Open source intelligence

Definition

Open source intelligence is an approach to intelligence gathering that involves collecting information from publicly available sources and analyzing it to produce usable intelligence. The term "open source" is not related to open-source software. (See the Wikipedia article for more.)

Issues

Questions:

• Is it really such a new idea to take this seriously?
• How naive it is to see this as the major source of intelligence info?

Related thoughts:

• In the documentary movie The Fog of War, McNamara laments his lack of understanding of Vietnamese history and nationalism at the time of the Vietnam War, when he was the US Secretary of Defense. It might appear to a casual viewer that he had been completely unaware of the facts, with tragic but unintended consequences. Yet at the time of the war and even before its escalation in the mid-1960s, some people were putting these arguments forward forcefully. For example, John Kenneth Galbraith (then the US Ambassador to India) in a private letter to US President, John F Kennedy, warned against mistaking nationalism for hardline communism (is that correct? need to check the details of this) or supporting an undesirable government in the South Vietnam. So, in this case, it appears that the knowledge was widely available, but ignored or rejected by the strategists in Washington.
• Bali Bombing