Corporate Intelligence
The realization that Governments fail to grasp both reality and the facts has led to a huge growth in independent corporate intelligence departments, especially in companies that trade globally. In recent years global trading companies relied on information and advice from government officials and politicians. They monitored the global supply chain and protected the lines of communication, and flow of goods and services.
Today politicians lie to promote their own agendas and fabricate intelligence to suit their own goals. The media happily go along with them, and the disinformation machine churns out articles and quotable literature to support their version of reality. Industry has to survive as best it can.
Smart companies are developing their own filtering network to look neutrally at world events, and market forces, and analyze the scenarios for themselves. Those who faithfully follow the words of governments will suffer the financial losses. OSINT came into prominence to monitor the activities, threats and intentions of terrorist organizations, but today the manipulation of events and markets by a few have created a climate where the use of OSINT has to be used to analyze the acts and intentions of those who are supposed to protect and serve.
Intelligent Intelligence by Arnaud De Borchgrave
There are now 26,000 individual newspapers in the world that have to be monitored because one or two of them might contain a piece or two of a global terrorist puzzle. To complete the global Tower of Babel babble, there are 26,000 radio stations; 21,000 TV stations; 108 million Web sites; 75 million blogs; 56 million MySpace squatters; 100 million hits a day on YouTube; 8,000 news and information portals; 200 million photos on flickr.com, increasing at the rate of 5,000 per minute; 45,000 daily podcasts; and 2.5 million Web-enabled devices.
by Arnaud De Borchgrave
UPI Editor at Large
Washington DC (UPI) Jul 25, 2007
President John F. Kennedy once said he got "far more out of the New York Times than the CIA." Those were the days when major U.S. newspapers and the three networks maintained foreign bureaus staffed by prize-winning foreign correspondents all over the world. In those halcyon days, Open Source Intelligence, or OSINT in the espionage vernacular, could be culled from highly knowledgeable foreign correspondents, many of them scholars who had written books about the history and culture of their wide-ranging beats.
No more. At the end of World War II there were 2,500 U.S. foreign correspondents; today there are fewer than 250.
Newspapers, magazines and networks -- victims of both a weak dollar and corporate bottom-line bean counters -- have cut back foreign news coverage to the point where it no longer qualifies as OSINT. ABC slashed its staff foreign correspondents from 37 in the 1970s to four, according to veteran newsman Ted Koppel. Once over lightly foreign reporting -- with the exception of major events like wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and 20-minute TV magazine pieces -- is not what the Intelligence Community sees as OSINT. Reporters are now increasingly "parachuted" into hot stories abroad for a few days and then home to avoid exorbitant hotels bills.
A recent two-day Washington conference on OSINT organized by Eliot Jardines, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for open source, brought 1,200 people together from 40 countries. It was a mix of media, academia, business and IC.
All facets of OSINT were discussed, notably the constant drama of constant trivia that has afflicted U.S. media since the end of the Cold War (e.g., almost two years of O.J. Simpson that kept America's collective eye off the international ball; infamous skater Tonya Harding, who got more airtime in a comparable news period than the fall of the Berlin Wall that collapsed the Soviet empire; Congressman Gary Condit, whose affair with a murdered staffer was dislodged by Osama Bin Laden and the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks; Paris Hilton, whose mind-numbing, one-hour interview on "Larry King Live" reminded the millions who watched that addle-brained celebrity has now displaced merit-based fame).
For obvious reasons, open source information is no longer the traditional collection from open sources. This aspect of the intelligence business has become infinitely more complex. There are now 26,000 individual newspapers in the world that have to be monitored because one or two of them might contain a piece or two of a global terrorist puzzle. To complete the global Tower of Babel babble, there are 26,000 radio stations; 21,000 TV stations; 108 million Web sites; 75 million blogs; 56 million MySpace squatters; 100 million hits a day on YouTube; 8,000 news and information portals; 200 million photos on flickr.com, increasing at the rate of 5,000 per minute; 45,000 daily podcasts; and 2.5 million Web-enabled devices.
