No More Secrets This page intentionally left blank No More Secrets Open Source Information and the Reshaping of U.S. Intelligence HAMILTON BEAN Foreword by Senator Gary Hart Praeger Security International Copyright 2011 by Hamilton Bean All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, me- chanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bean, Hamilton. No more secrets : open source information and the reshaping of U.S. intelligence / Hamilton Bean ; foreword by Senator Gary Hart. p. cm. — (Praeger security international) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-313-39155-2 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-39156-9 (ebook) 1. Open source intelligence—United States. I. Title. II. Series. JK468.I6B396 2011 327.1273—dc22 2011008505 ISBN: 978-0-313-39155-2 EISBN: 978-0-313-39156-9 15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America Contents Foreword by Senator Gary Hart vii Preface xi Acknowledgments xv Abbreviations xvii Chapter 1: The Coming of Age of Open Source 1 Chapter 2: The Origins of the Open Source Debate 23 Chapter 3: A Discourse-Centered Perspective on Open Source Developments 41 Chapter 4: “The Source of First Resort”: The Intelligence Community 59 Chapter 5: Bridging a Cultural Divide: Homeland Security 85 Chapter 6: Open Source as a Resource for Citizen Participation in National Security Affairs 107 Chapter 7: Open Source, Democracy, and the Future of U.S. Intelligence 129 Appendix: Open Source Contexts and Practices 147 Notes 163 Bibliography 195 Index 211 This page intentionally left blank Foreword “There are no secrets,” a friend said some years ago. Though he was fore- casting the disappearance of personal privacy, he might well have been predicting the tsunami building off the shores of those peculiar islands of secrecy known as intelligence agencies that emerged in the post–World War II Cold War years. Efforts by governments to collect and hoard secrets—regarding both the intentions of their enemies and possible treachery by their own citizens— surely date to the Greek city-states if not also to a variety of oligarchies before them. Elizabeth I’s principal secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, is gener- ally considered 16th-century England’s charter member of the Western world’s intelligence services and is credited with recruiting the drama- tist Christopher Marlowe into the enterprise. Whether Marlowe’s violent death in 1593 was directly traceable to his spying sideline is still a matter of conjecture, but it certainly started a trail leading more or less directly to his fellow countryman David Cornwell (a.k.a., John Le Carré) some four centuries later. What few in this long, complex, and murky history could have foreseen, however, was an age in which there were few, if any, secrets. Technology, the hallmark of the early 21st century, is credited with cracking the vault of mystery and concealment. The silicon chip, digital compression, wire- less intercepts, wall-penetrating listening devices, ultra-long-range cam- era lenses, and so on have all combined to ensure that Wikipedia would inevitably become WikiLeaks. viii Foreword It was by no means accidental that those deputized to plug the many leaks mounting to a virtual river of secrets during the Nixon era were given the colorful designator “plumbers.” This would prompt Norman Mailer to compare plumbers to rocket scientists in that both were tasked with the prevention of treachery in closed systems. Daniel Patrick Moynihan commented extensively in the late Cold War years on bureaucracy’s predictable response to the erosion of secrecy— create more secrets. Thus, an increasing army of security bureaucrats, in and out of uniform, armed itself with the most dangerous of weapons— rubber stamps, in this case marked “Secret.” But, if everything is secret, as Senator Moynihan shrewdly observed, then nothing is secret. At the turn of this century, technology, the engine of “open sources,” swept away burgeoning warehouses of secrets faster than they could be built and filled. And this fact is central to Hamilton Bean’s remarkable and critically important pioneering work. What happens to the mysteri- ous world of intelligence, he asks, when the content of its hidden vaults shrinks and melts before our very eyes? What happens when there are few, if any, secrets? An image of this intelligence revolution comes to mind: a small crew tunneling diligently to come up under an epic vault of secrets only to dis- cover upon surfacing that they are in the New York Public Library. But this transformation did not arrive without warning. As early as 1969, a Central Intelligence Agency study said, “A virtual tidal wave of publicly printed paper threatens to swamp almost all enterprises of intellectual research.” And by 1975, the movie Three Days of the Condor featured a CIA researcher, Joe Turner (Robert Redford), who, by simply reading books, uncovers a complex CIA plot to dominate Middle Eastern oil fields. Interestingly, and importantly, in between these dates the so-called secret bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War made it clear that secrecy was a two-edged sword. The Cambodians surely knew they were being bombed. The secret was being kept from the American people. The pat- tern of using instruments of intelligence to collect secrets from the Ameri- can people and to prevent them from discovering the perfidies their own government was carrying out would lead to congressional investigations requiring substantial reforms in the vast U.S. intelligence community. Though the Cold War has been over for two decades, today that commu- nity is much more vast. If one were to date the dramatic shift from too little intelligence to too much, documented here in Dr. Bean’s groundbreaking work, one might arbitrarily select the inauguration of the World Wide Web in 1990. Ironi- cally, this was within months of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Before that, the intelligence world dramatized by John Le Carré was tedious, dreary, and mundane. Now that world approximates the political image of drinking from a fire hose. Foreword ix Dr. Bean recognizes that a democracy must protect its citizens and that the collection of information and the conversion of it to intelligence are crucial to that duty. But he also knows that a democracy that violates the rights and privacy of its citizens and conceals its activities from them edges dangerously near something other than a democracy. The most radical of our founders, Thomas Jefferson, held that the best guarantor of the American republic was the good judgment and common sense of the American people, a people fully informed of the activities of its government on their behalf. Thanks to the advent of open sources con- verting intelligence to information, we may be restoring that ideal. Gary Hart Scholar in residence, University of Colorado; charter member of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee; co-chair of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century This page intentionally left blank Preface I arrived for my first day of work at Intellibridge Corporation on May 21, 2001. Intellibridge was located in Washington, DC, in a modern, red brick building at the corner of 33rd and M streets near Georgetown Univer- sity. When I arrived, the wall between Intellibridge’s second-floor office and an adjoining apartment had been hastily torn down to make room for more desks. Even that did not provide enough space, however, so ana- lysts were soon working from computers perched atop the apartment’s kitchen counter. When walking into Intellibridge during the months be- fore the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, one encountered a series of small, dimly lit rooms filled with more than two dozen analysts gazing in- tensely into their desktop computer screens. These analysts—in their 20s, 30s, and 40s—possessed government work experience, foreign language skills, and advanced degrees from prestigious colleges and universities. Typically working 10-hour shifts (spread across the day), these analysts scoured the Internet, looking for information in nearly a dozen languages that responded to the defined needs of Intellibridge’s clients. My image of intelligence up to that point had been mostly informed by Hollywood movies, so I was shocked to see analysts supporting U.S. naval intelligence crammed into a darkened, debris-strewn Georgetown apart- ment. Intellibridge provided what it called “open source intelligence and analytical services” to its clients. This meant that Intellibridge employed policy, security, and business experts to search and analyze online sources of information about geopolitical trends and events deemed of interest to Fortune 500 corporations and U.S. government agencies. Promising in- sight and advantage to clients, Intellibridge’s motto claimed to provide xii Preface “Not Just What You Need to Know, But What It Means.” Intellibridge was an early purveyor of what has come to be known as outsourced or private intelligence. In the years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, I strode the corridors of power in Washington, DC, attempting to persuade national security officials to purchase the open source information and analytical sup- port services of Intellibridge. In the process, I became fascinated by how people talked about open source.