Interesting: the intelligence community has discovered (again) that public information can be a rich source of valuable knowledge, and has established an Open Source Center to collect and analyze it.
The data can be free—such as local property records, voter registrations and political-campaign contributions—or it can be for sale, such as credit reports, commercial satellite imagery and New York Times articles. The data might already be in database format, or it may have to be converted, as are transcripts of TV and radio broadcasts. All of it, however, is grist for the mills of analysts throughout the intelligence community. The center is the clearinghouse for much of it.“We like to make a distinction between collection and acquisition,” said [Eliot Jardines, assistant deputy director in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)]. Traditionally, the IC has owned the means of collection, with an emphasis on covert intelligence gathering. But open-source intelligence revolves around acquiring information that someone else has collected, organized and published, he said.
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The OSC monitors somewhere between 150 and 300 jihadist Web sites it considers the most significant.... The center also tracks about 500 television stations, with access to about 20,000 around the globe. Throw in blogs, radio broadcasts, even bumper stickers and graffiti (they reflect local public sentiment “on the ground”), and one can see just how vast a sea of data is covered by open-source data mining.
Of course, librarians have known this for decades.
Posted by Alan at March 21, 2006 05:55 AM