The pipe input into the Internet doubles every six months. Daily some 627 petabytes crisscross the globe on the Internet (one petabyte equals 1,024 terabytes, or 2 to the 50th power, which comes out to 1,125,899,906,842,624). That's several thousand times the entire contents of the Library of Congress -- every day.
Cold War problems were a lead-pipe cinch next to today's counter-terrorism challenges. As Tom Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, put it, "For almost half a century it was a question of what do we do to keep nations on our side and what we do to pry the others away." Now the IC has 15 minutes to supply answers to immediate questions. Decisions will be made whether IC can weigh in or not. The magnitude of the challenge can be gauged by the inexperience of many analysts hired since the Sept. 11 attacks. Half of some 45,000 analysts in 16 intelligence agencies (total personnel just under 100,000) have less than five years of experience. They were part of the explosive growth of the IC post-Sept. 11.
Now the IC needs to tell its political masters something critically important they didn't know, which is a lot more than Googling a profile for a living or checking a Wiki entry. OSINT supplies the deeper knowledge that provides real insight into why, for example, a 21-year-old French Muslim living in the Paris suburb of St. Denis, whose grandparents were born in Algeria, found his way to Iraq to fight Americans and returned to France to set up a terrorist cell. A French professor who specializes in Islam would have access to such a youngster now in prison in France, not the CIA station chief in Paris.
With OSINT, the IC wants to make accessibility a normal way of doing business. Too many things are stamped Top Secret, Secret or Classified that don't need to be. Even newspaper clippings sent from one Intel agency to another have wound up classified.
OSINT is now a matter of consulting the best experts available. A Cold War National Intelligence Estimate used to take 480 days to reach agreement among 16 agencies. It is now down to 80 days -- still far too long, says DNI Adm. Mike McConnell.
As Mary Margaret Graham, deputy DNI for collection, says, "Open Source is a discipline of collection, not intelligence per se, but an enabler of intelligence." The Center for Strategic and International Studies, where this reporter dwells as a senior adviser, has just published the findings of a one-year experiment in "Open Source as a Force Multiplier in Intelligence."
CSIS' Transnational Threats Project, which this writer directs, recruited 15 experts on Islamist extremism in Europe from the Middle East (including Israel), North Africa, Europe, the United States and Canada, and networked them 24/7 with a state-of-the-art, electronic collaborative software tool. They were known as TIN members -- for Trusted Information Network.
With a budget of less than half a million dollars, Tom Sanderson, who moderated the TIN, and his deputy Jacqueline Harned, proved such a network can produce material inaccessible to the IC. It can be used for myriad problems requiring expert illumination.
Commented Eliot Jardines, open source director for the Intelligence Community, "Why collect clandestinely what we can get from Open Source?" Why indeed. When Jardines came aboard ODNI in 2005, with his deputy Sabra Horne, senior adviser for outreach, they had a blank slate. They then decided to gather open source expertise from academia, media, corporations, the IC, the military and government. The Washington OS conference more than met everyone's expectations.
Source: United Press International
The Global Stress Points
WASHINGTON, DC April 18, 2007-- The world has become a far more dangerous place thanks to the ill thought out military excursions of the Bush Administration.
No matter how you sugar coat it the incompetence of Bush/Cheney and his advisers will go down in history as an unmitigated disaster for the United States. Unfortunately none of us can turn back the clock and the new global scenarios are here, and here to stay. Even though the global energy scenarios are far down the list of perceived threats, they are by far the most potentially damaging to the United States, and the World. By 2030 China will require the entire output of the world's oilfields to meet it's insatiable appetite, and long before that the United States and China will clash over energy.
