Blogger spooks: CIA mining Internet musings for insights
WASHINGTON – The CIA now has its own bloggers.
In a bow to the rise of Internet-era secrets hidden in plain view, the agency has started hosting Web logs with the latest information on topics including North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il’s public visit to a military installation and the Burmese media’s silence on a ministry reshuffling. It even has a blog on blogs, dedicated to cracking the code of what useful information can be gleaned from the rapidly expanding milieu of online journals and weird electronic memorabilia warehoused on the Web.
The blogs are posted on an unclassified, governmentwide Web site, part of a rechristened CIA office called the DNI Open Source Center, which monitors, translates and analyzes publicly available information. The center, which officially debuted this month under the auspices of the new director for national intelligence, marks the latest wave of reorganization to come out of the recommendations of several commissions that analyzed the failures of intelligence collection related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
They pointed to decentralized and insufficient efforts to tap into the huge realm of public information in the Internet era, as well as a continuing climate of disdain for such information among spy agencies. “There are still people who believe if it’s not top secret, it’s not worth reading,” said an outside expert who works with government intelligence agencies.
By adding the new center, “they’ve changed the strategic visibility,” said Douglas Naquin, a CIA veteran named to direct the center. “All of a sudden open source is at the table.” But, in an interview last week at CIA headquarters, he added that “managing the world’s unclassified knowledge … (is) much bigger than any one organization can do.”
Even before the Open Source Center’s debut, the office had retooled its Internet efforts earlier this year. It added a new video database that makes all its archives available online, and it rolled out an upgraded Web site with the blogs and homepages for key intelligence topics, such as Osama bin Laden, Iraq insurgency leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, China and even avian flu.
The center also sees itself as a repository of what Naquin calls “open-source tradecraft.”
It teaches courses to intelligence analysts across the community, with titles such as “Advanced Internet Exploitation.”