By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
The Under Reported World Of New Spy
Agencies
Spies
have played an outsize role in the war on Ukraine. American and British
intelligence agencies found out, and then exposed, Russia’s war plans for
Ukraine months ahead of time in what was the biggest intelligence coup since
the Cuban missile crisis. Russia’s “special services” had a torrid time. First, they bungled their part in the invasion of
Ukraine. Then more than 400 of their officers were expelled from embassies across America and Europe. Finally,
they watched as a string of precious “illegals”—spies who operate without
diplomatic cover—were rolled up in the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Sweden.
In December, even Belgian spies hit the headlines when they exposed a Moroccan
intelligence network in the European Union. We chose seven books encapsulating
covert work's past, present, and future. They span the range of espionage and
intelligence, from traditional agent running, with snatched meetings in shadowy
street corners, to psychological warfare waged over computer networks.
The CIA, possibly in
cooperation with the Ukrainian intelligence service, was
able to successfully get advanced knowledge that Russia was planning to fabricate
a pretext for an invasion of Ukraine by falsely blaming the Ukrainian military
for an attack that would include corpses and
actors that would be
depicting mourners and images of destroyed locations. Meet the new world, today's spy agencies.
There has been no
time during the past 35 years where all intelligence (meaning spy) agencies in
every country of the world today are focused on one issue, and that is
the potential war
in Ukraine because
it is crucial for three significant countries and is Russia China and the USA
and each other country in the world has a connection with at least one of the
latter countries and in some cases two or even all three countries. So we
decided it is time to explain how intelligent agencies work and what matters
the most. This includes looking ahead, maximizing the benefits, and
mitigating the risks of the evolving open-source nuclear intelligence landscape
will be essential. That process starts by
recognizing that the future may not look like the present and that the
present system has weaknesses.
Washington publicly
released a relentless stream of remarkably detailed findings about everything
from Russian troop movements to false-flag attacks the Kremlin would use to
justify the invasion.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a watershed
moment for the intelligence world. For weeks before the shelling began, Washington
publicly released a relentless stream of remarkably detailed findings about
everything from Russian troop movements to false-flag attacks the Kremlin would
use to justify the invasion.
This disclosure
strategy was new: spy agencies are accustomed to concealing intelligence, not
revealing it. But it was very effective. The United States could rally allies
and quickly coordinate hard-hitting sanctions by getting the truth out before
Russian lies took hold. Intelligence disclosures set the Russian
President on his back foot, wondering who and what in his government had
been deeply penetrated by U.S. agencies. It made it more difficult for other
countries to hide behind Putin’s lies and side with Russia.
The disclosures were
just the beginning. The war has ushered in a new era of intelligence sharing
between Ukraine, the United States, and other allies and partners, which has
helped counter false Russian narratives, defend digital systems from cyberattacks
and assisted Ukrainian forces in striking Russian targets on the battlefield.
And it has brought to light a profound new reality: intelligence isn’t just for
government spy agencies anymore.
Over the past year,
private citizens and groups have been tracking what Russia is planning and
doing in ways that were unimaginable in earlier conflicts. Journalists have
reported battlefield developments using imagery from commercial
space satellites. Former government and military officials have been
monitoring on-the-ground daily events and offering over-the-horizon analyses
about where the war is headed on Twitter. A volunteer team of students at
Stanford University, led by former U.S. Army and open-source imagery analyst
Allison Puccioni, has been providing reports to
the United Nations about Russian human rights atrocities in Ukraine—uncovering
and verifying events using commercial-satellite thermal and electro-optical
imaging, TikTok videos, geolocation tools, and more. At the Institute for the
Study of War, a go-to source for military experts and analysts, researchers
have created an interactive conflict map based entirely on unclassified or
open-source intelligence.
Technological
advances have been central to this evolution. It is, after all, the Internet,
social media, satellites, automated analytics, and other breakthroughs that
have enabled civilians to collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence. But
although new technologies have helped shine a light on Russian military
activity, their effects are far from uniformly positive. New technologies are
creating more threats at a far faster rate for the 18 agencies that make up the
U.S. intelligence community. They are dramatically increasing the amount of
data that analysts must process. They are giving companies and individual
citizens a newfound need for intelligence so that these private entities can
help safeguard the country’s interests. And they are offering new intelligence
capabilities to organizations and individuals outside the U.S. government and
to more countries.
