Going Beyond Apples to Oranges: Open Source Intelligence and United States National Security Decision-Making
Giurleo, Nicholas G.
2019
- We are in the midst of an "open source" revolution, a transformation driven by the unprecedented degree to which the twenty-first century world finds itself technologically interconnected. The revolution in information technology, commerce, and politics since the Cold War's end is only making "open" or publicly available information more accessible, ubiquitous, and valuable than ever before. ... read moreThere is reason to believe that the effective exploitation of open source information can play an essential role in giving United States national security decision-makers insight and context at a relatively low cost. This thesis considers the relationship between two variables: the OSINT discipline and national security decision-making in the US. The first part considers a potential theoretical nexus between the two, examining technical applications for OSINT regarding counterintelligence, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) tools, and all-source intelligence and "jointness" in addition to a number of formal and informal structures of national security decision-making. The second part attempts to quantitatively assess the relationship between the two variables. Considering the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 as a case study, 20 pieces of "raw" or open source information are sampled with 10 pieces of finished all-source intelligence products with OSINT components to assess the impact of quantity and quality of OSINT products on the national security decision-making of the Kennedy administration during the crisis. I conclude that OSINT has historically played an important role in national security decision-making and that national security decision-making occurs somewhere in the intersection of formal and informal structures. I also conclude that finished OSINT products are of an overall higher quality than unfinished OSINT products and that the certainty of making optimal policy choices increases when the quantity of unfinished OSINT increases.read less
- ID:
- vx021t268
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