CIA mines ‘rich’ content from blogs is an article in today’s Washington Times discussing how the CIA’s Open Source Center is using Internet blogs to gather intelligence.

“The new Open Source Center (OSC) at CIA headquarters recently stepped up data collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content, said OSC Director Douglas J. Naquin. “A lot of blogs now have become very big on the Internet, and we’re getting a lot of rich information on blogs that are telling us a lot about social perspectives and everything from what the general feeling is to … people putting information on there that doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Mr. Naquin told The Washington Times.”

Intelligence agencies have long relied on open source intelligence — gathering and analyzing information collected from sources available to the general public, such as newspapers, radio and television broadcasts and public documents. It’s not surprising, nor necessarily worrisome, that blogs are being viewed as a new source of information. Companies are using information mined from blogs for market research, e.g., to analyze “the who, what and why of online opinion to provide deep insight into the buzz about companies”, as Umbria puts it. The same is true for politicians. And Governments.

The Washington Times article continues:

Eliot A. Jardines, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for open source, said the amount of unclassified intelligence reaching Mr. Bush and senior policy-makers has increased as a result of the center’s creation in November.

“We’re certainly scoring a number of wins with our ultimate customer,” said Mr. Jardines, who became the first high-level official in charge of the government’s nonsecret intelligence in December.

“I can’t get into detail of what, but I’ll just say the amount of open source reporting that goes into the president’s daily brief has gone up rather significantly,” Mr. Jardines said. “There has been a real interest at the highest levels of our government, and we’ve been able to consistently deliver products that are on par with the rest of the intelligence community.”

Mr. Naquin said recent OSC successes have included the discovery of a technology advance in a foreign country. Also, most data on avian flu outbreaks come from open sources, he said.

I wonder if they are using the standard Web infrastructure to do this — Google, Yahoo, MSN, ping servers, Technorati, etc. — or building their own? Are they filtering out the splogs?

There is, of course, a very real danger that blog mining can be misused to compile information about individuals which don’t pose a threat to national security. Many of us put way too much information about our lives on blogs, the Web, and in email — what we buy and sell on ebay, seek on craigslist, feed to our cats and rant about when we’ve been drinking. The Semantic Web may even make it worse. Today, Martha Mitchell would be blogging in the wee hours rather than telephoning. Integrate and fuse all of that Web information with other sources (public records, credit information, etc.) and you know a lot about many people.

For more information on the CIA’s OSC, see Intelligence Center Mines Open Sources which is a an informative article by the AFCEA (Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association).

Spotted on Wonkett. Related posts: CIA Open Source Center.

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