The times they are a’changing. Open-source intelligence was once the lesser celebrated branch and now makes up the bulk of analytical reporting. Our guest tells how the federal government is changing its views on OSINT.
As head of strategic initiatives at Authentic8, Abel advises the federal business team on policy development and budget trends to identify growth opportunities and shape customer engagement.
ABEL VANDEGRIFT
I think just the expansion in data available now, every day it continues to grow, and the value of that can be extracted in so many different ways for so many different types of organizations, like Matt said.
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MATT ASHBURN
Welcome to Needlestack, the podcast for professional online research. I'm your host, Matt Ashburn.
JEFF PHILLIPS
And I'm your co host, Jeff Phillips. Today we're joined by Abel Vandergrift, head of strategic initiatives at Authenticate. Abel, welcome to the show.
ABEL VANDEGRIFT
Hey, Jeff. Hey Matt, thanks for having me.
MATT ASHBURN
Abel, we brought you on the show today in part to talk about the changing role of OSINT and specifically how it may be changing within the federal US government space. Though I guess before we get into that, can you give us a bit of a background on how open source collection has traditionally been treated within the US government?
ABEL VANDEGRIFT
Sure. So open source collection has been around kind of since the inception of US government modern intel collection capabilities, starting out with monitoring foreign media and evolving throughout the years. But it's always been kind of secondary to more exquisite type of collection and things that make these intelligence agencies seem more sophisticated than your traditional collecting of open source information.
JEFF PHILLIPS
So do you see any progress in terms of that mindset and that it's starting to shift?
ABEL VANDEGRIFT
Yeah, I think so. There's been a lot of eyes and discussion on OSINT over the past few years especially. And the government, I believe, is making steps, as well as academia and private industry in terms of making OSINT more of a priority from just an intelligence collection perspective and the ability to compete in the new strategic competition of the new world we're living in.
MATT ASHBURN
You mentioned there the highlight of OSINT and the new world that we live in, and you also mentioned that it's been around for quite some time. Right. So if we think of open source more generally, performing research online, or obtaining news clippings or other publicly available information that can apply to a lot of things, everything from law enforcement investigations all the way up to analysis of key world leaders, for example, and war conflicts. And one of those, though that is recent, or fairly recent, I suppose, is the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. And we've seen a lot of attention in particular on open source and obtaining publicly available information during the Ukraine conflict. Why do you think all of a sudden it's getting this attention?
ABEL VANDEGRIFT
It's a great question. The availability of digital collection on the ground, so everybody has a cell phone, almost everybody has access to the Internet from the civilians living there in Ukraine, in Russia, on the border areas, as well as the soldiers themselves, they're able to process and collect information in real time and upload it. You saw at the very beginning of the invasion, sort of revealed through google maps, seeing that, all of a sudden, there was a huge traffic jam on the border going into Ukraine, kind of revealing those Russian troop movements. To TikTok videos, other types of videos being posted that have information valuable to all sides, whether it's people investigating war crimes to allied organizations looking at battle damage assessments from missile strikes or tank strikes. And then there's also OpSec issues that have arisen from Russian troops using their personal cell phones, emitting signals that the Ukrainians can track, as well as geotagging photos of where they are exactly located and allowing for Ukraine to strike them back.
JEFF PHILLIPS
You had mentioned earlier, Able, that there's a lot of different sources for intelligence, and now you've just gone through what's been going on since what's happened in the Ukraine. Can you talk a little bit more about why OSINT is so relevant, even though there's all these more traditional and older resources available through other sources?
ABEL VANDEGRIFT
Yeah, I think just the expansion and data available now, every day it continues to grow, and the value of that can be extracted in so many different ways for so many different types of organizations. Like Matt said, law enforcement to the intelligence community, to academia, investigators of all sorts. So the ability for a lot of different organizations to be able to access this information in ways that they couldn't before, like satellite imagery, for example, used to be strictly available to government folks, and now commercial imagery is one of the primary ways that even the government gets their satellite data. So there's a lot of accessibility that provides through OSINT, as well as just the cost and time to use other intelligence collection methods that can not necessarily be supplanted by OSINT. But OSINT provides a lot of either tipping and queuing, creating points of interest of saying, okay, we need to go look closer at this, or it evaluates different types of contexts around other intelligence that might be coming out of a certain region.
JEFF PHILLIPS
Abel, you mentioned a couple of times about the relationship that is going on between the government and academia. And for our listeners, hopefully you checked out last week's episode where we learned about the OSI lab that's being built at one of the universities in our conversation with Steven Colthart. So it's interesting that there's even expansion and more focus at the university level on OSINT.
MATT ASHBURN
One of the things we've also seen over the past year or so, I'd say on the heels of a number of watchdog reports in the US. Government, whether from OIGs or Gao, a lot of sudden discussion about what the future of OSINT should look like, including should there be a single dedicated intelligence agency solely for OSINT? Should OSC be integrated with all the other disciplines within the IC and a variety of different variations of those options? There's a bit of debate in the public space. We also see some very public statements from some of the world's foremost intelligence agencies on this. Can you talk a bit about some of the viewpoints that are out there evil.
ABEL VANDEGRIFT
Sure. So this debate isn't new, but it's definitely been gaining a lot of ground recently. And from think tanks to, like you said, government officials coming out and kind of proposing these different setups of how OSINT could be organized within the government, particularly the US. Government. So I think one of the better resources that laid out a few options is from the Special Competitive Studies Project, and they presented four different options for leveraging open source. One, to create a new open source agency outside of the intelligence community. Two, create a new Osin agency within the intelligence community. So add another element to the IC, put an open source office within the office of Director of National Intelligence. So that sort of centralized group there at ODNI, or normalize open source across the IC. So enable all of the different IC elements to collect and share open source at their own discretion. So those are kind of the major four different types of proposals out there. And I think the crux will be whether to establish a brand new agency or to continue sort of in the way it is now, where there's a functional manager kind of overseeing it, but allowing the agencies to collect their own OSINT, but allow for better sharing of information across the agencies.
JEFF PHILLIPS
That's really interesting. Abel, for our listeners that are in the government space, are there any resources that could help them keep up with the changes and the views from collecting open source intelligence?
ABEL VANDEGRIFT
Yeah, so there's a lot of think tanks that often discuss this, from CSIS to the Atlantic Council to plenty of others in the national security space. Then there also is the recently stood up OSINT Foundation that will serve the OSINT community at large to discuss open source issues in and out of the government.
MATT ASHBURN
Yeah, that's great. And Abel, we appreciate the time that you've given us today to talk about OSINT and the future of it within the federal government. If you had to leave our audience with a final thought, what would it be?
ABEL VANDEGRIFT
This figure has been cited a number of times from different sources, but they've said that 80% to 90% of the intelligence provided to policy makers each day comes from open sources. So given that the importance and the reliance that both the government and policy makers intel collectors have on open source, it just goes to show you how important it is and the need to elevate it, focus on it, resource it, and provide it as our intelligence and competitive edge going forward.
MATT ASHBURN
Well, Abel, thanks again for joining us today on the show. And thanks also to the audience for joining us. And if you liked what you heard today, you can always view transcripts and other episode info on our website@authentic8.com/needlestack. That's authentic with the number eight Needlestack. Also, be sure to let us know what you thought of the show today on Twitter. We're at Needlestackpod on Twitter. You can also like and subscribe wherever you're listening today. And we'll be back next week with more OSINT research tips. We'll see you then.
