On the American Intelligence Community’s OSINT Strategy 2024–2026
On 8 March 2024, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released the Intelligence Community (IC) OSINT Strategy 2024-2026.
Among 18 agencies of the American IC, the CIA is designated Functional Manager for both HUMINT and OSINT. I will summarise the gist in my personal interpretation as follows:-
- Common visibility of and coordination in open source data collection throughout the IC to prevent duplication of effort and pooling together resources for a common data bank.
- Developing a mechanism for the distribution of IC OSINT products to the wider US government to achieve same-page information advantage against adversaries.
- Establishing and nurturing separate channels for engaging the academia, private sector and foreign counterparts with the aim of acquiring new tools and improving tradecraft.
- Intensive investments in the IC's OSINT workforce (human resources) apart from technologies (hardware, software etc).
Since the invasion of Ukraine, the popularity of OSINT exploits against Russia has spiked. Amateur and seasoned practitioners alike have vastly increased the quantum of open source reporting. The Israel-Palestine conflict is another major catalyst.
The American IC remains at the forefront in institutionalising OSINT, and for that matter matchless among its contemporaries in publicising them. Interestingly, the US Army had already released its (classified) OSINT Strategy in early 2022.
Jason Barrett, a national security wonk at the ODNI with experience serving in the DIA and FBI, was roped in as OSINT Executive in October 2023 to work on this strategy (also its upcoming 'Strategy Action Plan') and also to facilitate for improved coordination across 18 agencies in the IC. An unenviable task but one that promises to help yield much-needed synergy. We will have to wait and see if, for some reason, a change in government retards or up-ends the consolidation process.
To my mind, the most important and difficult aspect of the recent strategy is to develop and sustain a common open source data bank which will bring together the open source collection capabilities from all agencies. It will help to significantly reduce wastage of time and budgetary resources which these agencies are presently engaged in, from within their own silos.
It is also intriguing to note the CIA, as Functional Manager of OSINT, refer to the discipline as 'INT of First Resort' (apparently beginning with pronouncements to this effect by Patrice Dibbs of the CIA Open Source Enterprise); the IC OSINT Strategy 2024-2026 bears this slogan in its title cover.
In terms of overall symbolism, this is no small feat. It appears to represent a paradigm shift within the CIA’s organisational culture which has steadfastly held prestige for its leading role in HUMINT collection. Intelligence operators and analysts from the pre-Internet era, including some of their protegés still dominating the leadership of different agencies, are quite likely to uphold their skepticism of OSINT’s potential.
But what was coming, has arrived. With the CIA taking public ownership of OSINT’s exploitative value, their contemporaries across the world will expectedly follow suit.
Beyond drooling over the slightly technical verbiage of this Strategy, countries in the 'Third World' and 'Global South' should also pay attention to the American IC's emphasis on a well-trained OSINT workforce in which foreign language skills and cultural knowledge (social science familarity) are as important as the various specialisation strands of computer sciences. This is also very important because populist narratives around AI influence many institutions to acquire COTS solutions at the long-term expense of retaining quality human talent.
I am not presenting the American IC as an exemplar or 'role model' to emulate. Path-breaking policymaking anywhere, by anyone, is commendable. As a practitioner, it seems to me that the American IC has thoroughly considered the existing and potential pitfalls of OSINT in national bureaucracies; a decentralised, disintegrated and heavily compartmented effort for open source data collection will burden the coffers and eventually prove self-defeating for synchronisation of effort.
I do not know if OSINT is indeed the 'INT of first resort'. What I do know from years of experience is that its functional costs and liabilities both are relatively low.
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