Has the American intelligence secrets market lost its appeal?
Increasing pressure to change the work and information gathering mechanisms of security institutions in Washington
With the development of information technology and open sources, the mechanism followed by US intelligence, which still adopts a traditional isolationist method in Washington and separates the issues and secrets it deals with, needs to be changed. Private security companies, press organizations and intelligence services are competing against each other in the field of knowledge. The US intelligence services, although operating in secret and at enormous costs, produce about 50,000 intelligence reports a year, which are only accessible to a limited number of civil servants and officials. On the other hand, there are calls to change the working mechanism of the intelligence services to be based on more comprehensive and open source tools and not to focus solely on enemy armies and terrorist organizations.
Complex security system
For nearly 75 years, American intelligence services have provided US military commanders and political leaders with information and analysis to help them make better decisions on critical issues related to the country’s national security. The United States and the Soviet Union made extraordinary efforts during the Cold War to gather as much confidential information as possible about the other side. But it was too costly to develop and maintain drones, eavesdropping devices, and other innovations invented for information. In addition, the elaborate and highly complex security system established to protect these devices and methods, which have been developed over time and continued to be developed for decades, is still in operation.
Research elsewhere
However, with the end of the Cold War, this tight and closed intelligence structure turned into an obstacle to the timely delivery of information in a period of abundant data flow, rapid changes and new threats to US interests. It became more important to convey thoughts and facts than to preserve the tools used to collect them. This forced the intelligence services to work within a complex security system that limits them from obtaining useful information but transmitting it at the required speed, while US national security officials seek out sources of information that are more appropriate for them.
Out of the confidentiality framework
According to many security experts in Washington, although American intelligence services are basically set up to control a world of secrets, their future success depends on their ability to operate effectively in an open society outside of secrecy, and to reinvent themselves to protect their status and importance. will be. However, they are not noticed yet today.
Carmen Medina, a former assistant director of intelligence at the CIA, warned more than 20 years ago of her concerns about maintaining the structure of American intelligence services, and the difficulties this will bring. Likewise, Zachary Tyson Brown, a former intelligence officer at the US Department of Defense (Pentagon), stated that it was frustrating that the discussions on reforming American intelligence services had been going on since 1947, but he still believed that reform was still possible.
Former CIA Director Stansfield Turner wrote in an article 30 years ago that the biggest threats the United States will face in the future will arise not from armed conflict, but from political and economic instability, which was the first indication that the reform process is progressing slowly. Turner has therefore made it clear that intelligence services need to make better use of open sources and be more pluralistic. However, it took many years for this vision to become reality in intelligence services.
Closed mechanism
Calls by experts and former intelligence officials for the activation and revitalization of American intelligence services have increased in recent months. However, since most of the policy proposals on this issue are related to issues such as resisting politicization attempts or adopting new technologies, there has been no change in the closed mechanism for collecting intelligence information and the method of transferring information to the authorities when it remained traditional.
About 50 thousand reports annually
Despite the capacity of American intelligence services to issue about 50,000 intelligence reports per year, security regulations are so stringent that most of these reports are read only by a limited number of intelligence officers. However, the primary purpose of the reports is to convey the whole truth to the relevant authorities.
Open source services
But the information revolution sowed the seeds of a growing new open source intelligence services system. For example, companies such as Recordered Future, DigitalGlobe, and McKinsey provide intelligence-like services such as news gathering and data analysis. They also provide services in areas such as satellite imagery and long-term strategic forecasting for which governments had previously been the sole authority.
Some companies, such as Bellingcat, have combined journalism and intelligence work by developing open-source technologies that track social media, images posted for commercial purposes, and research and other material produced and published by academic or nonprofit organizations.
Private corporate market
While directors of intelligence services claim that private companies’ technologies are not as complex or reliable as their own, private companies and media outlets often outperform intelligence services in this race, at least in terms of speed as well as access to information and data. Observers and experts in Washington confirm that private companies are always ahead when it comes to achieving a goal and speed, as a retired CIA official admitted in a tweet on his Twitter account. In his tweet, the former CIA official pointed out that the CIA has to deal with this situation, or is at risk of not being able to handle it and prove its existence.
On the other hand, while the American intelligence services are acting with the flawed assumption that they are the only ones working in this field, they want their employees to be in secure facilities so that they can access intelligence information and spend large sums of money to gather information. They then ask the analysts to justify the expense by keeping the sums high in their reports and documents. However, it is often unnecessary to focus on collecting information confidentially. Because the information itself can often be found through open sources that do not require any security protection, intelligence officers can discover them productively. For this reason, researchers and security experts are calling for a change in the isolationist trend in the primary operational management of intelligence services. They think that intelligence services can focus on open source information, research and analysis techniques.
New risks
The US-based Foreign Policy magazine tells the intelligence services in Washington that as networks of influence and power are woven under and through governments, political parties and individuals, infiltration, internal and external threats often overlap, and local governments, private companies and citizens can easily find themselves in the hands of major foreign powers. He called for extending the concept of national security beyond the overt threats posed by foreign armies and terrorist organizations, while he was on the front lines.
For example, cybersecurity experts pointed out that cyberattacks that can shut down a site or web server are a threat to manipulation and even attack anyone, anywhere in the world. Wars taking place in the cyber space may be virtual wars, but when they begin they can have real consequences, ranging from the excesses of the people the message reaches to the capture of the vital infrastructure of the population.
Privacy walls
Many people believe that the traditional frameworks of intelligence services are completely inadequate for this new age of communication technology that is reaching everywhere. The reason for this, they say, is that politicians and intelligence officials have been trained to deal with national security as a set of separate issues that could be placed in categories distant from each other. Thus, closed intelligence services create secrecy walls around the production and analysis of intelligence information on a particular subject, separating each interest group from one another. Although the reason these walls were built was originally intended to protect sensitive resources and methods, today these walls are so high that security experts believe they do more harm than good.
According to the analysis quoted by Şarku’l Avsat from Independent Arabia, security experts suggested that American intelligence services should never stop collecting secrets, hiding and revealing what foreign leaders say behind closed doors, although factors once considered relatively harmless are threats to national security. They point out that they should also understand that it can reveal unexpectedly. For this reason, experts underlined that the problems should not be understood separately, but should be understood in a combined way and the work should be concentrated on open source tools.
