Opening the Doors to Open Source Intelligence

The official report of the 9/11 Commission includes a pitch for a new "open-source intelligence agency," which would focus on developing government intelligence information from unrestricted, non-secret sources. "The intelligence world lives and breathes by secrecy, perhaps more so than is necessary," observes Charles Cameron. "In a world that's shifting in a thousand ways from the hierarchical to the distributed, from the top-down to the bottom-up, and - gasp - from the authoritative to the democratic, a more transparent approach to intelligence may be the wave of the future, and open-source intelligence may be the key to that effort."