COME BACK, ADMIRAL POINDEXTER, ALL IS FORGIVEN:

For years, government officials, commissions, and think tanks have warned that the U.S. intelligence community has blinded itself to enormous sources of intelligence, simply because the information is publicly available. In other words, the intelligence community would prefer to rely on billion-dollar classified satellites and intelligence-collection programs rather than to gather unclassified information on the internet for free. [...]

The new administration and Congress could finally act on years of recommendations based on warnings and intelligence failures. Plans, ideas, and recommendations have been created and published for the types of unclassified intelligence sources that agencies could be ingesting, the programs they could create, and the types of algorithms and automation that could be created to do this at scale. The status quo is proving that inertia alone is not solving this problem.

The U.S. government has an urgent need for intelligence based on open source information to understand and reveal foreign governments' campaigns to harm the U.S.; to identify methods of domestic radicalization and identify the sources of online radicalization campaigns; and even to better understand other countries' strategic goals and intentions.

Even when the relevant data is publicly available, intelligence analysts are not including this data in their analytic products during their routine course of business. Perhaps the most damning reason why is because open source responsibilities are not spread widely across the roles and functions of the intelligence community. Instead, the Open Source Enterprise--the office that would logically have this function--has seen its role, scope, and functions diminished and deprioritized over multiple presidential administrations. 

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