Oxford Analytica produced "The Global Stress Points Matrix," a list of 20 potential points and where they rank from "negligible danger" of stress to "Very High" and "Extreme." Overlapping "High," "Very High," and "Extreme" stress points are the following:
- 1. United States/Iran: US strike on Iran
- 2. United States: Deep recession
- 3. China/Taiwan: Armed hostilities
- 4. International: Avian flu pandemic
- 5. Pakistan: State collapse
- 6. International: Chemical/biological attack
- 7. International: Return to protectionism
- 8. International: Terrorist dirty bomb
- 9. International: Oil price shock
- 10. Iraq: Collapse of state institutions
- 11. India/Pakistan: Armed hostilities
- 12. Russia: Rise of assertive nationalism
- 13. Latin America: Disruption to hydrocarbons sector
- 14. Lebanon: Civil war
- 15. Argentina: New sovereign default
- 16. North Korea: Military conflict
- 17. Nigeria: Large-scale disorder in the Delta
- 18. Horn of Africa: Regional conflagration
- 19. Central Asia: Risk of major disorder
- 20. Balkans: Return to serious disruption
Meanwhile, the post-9/11 generation of analysts in the 100,000-strong US intelligence community, distributed among 16 agencies, have only childhood recollections of Desert Shield and Desert Storm during 1990 to 1991. The Cold War ended when they were toddlers. The average length of service of a US intelligence analyst today is five years. (Contributions from Arnaud de Borchgrave)
Competitive Advantage
New York, June 9th, 2007 --- From our new base of operations in Philadelphia we are focusing on stopping the declining Competitive Advantage of American industry and tourism in the global marketplace. Good intelligence is the key to defining that marketplace, the players and the direction of the game being played. That equally applies to cities, States and governments. Without Competitive Advantage wars are lost. Without Competitive Advantage goods and services remain unsold. Without Competitive Advantage poverty replaces prosperity.
Much of Competitive Advantage is in the image and perception in the marketplace, and not just on price and product features, as the cloistered academics would have us believe. Nuclear energy is the obvious way to go to solve the looming energy crisis, but it's media image is so bad it is immediately dismissed, and destructive alternatives proposed instead.
If your competitors can make do with a fraction of your energy use, or operate on lower healthcare costs, executive salaries and crippling real estate overheads then they can quickly overtake you in the global marketplace. America lost it's technological advantage a long time ago, as it gave production, research and development to India, China, Japan, and the Philippines in return for quick short term profits. Except for weapons of destruction they now lead US industry in hardware and software development.
America is losing it's competitive edge and the looming energy crisis will impact it even more. Watch for more focus on Competitive Advantage on all our sites, and come to one of the presentations by Alan Simpson.
Benefits of Private Sector OSINT
I draw from the research and writing of Tom Quiggin, " Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) can fill in most of the gaps immediately and at low cost. OSINT is not just open source information nor is it a substitute for all source analysis. OSINT is a distinct analytical process that integrates human expertise and open source information to produce policy relevant or actionable intelligence. If done correctly, it is as rigorous and timely as any other intelligence source. Currently, the majority of information and expertise are in the private sector – not government - and the trend is growing towards more private sector dominance.
OSINT is particularly well-suited to national security work, even though it lacks the “cool factor” of classified intelligence and is seen as a threat by many centralized bureaucracies. Why is OSINT so well-suited to national security asymmetric threats? There are six main reasons:
1. Many of the contingences or surprises that arise tend to do so in both geographic and thematic areas that are not covered by classified sources, but the government leaders will need the information anyway. The expertise required usually exists in the private sector.
2. OSINT allows for a greater flexibility when dealing with politicians, bureaucrats, foreign partners and with civilian agencies that lack clearances. Information can travel faster and more efficiently. OSINT can also be shared with supra-national organizations or non-government organizations. This is both a domestic and an international advantage.
3. OSINT-based information can be shared more readily with the media and the public in order to better inform them of actual or impending risks.
4. A small number of OSINT analysts (two or three) can track and provide warnings on global phenomena that are of interest to the state. This can be done using complex Boolean searches on databases such as Dialog or Lexis Nexis assisted by the WWW.
5. OSINT is low cost as the private sector has already developed and paid for the infrastructure needed to support it. There is no need to develop costly software or hardware.
