Given America’s zeal to bare all on the internet, the United States should have a comparative advantage in producing and sharing open-source intelligence and information. What’s sad is that overclassification has hobbled what our country ought to excel at – sharing what is publicly known with governments and populations that are either repressing this information or lack sufficient access.
The attached Lawfare posting, “Open-Source Intelligence and the Challenges of Overclassification,” features remarks David Reese, chair of the Practitioner Committee of the OSINT foundation, gave last month before NPEC’s overclassification workshop. It details just how harmful overclassification of open-source intelligence has been: lives have been lost on the battlefield and America’s diplomatic positions have been undermined.
It makes for very disturbing reading. Government officials have imposed NOFORN, controlled unclassified information restrictions, and inappropriate classifications of open source information in a most unthoughtful and imprudent fashion. Mr. Reese draws on his two decades of experience in open-source intelligence to make a number of recommendations to fix this.
As always, I’m curious to get your take.
December 13, 2024
Author: David Reese
Open-Source Intelligence and the Challenges of Overclassification
By David Reese
This paper was originally commissioned by and presented before the National Security Over-classification Workshop sponsored by the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and is part of a final report that will be released this winter.
Open-source intelligence (OSINT) has become an integral component of national security, providing valuable insights from publicly available sources. As a career OSINT practitioner, I have seen firsthand how OSINT can be a game changer in real-time decision-making and operational planning, particularly in the field of nuclear non-proliferation. However, its potential is often undermined by pervasive overclassification within the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), which results from the tendency to consider information valuable as a matter of national security only when it has been classified—a phenomenon known informally in OSINT practitioner circles as “James Bond syndrome…”
To read the full article, click here.