It is true that the world of publicly and commercially available information (PAI and CAI, respectively) is dynamic and rapidly changing, and the days of linguists sitting in an office monitoring foreign radio broadcasts or translating foreign press articles are long gone. Today, OSINT is all about digital innovation. It’s a story about artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation, natural language processing, human language translation models, data analytics, and much more. And the same people who ask me about the future of OSINT are usually surprised to learn how the Open Source Enterprise, which is aligned within CIA’s Directorate of Digital Innovation, has undergone a dramatic transformation in recent years, building the foundation for a near future were OSINT truly is our INT of first resort.
CIA’s open source mission builds upon a long and proud legacy, one from which I benefited for many years as a consumer while serving around the world as a US official. But that legacy model was never going to scale in this world of ubiquitous connectivity, with exponentially increasing volumes of PAI available quite literally at our fingertips. Our new model maximize agility, enhances integration across all the various types of intelligence collection (or INTs, as we call them), and exploit cutting-edge technologies. Indeed, OSE is an Intelligence Community leader in the use of advanced AI/ML technologies to automate and transform data-driven workflows, a key capability to help us meet new challenges in the rapidly expanding open source environment.
You might ask, what’s next? How do we build upon the progress made to date and truly realize OSINT’s incredible potential? Of course, it will require continuing investments in technological innovation, but more urgently, we must invest in partnerships. Partnerships across the Intelligence Community to create a true federation of OSINT professionals. Partnerships with the US private sector to leverage their expertise and insights. And partnerships with allied foreign intelligence services around the globe to help us achieve scale against our common national security challenges.
I can think of no more exciting time to be an expert — whether in government or private industry — working on open source intelligence. It’s a world of nearly limitless opportunity.
