Quotations on OSINT
“More can be deduced by an intelligent study of public sources than by any number of ‘reliable’ but unintelligent ‘agents’ listening at keyholes or swapping drinks at bars.”
— Hugh Trevor-Roper, veteran of both MI5 and SIS in 1968; cited in West. Faber Book of Espionage (1993).“Making a case for avoiding open source intelligence is a bit like saying that the air is filled with carcinogens and other harmful substances and that it would be better not to breathe.”
— Arthur Hulnick, “Expanding Open Source Intelligence,” paper presented at the International Studies Association convention, New Orleans, March 2002.“The CIA is reluctant to acknowledge how much it relies upon open sources. Some officials fear that Congress will not appropriate money for experts who ‘just read newspapers’. But all agencies performing economic intelligence must admit the obvious: the world economy functions on the basis of publicly available information. In general, the CIA does more to aggregate and interpret open source literature than any other government agency.
… To say, as some do, that this task is little more than ‘reading newspapers’ is like saying that US Navy’s multibillion dollar acoustic signal processing technology just ‘listens to the ocean’. ”
— Philip Zalikow, “American Economic Intelligence,” in Jeffreys-Jones and Andrew, Eternal Vigilance (1997).
- posted to Intelligence Forum by Mario Profaca.