6. OSINT relies exclusively on information gained through legal and ethical means. It can therefore be used in court proceedings, quasi-judicial hearings or other public venues. It is a means of informing the public about threats in an open manner. The full article: http://www.isn.ethz.ch/news/sw/details.cfm?ID=16727
Building the OSINT Center
Since we announced the development of the OSINT Center back in 2005 we have been busy meeting many of the key players in the corporate and international business community.
Our interest is in the private sector, although we welcome government departments, national and local who require to learn more about what is available in the marketplace.
We have been invited to, and attended many of the key conferences and exhibitions around the country, including conferences on Pharmaceuticals, Healthcare, Computers and Business Intelligence User Conferences such as Information Builders and SCIP. In each we learned of the requirements and shortfalls in the marketplace, and look forward to creating a resource to meet industry needs.
The huge drop in the cost of computing power, coupled with the high speed internet access from smaller cities have allowed us to move out into less pricey and congested facilities. We have embraced the idea of using home based experts, together with hosted computer facilities on the Internet Backbone. The extension of the ComLinks Brand back into Europe has validated this concept, for the United States still has the most cost effective Internet access, and hardware.
As the realization grows that companies and municipalities need to embrace the whole concept of gathering intelligence and analyzing their path in the turbulent oceans of the modern world, the question often asked is "Where do we start and what do we need?
Bringing together experts from around the world the OSINT Center creates an OSINT Supermarket for knowledge, tools, training and resources. The realization is that as much as 95% of all government intelligence, as well as 99.9% of corporate intelligence is Open Source and does not need the sprawling resources of government or corporate security to protect the information. The need for hugely expensive and inefficient compartmentalized units to protect each other, from each other and the outside world is both unnecessary and counter productive, as is the associated waste product, duplication of effort. In the Federal intelligence system there must be tens of thousands of people working on the same piece of information, with no contact, or assistance from each other. No matter how you try and defend it Secrecy is the Enemy of Knowledge. In a world where changes are dramatic and sudden every manager and decision maker needs to be aware of the world around them.
The vast majority of projects do not need specialized knowledge to create the "Skeleton" of the project, including training, software, procedures, books and publications. The "confidential" bit can be added by the user, after training and development. Yes, many companies are afraid of "Showing their hand" by allowing third party companies access to their plans and intentions. But like a food supermarket, you don't need to tell the cashier the recipe and dinner plans before buying the groceries.
Earlier News Releases
Demystifying OSINT for States, Cities and Chambers of Commerce
(PRWEB) - Sunday, Jan 1 2006 --- “OSINT is about management and employees pulling together to monitor the world around them, by creating a knowledge network to improve the forecasting and decision making process,” advised Alan Simpson, the International OSINT Advocate, speaking in Washington, DC. “OSINT, or Open Source Intelligence is finally being accepted as an essential tool in decision making by the US Government, with an initial budget of $2 billion.“
“States, Cities, Counties and trade organizations need to develop these structured capabilities of monitoring the changing world especially regarding the security and growth of their revenue base. OSINT isn't about espionage, it's about collecting and understanding unclassified political, economic, medical, technical and environmental information, and predicting the effects on plans and strategies.”
In 1996 Alan Simpson developed ComLinks, a fusion of Newsroom and Intelligence Center, found to be the most productive resource for OSINT. Local Governments around the world are becoming very interested in implementing their own OSINT projects, but are confused and often worried about anything containing the word “Intelligence".
In presentations he suggests Economic Planning Offices, even Chambers of Commerce give their members real economic intelligence to help the local companies prosper, and expand the employment and tax base. He believes every State, and major municipality should be feeding economic intelligence to companies in their area. It's out there in the OSINT world, just waiting to be found and used.
As he tours the USA and Europe he is often asked such questions as how to determine the effects of Baby Boomers retiring on housing and medical services, worker migration, and how government departments can use OSINT for economic development and to keep industries from disappearing overseas. Environmental questions occur again and again, especially on waste and pollution management, energy, and urban sprawl. Smaller units of government need to watch closely the actions, and plans of their neighbors, and of course the unfunded mandates from Washington, DC.
