At today’s DNI Open Source conference here in Washington, we kicked off with a keynote speech from Glenn Gaffney.
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.
