OSINT: Should the US Create an Open Source Intelligence Agency? Experts Discuss

Open source data has grown exponentially in quality, availability and prominence over the past 20 years. This publicly accessible data, from sources such as commercial satellite imagery, social media and cell phone application usage, provides information to intelligence professionals in ways not previously envisioned.

But this growth in open source data has caused a problem for the U.S. intelligence community in that existing institutions are not structured to handle it in a consistent manner. This has created discussion among intelligence professionals: should the U.S. create a standalone open source intelligence, or OSINT, agency?

Potomac Officers Club sat down with a pair of intelligence experts in exclusive interviews for their thoughts about creating an OSINT agency, the pros and cons of such an organization, and the problem it would try to fix.

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Why Should OSINT Have Its Own Agency

Eliot Jardines was assistant deputy director of national intelligence for open source from 2005 to 2008. He told POC the US should create an OSINT agency because the discipline is highly complex and requires language skills, cultural understanding and intimacy with a target that an “all-source” analyst can’t afford. 

OSINT needs its own agency because all-source analysts don’t know how to best leverage the information for intelligence purposes and often commit “surfing fratricide.” Jardines said this is where they find information on targets, but leave behind far more clues on the intelligence community’s intentions and interests than they’re collecting, spooking targets in the process.

Additionally, Jardines said the existing intelligence agencies do not prioritize OSINT and treat it as an additional, and unwanted, duty, limiting its potential. He said, for example, the National Security Agency prioritizes signals intelligence, or SIGINT, and the CIA focuses on human intelligence, a.k.a. HUMINT.

The Growth in OSINT

OSINT’s attention from the IC has had its ups and downs since Congress created the Community Open Source Program Officer, or COSPO, career field in 1991. One big boost came with the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the early 2000s.

But Jardines said growth in attention for OSINT has been followed by declines because the control of OSINT has been handed to another intelligence agency to act as an “executive agent” for open source.

“Nobody in senior leadership at the CIA has ever cared for open source,” he said. “It’s kind of like being in the Air Force and trying to run a program that’s not related to planes.”

Jardines said the CIA resented his office’s role in the IC, accusing it of micromanaging the agency and insisting that it could handle OSINT just fine. Years later, he said, the OSINT responsibility was given to the CIA, eliminating efforts such as an IC-wide certification for all OSINT professionals, established funding lines and an open-source officer career field.

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OSINT Career Fields

The Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency, Jardines said, have created an open source officer career field.

“Everybody else doing this is moving toward specialization, and [the U.S.] is doing the opposite,” he said, adding that unless the U.S. treats OSINT as a “full-time job,” OSINT will always play second fiddle.

Much of the debate over whether to create an OSINT agency rests on how to define open source. Jardines said commercially available data, such as hyperspectral and imagery, would fall under an OSINT agency’s scope.

Jardines said an OSINT agency having its own centralized acquisition authority with particular contract vehicles is essential. He cites the Army’s “OSINT toolkit” as a good example of centralized OSINT acquisition where Army intelligence professionals are allowed to spend their own money, but they have to buy from approved intelligence tools in the “toolkit.” Jardines also believes that every member of the IC should have dedicated money and billeted positions for OSINT.

Why OSINT Shouldn’t Have Its Own Agency

Another intelligence professional is skeptical of the need to create a standalone OSINT agency. James Dickey spent 22 years as an Army intelligence officer. Dickey told POC he is skeptical of the creation of another bureaucratic agency as being the only way to solve the problem of IC use of OSINT. He is also skeptical of a new intelligence agency being created in the current political environment.

Dickey said one of the biggest problems with the IC in general is there is too much bureaucracy and too many regulations. Instead of improving the current system and how it works with OSINT, he said creating an OSINT agency would essentially add to the system. Dickey said another problem with creating an OSINT agency is that the Trump Administration is trying to reduce the size of the IC, not expand it.

Additionally, he said, creating an OSINT agency would result in a bureaucracy growing to meet its own needs, rather than the IC as a whole.

“Once these agencies exist, they have a tendency to expand to meet their own requirements [and] not so much the customer requirements,” Dickey said.

An Obstacle to Creating an OSINT Agency

Another impediment to creating a new IC in the current political environment, Dickey said, is resistance from established intelligence agencies. Existing agencies, he said, would probably endorse creating a new OSINT agency if it would reduce problems with procuring open source data from commercial industry. He said they would not endorse a new OSINT agency telling them what they could, and couldn’t do, with open source data.

Dickey, instead, proposes:

• Clearly defining OSINT
• Drafting clear legal guidelines for the use of OSINT in intelligence-gathering
• Creating an independent budget line that could be leveraged by existing IC agencies to execute OSINT missions for each of the agencies.

For example: the Military Intelligence Program, or MIP, and the National Intelligence Program, a.k.a NIP, are congressional budget lines that can be used by the U.S. military services to execute their intelligence missions. The NIP includes all programs, projects and activities of the IC as well as other IC programs designated jointly by the DNI and the head of a department or agency, or the DNI and the president.

The MIP is devoted to intelligence activity conducted by DOD departments and agencies that support tactical U.S. military operations. Dickey suggests something similar for the IC to procure OSINT for their use in intelligence products.