These shifts have
been years in the making, and intelligence leaders are working hard to adapt.
But anticipating the future in the new tech era demands more. Washington must
embrace wholesale changes to understand and harness emerging technologies. It
must, in particular, get serious about creating a new agency dedicated to
open-source intelligence. Otherwise, the U.S. intelligence community will fall
behind, leaving Americans more vulnerable to catastrophic surprises.
Brave New World
When the Central
Intelligence Agency was created in 1947, the world was unusually precarious.
The allies had won World War II, but Soviet troops threatened Europe.
Repressive regimes were on the rise, democracies were weary and weak, and the
international system was divided into free and illiberal spheres. Amid this
intensifying uncertainty and anxiety, the United States was called to lead a
new global order. U.S. policymakers realized that they needed new capabilities
for this role, including better intelligence. Centralizing intelligence in a
new agency, they thought, would deliver timely insights about the future to
prevent the next Pearl Harbor and win the Cold War.
In many ways, the
present looks eerily similar to those early postwar years. The dog-eat-dog
world of strong states using brute force to get what they want has returned. An
authoritarian leader in Moscow is invading neighbors and menacing all of Europe
again. Once more, democracies are looking fragile. The United States and its
allies are engaged in yet another great-power competition—this time with China,
whose rise looks less peaceful by the day, with its crackdowns on freedoms in
Hong Kong, belligerent rhetoric about retaking Taiwan, and provocative military
exercises that encircled the island. Even Marxism-Leninism is making a
comeback. In China’s carefully choreographed 20th Party
Congress, President Xi Jinping made it clear to party officials that
ideology and personal loyalty was more important than continued economic
liberalization. In case anyone missed the message, Xi’s economic reform-minded
predecessor, Hu Jintao, was pulled from his chair and escorted out of party
proceedings, perp-walk style, in full view of the press.
But looks can be
deceiving. Thanks to technological innovations, the challenges of today differ
significantly from postwar ones. Emerging technologies are transforming the
planet in an unprecedented fashion and at an unprecedented pace. Together,
inventions are making the world far more interconnected and fundamentally
altering the determinants of geopolitical advantage. Increasingly, emerging
technologies and data are significant sources of national power, and they are
intangible, harder to see and understand, and often created and controlled by
companies, not governments. For the CIA and other intelligence agencies,
understanding the geopolitical dangers and dynamics of the twenty-first century
will likely be much harder than it was in the twentieth.
Near a Russian military helicopter, Horlivka Raion, Ukraine, September 2022
Consider the Internet.
In the mid-1990s, less than one percent of the global population was online.
Now sixty-six percent of the world is connected, from the far reaches of the
Arctic to Bedouin tents in the desert. In the last three years alone, more than
a billion more people have come online. This connectivity has already
transformed global politics for better and for worse. Social media has fueled
protests against autocracies, such as the Arab Spring and Hong Kong’s Umbrella
Movement. But it has also empowered a new wave of government
techno-surveillance led by Beijing and has enabled Russia’s massive
disinformation operations to influence elections and undermine democracies from
within.
Digital connectivity
is not the only technology upending the world order. Artificial intelligence is
disrupting nearly every industry—from medicine to trucking—to the point that
one expert now estimates AI could eliminate up to 40 percent of jobs worldwide
in the next 25 years. It is changing how wars are fought, automating everything
from logistics to cyberdefenses. It is even
making it possible for states to build unmanned fighter jets that could
overwhelm defenses with swarms and maneuver faster and better than human
pilots. Little wonder, then, that Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared
that whoever leads in AI development “will become the ruler of the world.”
China has also made no secret of its plans to become the global AI leader by
2030.
Technological
breakthroughs are also making it far easier for anyone—including weak states
and terrorist groups—to detect events unfolding on earth from space. Commercial
satellite capabilities have increased dramatically, offering eyes in the sky
for anyone who wants them. Satellite launches more than doubled between 2016
and 2018; now, more than 5,000 satellites circle the earth, some no larger than
a loaf of bread. Commercial satellites have less sophisticated sensing
capabilities than their spying counterparts, but civilian technologies are
rapidly improving. Some commercial satellites now have sharp resolutions to
identify manhole covers, signs, and even road conditions. Others can detect
radio frequency emissions; observe vehicle movements and nuclear cooling
plumes; and operate at night, in cloudy weather, or through dense vegetation
and camouflage. Constellations of small satellites can revisit the exact
location multiple times a day to detect changes over short periods—something
that was once impossible. All these changes are leveling the intelligence
playing field, and not always in a good way. In 2020, for example, Iran used
commercial satellite images to monitor U.S. forces in Iraq before launching a
ballistic missile attack that wounded more than 100 people.
