CHANGE 2010: Robert Steele on open source intelligence

Retired Major Robert Steele, former CIA clandestine officer, founder of the Marine Corps Intelligence Center and expert on open source and real time intelligence, offers his perspective on how the latest information technology can greatly enhance America’s national security capabilities, at the National Press Club.

[…] “The new revolution started about 3 or 4 years ago in Sweden, which has now displaced Canada as the third-party of choice for United Nations peace keeping intelligence and sense-making. I’ve been helping develop a multinational information sharing and sense-making architecture and protocol and training course, and the first conference on this will be in Madrid in November 2010. We’re not waiting for the US government. We are going to create what the Swedes call M4IS2: Multi national, Multi Agency, Multi discipline,  Multi Domain, Information Sharing and Sense-making. And then at larger context real-time information is the difference between intelligence, and non-intelligence.”

TED.com: Sean Gourley on the mathematics of war

By analyzing raw data on violent incidents in the Iraq war and others, Sean Gourley and his team claim to have found a surprisingly strong mathematical relationship linking the fatality and frequency of attacks.  Sean Gourley, trained as a physicist, has turned his scientific mind to analyzing data about a messier topic: modern war and conflict.

“…And I saw that there was information there. There was data within the streams of news that we consume. All this noise around us actually has information. So what I started thinking was, perhaps there is something like open source intelligence here. If we can get enough of these streams of information togetherwe can perhaps start to understand the war…”

Why is that spying? That’s surfing the web…

A 30 seconds clip that recycles the good old cliché about old-school spooks not knowing about or understanding OSINT: