Gaffney’s job is to co-ordinate the intelligence collection efforts of the US’s patchwork of 16 agencies and he was fulsome in his endorsement of the use of open source intelligence.
“We don’t own the technological playing field in the way we once did,” he argued. Information is cheaper and barriers to entry are lower. The challenge is to ‘leverage’ new technologies to deliver strategic advantage for the US.
In other words, the US government needs to go open source – or it will miss out on the growing wealth of information offered by a multi-connected, always on world.
Gaffney’s talk went down well – at least on Twitter, with reviews positive in the back channel. “He gets it,” was the geek consensus, as Gaffney urged an older generation to embrace the new approach or give way to the mash-up generation.
But Gaffney only took me so far. As you’d expect from an intelligence gatherer, his approach was very information-centric. For him, open source means more data to sort through, which should (if all goes right) produce a greater chance of “discovering and discerning truth and using it for the safety and security of our citizenry.”
In Gaffney’s talk, I heard echoes of an old command and control paradigm (which I discussed in a recent talk at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Services). At the heart of this paradigm is the assumption that if leaders can be given the right information, they will be able to manage away the instabilities of our globalised societies.
But there’s another way of looking at open source – as a novel form of distributed organisation and production enabled by cheaper, faster and more pervasive communication.
This poses a much more substantial challenge to the status quo. It’s not simply about a quantitative shift in the availability of information – but about qualitative changes in social organisation.
Understanding those qualitative changes is – or should be – the fundamental task of open source intelligence gathering.
In the run up to tomorrow’s anniversary (the wikipedia article on 9/11 is locked because of a high risk of vandalism) here are some interesting reports and articles worth reading (fee free to add).
A brilliant analysis by NYT’s Dexter Filkin on the regrouping and strengthening of al-Qaeda and Taliban forces in remote areas of Pakistan.
What’s going on? I asked the warlord. Why aren’t they coming for you?
“I cannot lie to you,” Namdar said, smiling at last. “The army comes in, and they fire at empty buildings. It is a drama — it is just to entertain.”
Entertain whom? I asked.
“America,” he said.
The Centre for American Progress has published its annual Terrorism Index.
The House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the House Committee on Homeland Security published a new report yesterday evening on the Administration’s Implementation of Recommendations by the 9/11 Commission. The title: The Wasted Lessons of 9/11: How the Bush Administration has ignored the law and squandered its opportunities to make our country safer.
British defense officials must be squirming. While it is common knowledge that parts of the US establishment government are unhappy about Britain’s role in Basra and Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki is almost contemptuous about British forces, now analysis about developments in the southern city do not even feature Britain.
Writing for the New York Times, three well-known American security analysts talk about their recent fact-finding visit to Basra and how they “glimpsed a model of post-American Iraq.” The words “British” and “Britain” are not mentioned once while the analysts note that “recent Iraqi operations in Basra, Sadr City and Mosul would not have succeeded without American military support.”
So much for Britain’s remaining soldiers and development workers.
I’ve argued before that if the West wants to stop Russian expansionism, it has to take away the excuse for that expansionism – the oppression of Russian citizens in former colonies like Georgia, Ukraine or the Baltics. This oppression is real, and as long as it exists, as long as the EU isn’t really pro-active in protecting the rights of Russian citizens outside of Russia, then Russia will use this as an excuse for its military sorties.
An interesting historical parallel for this strategy was drawn to my attention today. It turns out that, during the Great Game of the 18th and 19th century, the Russian empire used exactly the same strategy, using the excuse of Russian slaves in central Asia as an excuse to invade the khanates of Khiva and Bukhara and extend the borders of the Russian empire.
The British empire, realizing what Russia was up to, dispatched two secret agents to the khan of Khiva, in what is now Uzbekistan, to persuade him to release all his Russian slaves, which he did, thus removing the excuse for Russian aggression.