Other technological
advances with national security implications include quantum computing, which
could eventually unlock the encryption protecting nearly all the world’s data,
making even highly classified information available to adversaries. Synthetic
biology enables scientists to engineer living organisms, paving the way for
revolutionary improvements in the production of food, medicine, data storage,
and weapons of war.
Understanding the
promise and perils of these and other emerging technologies is an essential
intelligence mission. The U.S. government needs to know who is poised to win
key technological competitions and what the effects could be. It must assess
how future wars will be fought and won. It must figure out how new technologies
could tackle global challenges such as climate change. It needs to determine
how adversaries will use data and tech tools to coerce others, commit
atrocities, evade sanctions, develop dangerous weapons, and other
advantages.
But these critical
questions are becoming harder to answer because the landscape of innovation has
changed and expanded, making inventions more challenging to track and
understand. In the past, technological breakthroughs, such as the Internet and
GPS, were invented by U.S. government agencies and commercialized later by the
private sector. Most innovations that affected national security did not have
widespread commercial application, so they could be classified at birth and, if
necessary, restricted forever. Today, the script has flipped. Technological
innovations are more likely to be “dual use”: to have both commercial and
military applications. They are also far more likely to be invented in the
private sector, funded by foreign investors, developed by a multinational
workforce, and sold to global customers in the private and public
sectors.
Those born in the
private sector are more widely accessible and not as quickly restricted.
Artificial intelligence, for example, has become so prevalent and intuitive
that high school students with no coding background can make deepfakes(meaning
replaced)—AI-generated manipulated videos that show people saying and doing
things they never said or did. In March 2022, someone released a deepfake of
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, telling Ukrainian soldiers to lay down
their arms. More recently, deepfakes impersonating Michael McFaul, the former
U.S. ambassador to Russia, have been used to dupe Ukrainian officials into
revealing information about the war effort. McFaul’s deepfakes have become so
pervasive that the real McFaul had to tweet warnings asking people not to fall
for what he called “a new Russian weapon of war.”
These changes in the
innovation landscape give private-sector leaders new power and national
security officials fresh challenges. Power isn’t just shifting abroad. Power is
going home. U.S. social media platforms now find themselves on the frontlines
of information warfare, deciding what is real and what is fake, what speech is
allowed, and what speech is not. Startup founders are inventing capabilities
that can be used by enemies they can’t foresee with consequences they can’t
control. Meanwhile, U.S. defense and intelligence agencies are struggling to
adopt critical new technologies from the outside and move at the speed of
invention instead of at the pace of bureaucracy. Private-sector leaders have
responsibilities they don’t want, and government leaders wish to have
capabilities they don’t have.
Up To Speed
Intelligence is often
misunderstood. Although spy agencies deal with secrets, they are not in the
secrets business. Their core purpose is delivering insights to policymakers and
anticipating the future faster and better than adversaries. Clandestinely acquired
information from sources such as intercepted phone calls or firsthand spy
reports is essential, but secrets are just part of the picture. Most
information in a typical intelligence report is unclassified or publicly
available. And important information—secret or not—is rarely valuable because
it is often incomplete, ambiguous, contradictory, poorly sourced, misleading,
deliberately deceptive, or just plain wrong. The analysis turns uncertain
findings into insight by synthesizing disparate pieces of information and
assessing their context, credibility, and meaning.
Intelligence insights
are only sometimes correct. But when they are, they can be priceless. When U.S.
intelligence agencies warned that Russia was about to invade Ukraine, it gave
Washington critical time to help arm Kyiv and unify the West around a response.
But it may soon become harder for spy agencies to replicate this success
because the global-threat landscape has never been as crowded or as complicated
as it is today—and with threats that move faster than ever. It is now more
difficult for intelligence officers to do their jobs. After spending nearly
half a century primarily focused on countering the Soviet Union and two decades
fighting terrorists, they must confront many dangers today. They must deal with
transnational threats such as pandemics and climate change; great-power
competition with China and Russia; terrorism and other threats from weak and
failed states; and cyberattacks that steal, spy, disrupt, destroy, and deceive
at incredible speeds and scale. Intelligence agencies are, to put it mildly,
overtaxed.
