The Economist August 7th 2021 pp 9 and 18-21 |Briefing| Open-source intelligence| “Trainspotting, with nukes” “Academics, activists and passionate amateurs are making use of intelligence capabilities once reserved for superpowers”
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A little history lesson or a recollection for those old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. Simply put “Cuba was a crisis because [Russian] missiles were already there when America first became aware of the situation.” Today the American military would likely spot such an incursion very early. If the American military or government chose to remain silent of such a discovery today “academics, activists and passionate amateurs...making use of intelligence capabilities once reserved for superpowers” would reveal such a finding. This is doable using tools of Open-source intelligence (OSINT). These new capabilities are partly based on readily available image streams, from small satellites known as CubeSats, from dashboard cams, from surveillance cameras, from trackers and even from social media uploaded by cell phones. High resolution images and other data are now freely available and can be easily studied as sophisticate form of modern-day sleuthing.
“There are websites which track all sorts of useful goings-on, including the routes taken by aircraft and ships. There are vast searchable databases. Terabytes of footage from phones are uploaded to social media sites everyday, much of it handily tagged.” “A photograph of any spot on earth, of a stricken tanker or the routes taken by joggers in a city is available with a few clicks. And online communities and collaborative tools, like Slack, enable hobbyists and experts to use this cornucopia of information to solve riddles and unearth misdeeds with astonishing speed.” Tools of machine learning and artificial intelligence are even being leveraged to examine images including shadows for subtle nuances beyond the human eye.
At the core of these newer capabilities lies in part a large increase in Commercial Earth observation satellites. These satellites launched by the American government and by private companies have increased from very low numbers in 2015 to about 325 now. Add in 50 from China and 50 from other countries. These tools combined with online and other collaboration amongst investigators have been used to confirm or bring to light some important events in recent times. Included in these events are evidence of “ethnic cleansing in Myanmar”, the movements of hedge fund “company executives in private jets”, the exact cause of the “downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014”, the “full extent of Uyghur internment camps in Xinjiang” and recently the discovery by an amateur of “China constructing hundreds of nuclear-missiles silos in [the Gobi] desert.”
In total such a sea change in private capability has importantly shifted the access and control of potentially strategic information. Having these data widely available essentially reduces a government’s and a person's ability to control relevant or personal information. These are unsolicited capabilities and unsolicited trade-offs and in a way are really a manifestation of what many thought the internet would bring twenty years ago. Given the sensitive nature of what might be discovered, experts within “various OSINT organizations [are working] to develop a code of conduct for open-source researchers [when] faced with … ethical quandaries.” In terms of national security there may “be genuine loss [of control but] a lessened risk of strategic surprise is a real benefit.”
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