Open source intelligence

The New York Times: “Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and who led the campaign to get the [48,000 boxes of Arabic-language Iraqi documents captured by American troops] released, does not believe they have received adequate scrutiny. Mr. Hoekstra said he wanted to ‘unleash the power of the Net’ to do translation and analysis that might take the government decades.”

Bonus: In addition to this being “open source” in the same sense that Howard Dean’s presidential campaign was open source politics and that the term “open source” has been applied to a wide range of non-software fields, including computer hardware, genetics, journalism, publishing, and even cola, “open source” is an actual term for an intelligence gathering discipline that uses information collected from sources available to the general public. Interesting!

2 comments on “Open source intelligence

  1. Ian Murdock Post author

    If anything, this is an argument that the ambiguity of the term is a good thing, because it can then be adapted to other endeavors to convey something that might otherwise be difficult to get across. In your world, what would we call the Dean campaign? Free software politics? -ian

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