Ground Zero Minnesota: Center for the Study of Intelligence and Wisdom

Center for the Study of Intelligence and Wisdom

What is the Open Sources "Revolution in Intelligence Affairs?"

Advances in information technology are presenting opportunities and conundrums to intelligence professionals. ("Intelligence professional" is the polite term for spies in all their 57 varieties — like "sanitation engineer" is a polite term for janitors.) On the one hand, intelligence professionals enjoy unprecedented power to retrieve, sort, and analyze information, available to those with resources to pay for it. On the other hand, the cost of such services is dropping so fast that many people outside the professional intelligence community can now access them. For example, high resolution photographs of the earth’s surface, available only to secret elites just ten years ago, can now be purchased by anyone or often found free on the web. Furthermore, almost everyone in the information world is now being buried in far more information than they can effectively process. Quality is the overwhelming issue henceforth instead of quantity.

This places a premium on networking and collaboration, at which the open world excels. To the dismay of some and delight of others, many journalists and professors are now getting more accurate answers to many questions faster than spies and intelligence professionals. In response to this dilemma, some of the more far sighted and more open minded intelligence officers started what some have called the "Open Sources Movement" about 15 years ago, and several national intelligence entities now maintain open source offices to exploit these possibilities and to overcome years of hostility in polite society which was generated by covert operations in the past. The CSIW encourages this development, the use of "OSINT" (Open Sources Intelligence) and we would like to encourage also a focus on the dimension of "wisdom" as distinct from "intelligence," "knowledge," or "information." Our board includes Open Source officers from the Netherlands and Australia, among others.

Very recently a nascent movement has begun within active-duty intelligence circles to consider ethics and official intelligence. The first international conference on this was held in Springfield, Virginia, in January 2006, followed by another in 2007. We have been involved from the beginning, and authored the chapter (4) on intelligence ethics in a textbook for professionals (Handbook of Intelligence Studies, Taylor and Francis, London, 2006). We also published a reader for intelligence schools (and others, we do not classify any of our work) in August 2007, which has already been used by the CIA for their officers in residence program. The title is Intelligence Ethics: The Definitive Work of 2007. (It soon will be available for downloaded free from this site, so you can decide for yourself whether anything better was produced in 2007. It includes 13 essays from authors from six countries, and a proposed code of ethics and standards for the entire American intelligence community.)

Both the Open Sources Revolution and the seemingly oxymoronic effort to develop a formal ethos for intelligence professionals are works in progress. But both are important to the goal of human survival in an age of nuclear, biological, chemical, and other exotic weapons … in the hands of “terrorists” as well as “nation-states.”