Publicado no Blog Inteligência
Competitiva
"CIA mines
'rich' content from blogs" (CIA pesquisa rico conteúdo de
blogs) é o título do artigo publicado no "The Washington Times" de 24 de agosto de 2008,
mostrando como os blogs podem ser uma valiosa fonte de
informações.
É
importante para quem tem um blog saber o que deve ou não
publicar, pois esta ferramenta de comunicação,
aparentemente inofensiva, tem abrangência mundial e é
fonte de informação aberta, podendo ser acessada por
qualquer pessoa.
Este blog passa, a
partir deste momento, ser monitorado pela CIA pelo fato de terem
sido utilizadas algumas palavras-chave, associadas à
segurança doméstica americana e que são
sistematicamente monitoradas pelos sistemas de rastreamento de
comunicações (telefone, fax e email) da NSA -
National Security Agency.
O artigo do
"The Washington Times" foi mantido em inglês, como
originalmente publicado.
President Bush and U.S.
policy-makers are receiving more intelligence from open sources
such as Internet blogs and foreign newspapers than they previously
did, senior intelligence officials said.
The new Open Source
Center (OSC) at CIA headquarters recently stepped up data
collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is
developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content,
said OSC Director Douglas J. Naquin.
"A lot of blogs now
have become very big on the Internet, and we're getting a lot of
rich information on blogs that are telling us a lot about social
perspectives and everything from what the general feeling is to ...
people putting information on there that doesn't exist anywhere
else," Mr. Naquin told The Washington Times.
Eliot A. Jardines,
assistant deputy director of national intelligence for open source,
said the amount of unclassified intelligence reaching Mr. Bush and
senior policy-makers has increased as a result of the center's
creation in November.
"We're certainly
scoring a number of wins with our ultimate customer," said Mr.
Jardines, who became the first high-level official in charge of the
government's nonsecret intelligence in December.
"I can't get into
detail of what, but I'll just say the amount of open source
reporting that goes into the president's daily brief has gone up
rather significantly," Mr. Jardines said. "There has been a real
interest at the highest levels of our government, and we've been
able to consistently deliver products that are on par with the rest
of the intelligence community."
Mr. Naquin said recent
OSC successes have included the discovery of a technology advance
in a foreign country. Also, most data on avian flu outbreaks come
from open sources, he said.
"Have we got coups out
of it? Close to it," Mr. Naquin said. "But certainly we've had more
insight than we've ever had before."
The OSC uses powerful
computers and software technology to "sift" the Internet for
valuable intelligence. It also buys information from commercial
databases.
In the past,
open-source reports were used mainly by intelligence analysts.
"But now our customer
base literally ranges from the president to local police
departments," Mr. Naquin said. The Fairfax County police use OSC
products, as do police departments in San Diego, New York and
Baltimore. The center also provides support to the U.S.
military.
A Defense Department
official said Chinese military bloggers have become a valuable
source of intelligence on Beijing's secret military buildup. For
example, China built its first Yuan-class attack submarine at an
underground factory that was unknown to U.S. intelligence until a
photo of the submarine appeared on the Internet in 2004.
The center took over
the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service, known as FBIS,
that was formed in 1941 to translate foreign broadcasts.
The OSC is doubling its
staff and bringing in material from 32 government agencies that
also produce unclassified reports, Mr. Jardines said.
