OSINT and the Iraq War
In fall 2002, the Bush administration stepped up a campaign to publicize the dangers of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, or WMD. At the center of the campaign was an argument that Saddam’s Iraq was an “urgent” threat because of its “massive stockpile of biological weapons … thousands of tons of chemical agents,” the possibility that “it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year,” and “Saddam Hussein’s links to international terrorist groups.” To a nation still recovering from the shock of the 9/11 attacks, news that such a powerful enemy was poised to deliver an even more powerful blow rallied many behind the President’s call to action.
However, during this same time, a group of researchers, using the tools created in the previous decades’ technological and communication revolution, came up with a very different image of Iraq, one that proved far more accurate than the one painted above by the President. While disorganized and likely still not fully aware of the larger system in which they participated, these citizens worked together to understand the real state of Iraq’s military. The key to their success was the use of the intelligence discipline that is least well-known to the public, but most crucial in any intelligence agency: open source intelligence.
This is a quote from a draft of a paper I did about a year ago on citizen use of public resources to reveal an extremely accurate image of Iraq’s weapons programs before the Iraq War. While clouded by the political shit-fest of the election, the success in this area shouldn’t go unnoticed. In particular, information professionals of all kinds should recognize that it represented a fundamental shift in citizen consumption of information. The hype surrounding the political blog fad has focused most people on just one small part of the online information explosion leading up to the war, so I hope to expand on this subject in coming months.
Note, too, that this subject line is about the information collection and processing methods, not the politics.