Technology makes
today’s threat list not only longer but more formidable. For centuries,
countries defended themselves by building powerful militaries and taking
advantage of good geography. But in cyberspace, anyone can attack from anywhere
without pushing through air, land, and sea defenses. The most powerful
countries are now often the most vulnerable because their power relies on
digital systems for business, education, health care, military operations, and
more. These states can be hit by significant attacks that disable their
critical infrastructure. They can be subject to repeated small attacks that add
up to devastating damage before security officials even know it. China, for
example, has robbed its way to technological advantage in a variety of industries,
from fighter jets to pharmaceuticals, by stealing from U.S. companies one hack
at a time, in what FBI Director Christopher Wray has called one of the most
significant transfers of wealth in human history and “the biggest long-term
threat to our economic and national security.”
Russia has also used
cyberattacks, proving that technology can allow malignant actors to hack
minds—not just machines. Russian operatives created bots and fake social media
profiles impersonating Americans, spreading disinformation across the United
States during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, polarizing the country and
undermining its democracy. Today, China could turn Americans against each other
without using U.S. tech platforms. The Chinese firm ByteDance owns
TikTok, the popular social media app that boasts more than a billion users,
including an estimated 135 million Americans, or 40 percent of the U.S.
population. Democrats and Republicans now worry that TikTok could enable the
Chinese government to vacuum all sorts of data about Americans and launch
massive influence campaigns that serve Beijing’s interests—all under the guise
of giving U.S. consumers what they want. In today’s information warfare,
weapons don’t look like weapons.
Because cyberattacks
can happen so quickly, and because policymakers can track breaking events and
get hot takes with the touch of a button, U.S. intelligence agencies also need
to operate with newfound speed. Timeliness, of course, has always been important
to spycraft: in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis,
U.S. President John F. Kennedy had 13 days to pore over intelligence and
consider his policy options after surveillance photographs from a U-2 spy plane
revealed Soviet nuclear installations in Cuba, and on September 11, 2001,
U.S. President George W. Bush had less than 13 hours after the World Trade
Center attacks to review intelligence and announce a response. Today, the time
for presidents to consider intelligence before making major policy decisions
may be closer to 13 minutes or even 13 seconds.
But moving fast also
carries risks. It takes time to vet a source’s credibility, tap expert
knowledge across fields, and consider alternative explanations for a finding.
Without careful intelligence analysis, leaders may make premature or even
dangerous decisions. The potential consequences of rash action became evident
in December 2016, when a news story reported that Israel’s former defense
minister threatened a nuclear attack against Pakistan if Islamabad deployed
troops in Syria. Pakistan’s Defense Minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, quickly
tweeted: “Israeli def min threatens nuclear retaliation presuming pak role in Syria against Daesh. Israel forgets Pakistan is
a Nuclear state too, AH.” But the original story had been fabricated. Asif had
dashed off his response before finding out the truth. Satisfying policymakers’
need for speed while carefully collecting, vetting, and assessing intelligence
has always been a delicate balance, but that balance is getting harder to
strike.
Need To Know
Intelligence agencies
must deal with a vast data environment, not just fast. The volume of
information available online has become almost unimaginably immense. According
to the World Economic Forum, in 2019, Internet users posted 500 million tweets,
sent 294 billion emails, and uploaded 350 million photos to Facebook daily.
Every second, the Internet transmits roughly one petabyte of data: the amount
of data an individual would have consumed after binge-watching movies nonstop
for over three years.
U.S. intelligence
agencies are already collecting far more information than humans can analyze
effectively. In 2018, the intelligence community captured more than three
National Football League seasons’ worth of high-definition imagery daily on
each sensor they deployed in a combat theater. According to a source at the
Department of Defense, in 2020, one soldier deployed to the Middle East was so
concerned about the crushing flow of classified intelligence emails he was
receiving that he decided to count them. The total: 10,000 emails in 120 days.
These quantities are likely to grow. Some estimates show that the amount of
digital data on earth doubles every 24 months.
