Former CIA executive pushes for new ‘open source’ intelligence body

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An influential former CIA executive is working to build momentum in Washington for a new U.S. intelligence agency that would focus solely on commercially available data, such as content on social media and tech platforms. 

Former CIA executive William “Chip” Usher issued a new call for the creation of an “Open Source Agency” in the pages of the CIA’s Studies in Intelligence journal in September, arguing that the U.S. intelligence community needs a 19th agency to reflect the realities of gathering data in today’s world. 

While the CIA manages intelligence gathered by human sources and the National Security Agency collects signals intelligence amassed from electronics, the new Open Source Agency would focus on data. 

Mr. Usher said the federal government needs a new agency of analysts to study and acquire publicly available information (PAI) and commercially available information (CAI). An image accompanying his essay shows an existing open-source intelligence team running behind China and Russia who are chasing American tech companies such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta’s platforms and Elon Musk’s X, among others. 

“The new Open Source Agency (OSA) should be a standalone and independent member of the [intelligence community]; its principal purpose would be to acquire, curate, develop, employ, and share CAI and PAI data sources for intelligence purposes,” Mr. Usher wrote. “At least initially, its function would be to deliver OSINT to other [intelligence agencies] (and, selectively, to foreign allies and partners, the private sector, and to the public) for them to analyze and make use of.”

Such an OSINT agency would need some 2,000 to 3,000 dedicated personnel and a budget of “Billion $+,” according to a graphic accompanying a separate article detailing the potential agency’s benefits and drawbacks. 

The intelligence community’s handling of private industry’s data has already drawn criticism, and a new unit would likely provoke intense scrutiny. Sen. Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat, temporarily blocked the confirmation of the NSA director last year in an attempt to pry lose more details on the commercial data that U.S. intelligence agencies are already collecting. 

The intelligence community previously acknowledged it collected commercial data in a June 2023 report that recommended changes to the government’s existing collection process which had resulted in the gathering of “information on nearly everyone.”

Mr. Usher views a new agency as a one-stop shop for businesses to sell data to America’s spies, one that could help with public relations for private industry.

“It could also act as the [intelligence community] arm for discovering, evaluating and advertising open source-derived assessments by the private sector (commercial vendors, academics, or think [tanks’] experts) of relevance to U.S. national security priorities,” he wrote. 

Pushing for greater use of open-source intelligence within the intelligence community is something Mr. Usher has pursued via the Special Competitive Studies Project, an outfit led by former Google executive Eric Schmidt. 

Mr. Schmidt has Senate Democratic Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer’s ear on tech policy, particularly on questions involving taxpayer spending on technology and artificial intelligence.

At the Special Competitive Studies Project’s AI Expo in Washington earlier this year, Mr. Usher assembled a panel of current and former intelligence officials and raised the question of whether a new OSINT agency made sense. 

Mr. Usher said at the AI Expo that he saw the intelligence community’s dysfunction at using open-source intelligence during the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East during the 2010s, many of which were organized heavily online.

“By the end of my career, I can recall distinctly sending analysts home to get on the internet to track Facebook or Twitter or what have you to actually ascertain what the heck was going on, because we didn’t have the intelligence collection necessary to understand elements occurring in the Arab Spring and in other crises,” Mr. Usher said. 

Mr. Usher’s assessment has not changed much in the ensuing years. He wrote in the September journal that the intelligence community had a “poor understanding of the data it holds, how valuable it is, where it is kept, and how it is used.”

While the CIA published his “Case for Creating an Open-Source Intelligence Agency,” the CIA attached disclaimers to Mr. Usher’s essay that said Mr. Usher’s recommendations “do not necessarily reflect” the views held by the agency and Mr. Schmidt’s SCSP.