US spies lag rivals in seizing on data hiding in plain sight

WASHINGTON — As alarms began to go off globally about a novel coronavirus spreading in China, officials in Washington turned to the intelligence agencies for insights about the threat the virus posed to America. “We collectively as a nation aren’t preparing a defense for the ammunition that our adversaries are stockpiling.” Intelligence agencies face several obstacles to using open source intelligence. Rep. Jim Himes, a Connecticut Democrat and longtime Intelligence Committee member, said he believed there needed to be “some cultural change inside places like the CIA where people are doing what they’re doing for the excitement of stealing critical secrets as opposed to reviewing social media pages.” In one 2017 test held by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a human team competed against a computer programmed with algorithms to identify Chinese surface-to-air missile sites using commercial imagery. “What it needs to do is figure out how to leverage that ecosystem instead of trying to buy it.” Most of the 18 U.S. spy agencies have open-source programs, from the CIA’s Open Source Enterprise to a 10-person program in the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence arm. “We’re not paying enough attention to each other and so we’re not learning the lessons that different parts of the are learning, and we’re not scaling solutions,” said Avril Haines, the U.S. director of national intelligence, at an industry event last year The Open Source Enterprise headquartered at the CIA is the successor to the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, where for generations employees monitored broadcasts to translate them for analysts.