The list for areas of government benefiting from effective OSINT is extensive, from crime and immigration, to new markets, medical breakthroughs, technologies and the political climate in Washington, DC, Brussels and Beijing. Forewarned is forearmed. In the years ahead the race for economic prosperity will become more intense and cut throat. It will be survival of the fittest, the smartest and there are no guarantees.
In visits to both government and private sector offices Alan Simpson finds much of this is already being done piecemeal, duplicated and managed inefficiently. Language skills are being ignored, and there often exists no structure to utilize the knowledge base within the organization. OSINT brings these information resources together in a unified transparent intelligent infrastructure to enable an effective decision support system. Corporations are finally realizing they need to embrace OSINT to stay profitable and fight competition, and predict and lead market changes. It’s time for States to begin taking the lead with economic, environmental, medical and social intelligence for the benefit of themselves and the protection of their revenue base.”
Alan Simpson is a leading international advocate of OSINT with 25 years experience, in over 80 countries. He is President of Communication Links, Inc., which has just announced the creation of the ComLinks OSINT Center in Washington, DC to advise and guide Governments, States, Municipalities, Corporations and Organizations in developing their own OSINT programs. A second centre is being planned for the UK, to service the European marketplace. He recently announced the successful trial program for advising Hedge Funds, from New York to Beijing, on political intelligence. Since 1996 he has published ComLinks Intelligence Report and has appeared on radio and television around the world.
Open Source Intelligence and Newsrooms
Washington, D.C. (PRWEB) December 27, 2005 -- Savvy News Directors, investigative journalists, and News Bureau Chiefs are realizing the unproductive information sitting in their computers is the raw material of a booming new industry, that of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). The world of journalism is shrinking rapidly, thanks to takeovers, downsizing and the changing face of electronic media, but OSINT companies, in the business intelligence or competitive intelligence fields are growing by leaps and bounds.
Alan Simpson, President of Communication Links, Inc. who pioneered the fusion of newsrooms and OSINT analysis is often asked the difference between investigative journalists and OSINT. His answer is “None”.
“In fact ex journalists make the best OSINT Analysts. They are used to wading through misinformation and hype, to get at the facts underneath, especially those from trade publications.” he explains. ”We experimented back in 1985 with what has become to be known as OSINT, and developed the fusion of newsroom and in depth analysis.”
He is developing the ComLinks OSINT Network, staffed mainly by current and ex investigative journalists, as well as legislative, economic and technology experts, to meet the needs of US and international industry, investment banks, and private clients. Most work from home using the ComLinks web based Intranet. The OSINT Center is the newsroom of the future, highly focused, and using the benefits of distributed technologies to create a world wide net for news and expert in-depth analysis.
The speed of modern commerce, and global competition means the successful players in every industry need to know, where the industry is going, what their competitors are up to, and what analysts predict their future intentions could be. Investment Bankers and Hedge Funds need to know which are the companies and industries with growth potential, and which are in decline. Politicians too are of keen interest to corporate planners, and trends in rule making and environmental, or commercial legislation can make or break a corporation.
What has changed since those early trials in 1985 is that OSINT has now entered the mainstream, and thousands of new analysts are recruited every year. Even the US Government has finally accepted it’s value and allocated $2 Billion to develop resources. But this government spending is dwarfed by the tens of billions spent on OSINT by corporations in the USA and around the world, estimated at over $50 Billion, directly and indirectly. Now there is a shortage of qualified collectors and analysts.
A database of resumes has been created to provide corporations access to expertise in report writing, investigation, and analysis for special assignments. Often these relate to a particular industry such as aviation, telecommunications, pharmaceutical or to a specific geographical location, such as New Orleans, China, India, US Rust Belt, or Silicon Valley. All companies and organizations need to know about the environment around them, and detailed projections on important scenarios. The rate of clean up after Hurricane Katrina is a good example, should companies rebuild, or relocate?
As a Member of the National Press Club in Washington, Alan Simpson has seen hundreds of experienced journalists put out of work these past few years, and that accumulation of years of experience and knowledge lost to the world. That knowledge may be just the information Corporate America is needing for their strategic planning.
# # #