U.S. News: Defense Intelligence Agency to Take Lead On Unclassified Data

"The Defense Department is expected to name the Defense Intelligence Agency as its lead agency for "open-source" intelligence, according to U.S. officials, highlighting the growing importance of unclassified information drawn from social media, online material and commercial data sources in modern military operations.

The move would give the DIA a leadership role in deciding policy questions and setting standards regarding a category of information that was once an afterthought but has grown more important in military intelligence programs in recent years as digital devices, online services and commercial databases proliferate.

DIA director Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier told a Defense Department technology conference in Phoenix this week that the agency was expecting to get a directive from Pentagon leadership to designate the agency the manager of open-source intelligence -- often called OSINT -- for all military intelligence programs.

"There's some controversy with OSINT right now -- the tools that we're using, the tradecraft that we're practicing, the amount of money that we're paying for data, who is paying what and what's being duplicated, how does [publicly available information] fit into all of that," Gen. Berrier said in remarks before the conference.

A spokesman for the Pentagon declined to comment on "pre-decisional" matters, including whether there was an expected timeline for the action.

 

Open-source intelligence once referred mostly to monitoring press reports from around the globe. In recent years, OSINT has come to encompass an array of unclassified material available online or for purchase. That includes social media and posts on web forums as well as commercially available data. It also includes a huge category of data that modern electronic devices emit and that are often collected without much consumer awareness, such as precise geolocation.

 

The government has also invested heavily in developing specialized analytical capabilities to extract information from open sources -- for example, tools that can estimate location information from social-media photos using tiny clues such as the position of the sun, stars or visible landmarks like mountains.

 

The government's expanding use of open-source data has recently begun to attract significant concern from privacy advocates.

The DIA revealed earlier this year that it had access to data on the movement of millions of American smartphones through data drawn from apps and that it had queried the data five times without warrants in the past few years. All five instances involved matters of national security, the Journal has reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.

"DIA has policies and procedures in place to ensure compliance with all Constitutional, statutory and regulatory requirements and attorney general-approved guidelines for the conduct of intelligence activities," a DIA spokeswoman said about the agency's use of OSINT." [1]

1.   U.S. News: Defense Intelligence Agency to Take Lead On Unclassified Data
Tau, Byron; Volz, Dustin. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 11 Dec 2021: A.6.