Chinese cyber warfare attacks on foreign computers, on communication computers of visiting dignitaries, and espionage activities to assist a friendly country is building weapons of mass destruction (WMDI) has refocused international attention on the developing spectrum of China’s military doctrine. Read the rest of this entry »
“When you think about how the system will change, it may be helpful to picture national intelligence as a baseball game. In the old days, government bureaucrats accustomed to unlimited budgets and secret methods would try to win a game simply by bribing a player (Clandestine Intelligence), putting a “bug” in the… Read the rest of this entry »
“There is altogether too much discussion about the deliverables that OSINT [open source intelligence] can produce,” said Jennifer Sims, a former State Department intelligence official, at a DNI conference on open source intelligence last week.
Open source intelligence refers to intelligence that is derived from unclassified, legally accessible information sources. Read the rest of this entry »
iterasi is a simple browser-based tool for saving any web page—dynamically generated or otherwise—with the click of a button. The dynamic content is saved immediately—frozen in that moment in time—in an accessible HTML format and stored to a secure personal account. With iterasi, any web page can be saved, searched and shared anytime, from anywhere, forever.
From War & Health : Ten months ago, War & Health discussed a little known, but promising, project called Ushahidi. Born from the 2007/2008 electoral violence in Kenya, Ushahidi is a new way to report and gain low-level, real-time intelligence in crisis zones. Today, Ushahidi, in partnership with some NGOs, took a big step forward and deployed their system in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In a nutshell, Ushahidi allows individuals to report instances of violence, looting, and other incidents via local SMS messages. The report is then displayed on a web-based map using the Ushahidi engine. A more detailed explanation is offered in the diagram below:
I am a strong supporter of Ushahidi and I believe it will become a standard part of any humanitarian’s toolkit. That said, the project still has work to do. Presently, while the project is an innovative technological tool, it has yet to be connected with the interests of the policy folks. How well Ushahidi’s crowdsourcing methods mesh with the operations of NGOs? Of international peacekeepers? Does the project offer a value-added service to existing local health information networks? What is the potential for armed groups to exploit Ushahidi’s crowdsourced design? How best can the raw information collected be converted into reliable and actionable intelligence? In the coming weeks, War & Health will publish a series of articles looking at Ushahidi from a political science / policy perspective. Stay tuned.
WASHINGTON — The secretive National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is rushing to get the latest, high-definition satellite photos of Afghanistan into the hands of U.S. ground troops as they ramp up operations in the country’s tangled terrain.
College students get plenty of assignments, but this one was different.
It came from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as a challenge to think tanks, security companies, collegiate teams and veterans of the U.S. intelligence community. Read the rest of this entry »
From ThreatsWatch.org: Open source intelligence (OSINT) is, for lack of a universally-accepted formal definition, information of value that you don’t have to steal with spies or technical means.
PRINCETON, N.J., Nov 02, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Internet Crimes Group, Inc. (ICG) announced today that reports from international affairs intelligence company, Stratfor, will be integrated into ICG’s iThreat(R) Global Intelligence Monitor open source intelligence product.
The new administration must broaden the scope of its counterterrorism activities, including a focus on collection of domestic and open source intelligence as well as traditional foreign intelligence, the Defense Science Board said in a report outlining the key priorities for incoming leaders. Read the rest of this entry »
There are a number of great sites (mostly libraries) where there is good guidance on how to evaluate internet based sources. I intend, in this post, to list some of those sites and identify some up-and-coming tools. Finally, I want to highlight an important contribution to this literature that specifically pertains to intelligence analysis.
Virtually every good research library has a page dedicated to evaluating internet based sources. Some good examples include, among others: Read the rest of this entry »
Taking their cue from the CIA, almost every branch of the American intelligence community now has specialists who deal with open source intelligence (OSINT).
After buying a raft of sub-contractors of American intelligence agencies, DC Capital Partners is setting up a new holding company devoted to private security.
In a recent article on free software and the Large Hadron Collider I mentioned that here in the United Kingdom The Guardian, a national British newspaper, had founded a campaign called “free our data”. They objected to the fact that the Ordnance Survey (and others), funded by the British taxpayer, was charging business and individuals for its cartographic data thus effectively making people pay for it twice. Their campaign is great but until such times as it succeeds an alternative is needed. A free software alternative. Enter OpenStreetMaps.
Google Earth and Google Maps are too well know to require iteration here, but the spectre of proprietary software haunts them. They are not free software. If you want to incorporate any of them into you budding business project and run your software under a relatively permissive licence for others to take up your ideas and improve them you will have to find something else.
Just like Wikipedia, on which it is loosely modelled, OpenStreetMaps is resolutely free software. It is an attempt, by community participation, to map the Earth.
