I think ODINT analysis is a kind of counterproductive differentiation without useful distinction. If we broaden the definition of intelligence to the creation of products that intend to inform our reality with reality. Then we can return to intelligence collection disciplines that funnel information into a pipeline that goes to an analyst who pieces together a product that is useful to an audience. Not an audience of decision makers but of end users. Through this lens we can call an analyst simply an analyst and the structured analytical techniques can make use of different collection disciplines.
Hi Brian, love your videos. If one wanted to get into Intelligence Analysis to work at a government agency or go into a career in military intelligence, what books could you recommend that one should read as a gateway?
I would start with this one: us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/structured-analytic-techniques-for-intelligence-analysis/book255432 I recently (two days ago) attended a workshop on getting into the intelligence community for academics. Some of the discussion was specialized but some of it was more general to anyone. Military intelligence works differently than the CIA, but the takeaway for me was that the CIA gets 100k applications a year, most from plausibly qualified people. You usually need a champion to get an application to get a serious look. I live tweeted the whole thing for my own reference, but it might be useful to others. threadreaderapp.com/thread/1635607000124981254.html
I am a fan of the channel. Does intelligence sifted from information posted on a website that requires a visitor to create an account and sign in or a forum where the user is ask to pay a fee to listen to a speaker be consider Open Source?
What you described would absolutory be considered open source. I mentioned taking a course this summer on open source techniques. A solid 10% was on creating sock puppet accounts to use when logging in to forums or other social media accounts to access information that was not publicly available. Likewise there may be services that have specialized databases or specialized tools that you need to pay for--this would also be considered open source. "Open" really just means "not classified" If you are working for a company or as a journalist or as an independent researcher, pretty much anything on the internet is fair game. If you are working as a researcher for a university or for a hospital that receives federal funds, the rules may change a bit. Institutional Review Boards may be hesitant to approve collecting data that requires an account to view, because the information is not "public" but instead "private." I've run into this a couple of times, but my local IRB is very strict.
Are you planning to teach any open seminar or course ? I learnt a lot on structure (d-s) intelligence analysis and production from your videos. You should join Carmen Medina and write a paper, it would be pure gold.
Wow...that is amazing praise. Carmen Medina is so far out of my league...I would love to work with her but that seems like a bit of reach for me! I don't have any plans to do an open seminar, at least not for a couple years...but then again, I never planned to do in person trainings and I've had some really good experiences with that this past year.
That is certainly a risk, and there are cases where information gets cherry picked to advance a particular position or policy (one of the main criticisms of the Iraq WMD assessment is that analysts--under the direction of policy makers-- cherry picked of data). So yes, it can happen, but that kind of intelligence doesn't serve anyone in the long run. So the intelligence community seeks to train professionals with the skills to do better than simply cherry picking data. Part of intelligence as a "profession" is being trained in basic tradecraft, which pushes back against the temptation to cherry pick data in a whole host of ways--see structured analytic techniques. Of course policy makers can still cherry pick data and even intelligence reports all they want (that is their right).