And increasingly,
intelligence agencies must satisfy a broader range of customers—including
people who do not command troops, hold security clearances, or even work in
government. Today, many essential decision-makers live worlds apart from
Washington, making meaningful policy choices in boardrooms and living
rooms—not the White House Situation Room. Big Tech companies, including
Microsoft and Google, need intelligence about cyber threats to and through
their systems. Most of the United States critical infrastructure is controlled
by private firms, such as energy companies. They also need information about
cyber risks that could disrupt or destroy their systems. Voters need
intelligence about how foreign governments interfere in elections and wage
operations to polarize society. And because cyber threats do not stop at the
border, U.S. security increasingly depends on sharing intelligence faster and
better with allies and partners.
To serve this broader
array of customers, the U.S. intelligence community is making unclassified
products and engaging with the outside world to an extent it has not before.
The National Security Agency, the FBI, and other intelligence agencies are now
creating public service videos about foreign threats to U.S. elections. In
September 2022, the CIA launched a podcast called The Langley Files aimed
at demystifying the agency and educating the public. The National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which collects and analyzes satellite imagery
and other geospatial intelligence, launched a project called Tearline—a collaboration with think tanks, universities,
and nonprofits to create unclassified reports about climate change, Russian
troop movements, human rights issues, and more. In 2021, the NSA began issuing
joint advisories with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency detailing major cyber threats,
exposing the entities behind them, and explaining how firms could shore up
their security. In October, these three agencies even released the technical
details of the top 20 cyber vulnerabilities exploited by the Chinese government
to hack into U.S. and allied networks, along with detailed instructions about
how to improve cyber defenses. The U.S. government is now also issuing
advisories with foreign intelligence partners.
The success of this
public-facing strategy has been on full display in Ukraine. It helped the
United States warn the world about Russia’s invasion. It helped rally the West
behind a fast response. And it continues to frustrate Moscow. Most recently,
after Washington revealed intelligence indicating that senior Russian military
leaders were discussing using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Xi issued a
rare public warning against the “use of or threats to use, nuclear weapons.”
Xi’s “no limits” relationship with Putin suddenly had limits.
Crowd Surfing
In addition to more
customers, technology has given U.S. intelligence agencies more competition.
The explosion of online open-source information, commercial satellite
capabilities, and the rise of AI enables individuals and private organizations
to collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence.
For instance, the
amateur investigators of Bellingcat—a volunteer organization that
describes itself as “an intelligence agency for the people”—have made many
discoveries in the past several years. Bellingcat identified the
Russian hit team that tried to assassinate former Russian spy officer
Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom and located supporters of the
Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in Europe. It also proved that Russians were
behind the shootdown of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 over Ukraine.
Bellingcat is
not the only civilian intelligence initiative. When the Iranian government
claimed in 2020 that a small fire had broken out in an industrial shed, two
U.S. researchers working independently and using nothing more than their
computers and the Internet proved within hours that Tehran was lying. As David
Albright and Fabian Hinz quickly found, the building was a nuclear
centrifuge assembly facility at Iran’s leading uranium enrichment site. The
damage was so extensive that the fire may have been caused by an
explosion—raising the possibility of sabotage. In 2021, nuclear sleuths at the
James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in California used commercial
satellite imagery to discover more than 200 new intercontinental ballistic
missile silos in China, a finding that could signal historic increases in
China’s nuclear arsenal.
A satellite picture of the damage in Mariupol,
Ukraine, October 2022
For U.S. intelligence
agencies, this burgeoning world of open-source intelligence brings significant
new opportunities and risks. On the positive side, citizen sleuths offer more
eyes and ears worldwide, scanning for future developments and dangers. The crowd’s
wisdom can be a powerful tool for piecing together tiny bits of information.
Unbound by bureaucracy, open-source intelligence analysts can work quickly. And
because open-source information is declassified, it can be shared easily within
government agencies, across them, and with the public without revealing
sensitive sources or methods.
But these features
are also flaws. Open-source intelligence is available to everyone, regardless
of their motives, national loyalties, or capabilities. Citizen sleuths do not
have to answer to anyone or train anywhere, which invites all hazards. Volunteer
analysts are rewarded for being fast (especially online) but are rarely
punished for being wrong—which means they are likelier to make errors. And the
line between the wisdom of crowds and the danger of mobs is thin. After a 2013
terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon killed three people and wounded more
than 260 others, Reddit users jumped into action. Posting pet theories,
unconfirmed chatter on police scanners, and other crowdsourced tidbits of
information, amateur investigators fingered two “suspects,” and the mainstream
media publicized the findings. Both turned out to be innocent.
