Outside the traditional military realm, the explosive growth of personal computers (PCs) and their linking via the Internet offers vast quantities of public information that is freely available. While the intelligence community is probably the most affected, all branches of government are impacted. Indeed, the ongoing extremist threat, other non-State threats, and the increasing need for whole-of-government consideration of security issues should be sharpening the government’s focus on the potential and indeed the strategic and tactical importance of open source information on the Internet.
Joseph Nye, a former head of the US National Intelligence Council in the 1990s stated:
Open source intelligence is the outer pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, without which one can neither begin nor complete the puzzle … open source intelligence is the critical foundation for the all-source intelligence product, but it cannot ever replace the totality of the all-source effort.[10]
Within this context, the Australian Government needs to consider the value of open source information; the importance of the ever-increasing amount of information on the Internet; the utility of new analytic tools that can collect, sift, analyse, and disseminate this publicly available information; and, training issues relating to open source technology and techniques.[11]
Open source information may be defined as that information which is publicly available and that anyone can lawfully obtain by request, purchase, or observation. However, the acquisition of such information must conform to any existing legal copyright requirements. Open source information can include:
media such as newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and computer-based information;
public data such as government reports, and official data such as budgets and demographics, hearings, legislative debates, press conferences, and speeches;
information derived from professional and academic sources such as conferences, symposia, professional associations, academic papers, dissertations and theses, and experts;[12]
commercial data such as commercial imagery; and
grey literature such as trip reports, working papers, discussion papers, unofficial government documents, proceedings, preprints, research reports, studies, and market surveys.[13]
It can also include company proprietary, financially sensitive, legally protected, or personally damaging information that is unclassified.[14] Increasingly, it also encompasses information derived from Internet blogs.
In 2004, the US Congress called for an open source centre that could collect, analyse, produce, and disseminate open-source intelligence. Congress argued that open source intelligence was a valuable source of information that had to be integrated into the intelligence cycle to ensure that US policy-makers were fully informed. Accordingly, the National Open Source Center (NOSC) was established on 1 November 2005, and placed under the management of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The NOSC’s functions included ‘collection, analysis and research, training, and IT management to facilitate government-wide access and use’. The intent now is to provide a centre of expertise for exploiting open-source information across whole-of-government. Indeed, the NOSC can be tasked by other agencies for specific research.[15]
For Australia, it will be important to ensure that open-source experts are available across all government agencies so as to also avoid unnecessary duplicative efforts. Thus, some form of Centre with the requisite expertise and capability to train open source experts in government agencies is needed now. Such a Centre could improve information sharing across agencies by using state-of-the-art IT, seeking to maximise connectivity throughout the Australian Government and eliminate incompatible formats and any duplicative effort. Individual agencies should still be able to maintain independent open-source databases, but they would have to be maintained in formats accessible to other agencies.
Commercial satellites offer a good supplement to imagery from government satellites. Indeed, today, anyone with access to the Internet can obtain high-quality overhead imagery. It would be important for an Australian Centre, therefore, to have links to the Defence Imagery and Geospatial Organisation (DIGO).
In short, there would seem to be real merit in establishing an Australian Open Source Agency outside the Intelligence Community, with the intent to provide open-source information to all elements of the Australian Government, including parliamentary committees. Increasingly, open-source information will become essential for all functions of government and will demand more concerted efforts to acquire and analyse the vast quantities of available information. This could be one of the functions of a Cyber-warfare Centre as described in the final chapter by Des Ball.
[10] Amy Sands, ‘Integrating Open Sources into Transnational Threat Assessments’, in Jennifer E. Sims and Burton Gerber, Transforming U.S. Intelligence, Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, 2005, p. 64.
[11] Richard A. Best, Jr. and Alfred Cumming, Open Source Intelligence (OSINT): Issues for Congress, CRS Report for Congress, Congressional Research Service, 5 December 2007, p. CRS-1, available at <http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/ RL34270.pdf>, accessed 4 March 2008. Richard Best is a specialist in National Defense and Alfred Cumming is a specialist in Intelligence and National Security; both are within the Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division of CRS.
[12] See Mark M. Lowenthal, Intelligence, From Secrets to Policy, Second Edition, CQ Press, Washington, DC, 2003, p. 79.
[13] Sands, ‘Integrating Open Sources into Transnational Threat Assessments’, pp. 64–65.
[14] Sands, ‘Integrating Open Sources into Transnational Threat Assessments’, p. 65.
[15] Hamilton Bean, ‘The DNI’s Open Source Center: An Organizational Communication Perspective’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, vol. 20, no. 2, Summer 2007, pp. 240–57; and Robert K. Ackerman, ‘Intelligence Center Mines Open Sources’, Signal, March 2006, available at <http://www.afcea.org/signal/articles/templates/SIGNAL_Article_Template.asp?articleid=1102& zoneid=31>, accessed 4 March 2008.