| https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/open-secrets-ukraine-in... To summarize, there are many people in government who are interested in open source intelligence. Traditional sources of intelligence are gathered with secret means and therefore must be restricted in distribution to prevent burning the source. This means you can have the best possible intelligence but be unable to a) act on it or b) distribute it to people who can. The value proposition of using open-source intelligence is that you can distribute it very widely to decisionmakers since it's already "out in the open". Intelligence isn't about hoarding secrets for the sake of such; it's about getting information to people who can use it. The political issue is that people assume that "secret = higher quality" when there's no inherent value to secrecy. So, spy agencies overinvest in secret-gathering, get a ton of info, and are unable to do anything with it. Meanwhile, if someone posts a tank manual on the WarThunder gaming forums you can give that to every soldier that might encounter that tank. This is doubly important in tech because many big tech companies play a significant role in national security but cannot get intelligence that would help protect them, and by extension, American interests. |