Spies Mine YouTube For Intelligence

By Noah Shachtman
February 06, 2008 3:42:00 AM
Categories: Cloak and Dagger
Courtesy Of: Wired.com

A leading Admiral once said that his best source of intelligence was the television. Now, a top spy says there's important information to be found on YouTube videos. Presumably, he doesn't mean the calls to leave Brittney alone.

The Open Source Center, an arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, "provides foreign media reporting and analysis to policymakers, government institutions and strategic partners," Its website explains. That media has typically included "openly available information [i]nclud[ing] the Internet, databases, press, radio, television, video, geospatial data, photos and commercial imagery."

After all, the vast majority of valuable intelligence, the spies tell us, isn't hidden in some secret filing cabinet; it's out in the public sphere.

For some time now, spooks have been coming jihadi websites for clues into their activities. In a recent speech, Doug Naquin, the Center's Director, said he's taking things even further than that:

We're looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence... We're looking at chat rooms and things that didn't even exist five years ago... We have groups looking at what they call 'Citizens Media': people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the Internet. Then there's Social Media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs.... A couple years back we identified Iranian blogs as a phenomenon worthy of more attention, about six months ahead of anybody else.

(Big ups: Secrecy News)

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