Today's spies find secrets in plain sight

WASHINGTON -- For 40 years, U.S. presidents have begun each day with a top-secret, personal briefing on security threats and global affairs obtained largely from covert spy missions, clandestine satellite surveillance and other highly classified intelligence sources.

Now, however, the President's Daily Brief and other crucial intelligence reports often rely less on secrets from risky espionage missions than on material that's available to just about anyone.

Intelligence officers have gleaned insights on Iran's nuclear capabilities from photos on the Internet. They've scooped up documents, including a terrorist training manual, at international conferences and public forums. They've found information in foreign university libraries and newscasts.

Such material is known as "open-source intelligence" or, in the acronym-laden parlance of the 16 federal agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, OSINT. The explosion of information available via the Internet and other public sources has pushed the collection and analysis of that material to the top of the official priority list in the spy world, intelligence officials say.

The change hasn't been easy in a bureaucracy that often measures success by its ability to steal secrets. Federal commissions repeatedly have criticized the intelligence community for not moving more quickly and aggressively to exploit open-source information.

It's a challenging task, given the mountains of material to sift through. Every potentially useful nugget must be vetted because enemy states and terror groups, such as al-Qaeda, sometimes use the Internet and other open channels to put out misleading information.

Yet officials say agencies are overcoming such obstacles and unearthing increasingly valuable troves of intelligence.

"It's no longer unusual to see open-source material in the President's Daily Brief … (and) it's often a very important component of the information that's incorporated into our intelligence analyses," says Frances Townsend, who until January was President Bush's assistant national security adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism.

Whether it's developments in Russian politics, the spread of avian flu, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Asia or the technological capacity of enemy states, "there's been a significant shift toward relying more on open-source information," Townsend adds. And "a lot of what we know about our (terrorist) adversaries comes from statements and videos they put on the Internet."

The intelligence community is investing heavily to improve its collection of open-source information.

The CIA has set up an Open Source Center, based in a nondescript office building in suburban Washington, where officers pore over everything from al-Qaeda-backed websites to papers distributed at science and technology symposiums, says Douglas Naquin, the center's director.