These weaknesses can
create severe headaches for governments. When errors go viral, intelligence
agencies have to burn time and resources, fact-checking the work of others and
reassuring policymakers that the agencies’ original intelligence assessments should
not change. Accurate open-source discoveries can cause problems, too. Findings,
for example, might force policymakers into corners by making information public
that, if kept secret, could have left room for compromise and graceful exits
from crises. To diffuse the Cuban missile crisis, for example, Kennedy agreed
to secretly remove U.S. nuclear weapons from Turkey if the Soviets took their
missiles out of Cuba. Had satellite imagery been publicly available, Kennedy
might have been too worried about the domestic political backlash to make a
deal.
U.S. intelligence
leaders know that their success in the twenty-first century hinges on adapting
to a world of more threats, speed, data, customers, and competitors. Their
agencies have been working hard to meet these challenges by launching
organizational reforms, technology innovation programs, and new initiatives to
recruit top science and engineering talent. They have had some significant
successes. But these are complex problems to overcome, and so far, the
intelligence community’s efforts have been piecemeal.
The rate of progress
is especially concerning given that the challenges are well known, the stakes
are high, and intelligence weaknesses have been festering for years. Multiple
reports and articles (including one in this magazine) have found that intelligence
agencies must catch up with technological developments. These reports point to
an unfortunate reality. Washington cannot address its challenges by making
incremental changes to existing agencies. Instead, developing U.S. intelligence
capabilities for the twenty-first century requires building something new: a
dedicated, open-source intelligence agency focused on combing through
unclassified data and discerning what it means.
Creating a 19th
intelligence agency may seem duplicative and unnecessary. But it is essential.
Despite Washington’s best efforts, open-source intelligence has always been a
second-class citizen in the U.S. intelligence community because it has no
agency with the budget, hiring power, or seat at the table to champion it. It
will languish as long as open-source intelligence remains embedded in secret
agencies that value confidential information. A culture of secrecy will
continue to strangle the commercial sector’s adoption of cutting-edge
technology tools. Agencies will struggle to attract and retain desperately
needed talent to help them understand and use new technologies. And efforts to
harness the power of open-source intelligence collectors and analysts outside
government will fall short.
A new open-source
intelligence agency would bring innovation, not just information, to the U.S.
intelligence community by providing fertile soil for the growth of far-reaching
changes in human capital, technology adoption, and collaboration with the burgeoning
open-source intelligence ecosystem. Such an agency would be a powerful lever
for attracting the workforce of tomorrow. Because it deals with unclassified
information, the agency could recruit top scientists and engineers to work
immediately without requiring them to wait months or years for security
clearances. Locating open-source agency offices in technology hubs where
engineers already live and want to stay—such as Austin, San Francisco, and
Seattle—would make it easier for talent to flow in and out of government. The
result could be a corps of tech-savvy officials who rotate between public
service and the private sector, acting as ambassadors between both worlds. They
would increase the intelligence community’s presence and prestige in technology
circles while bringing a continuous stream of fresh tech ideas back
inside.
By working with
unclassified material, the open-source agency could also help the intelligence
community do a better and faster job of adopting new collection and analysis
technologies. (The open-source agency could test new inventions and, if they
proved effective, pass them along to agencies that work with secrets.) The
agency would also be ideally positioned to engage with leading open-source
intelligence organizations and individuals outside the government. These
partnerships could help U.S. intelligence agencies outsource more of their work
to responsible nongovernmental collectors and analysts, freeing intelligence
officials to focus their capabilities and clandestine collection efforts on
missions nobody else can do.
And there will still
be many such missions. After all, even the best open-source intelligence has
limits. Satellite imagery can reveal new Chinese missile silos but not what
Chinese leaders intend to do with them. Identifying objects or tracking
movements online is essential, but generating insight requires more. Secret
methods remain uniquely suited to understanding foreign leaders’ knowledge,
belief, and desire. There is no open-source substitute for getting human spies
inside a foreign leader’s inner circle or penetrating an adversary’s
communications system to uncover what that adversary is saying and writing.
Analysts with clearances will also always be essential for assessing what
classified discoveries mean, how credible they are, and how they fit with other
unclassified findings.
But secret agencies are no longer enough. The country
faces a dangerous new era that includes great-power competition, the renewed
war in Europe, ongoing terrorist attacks, and fast-changing cyberattacks. New
technologies are driving these threats and determining who can understand and
chart the future. The U.S. intelligence community must adapt to a more open,
technological world to succeed.
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