Competitive Intelligence Marketplace

Privatized Intel for the Government?

From the International Security blog:

There is a $475M DoD contract being awarded to a private company to provide intelligence services to the US Army and security services for the US Army Corps of Engineers in Iraq. It was to be awarded in June but there is a legal challenge pending. A US citizen, Brian Scott, is attempting to block private firms with the 1893 Anti-Pinkerton Act which prohibits the government from hiring quasi-military forces.

In Iraq, the Reconstruction Operation Centers (ROCs) are the gateway between coalition forces and private security operators. According to Jane's Defense Weekly, “the ROC tracks contractor vehicles with transponders and distributes “sanitised’ (sic) military intelligence on road conditions and threat levels."

Link to relevant Washington Post article.

"When the spies are out of control" from Macleans

Another in a line of recent articles about "corporate spying."  For a refresher on why competitive intelligence practiced properly is not spying please visit the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals and review the Code of Ethics.

CIA's Open Source Intelligence

The Washington Post has an interesting article about the CIA's open-source and unclassified web site that hosts intelligence blogs that are open to anyone with a government account.  From the article:

The blogs are posted on an unclassified, government-wide Web site, part of a rechristened CIA office for monitoring, translating and analyzing publicly available information called the DNI Open Source Center. The center, which officially debuted this month under the aegis of the new director for national intelligence, marks the latest wave of reorganization to come out of the recommendations of several commissions that analyzed the failures of intelligence collection related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks...

Today's Open Source Center began life as the Foreign Broadcast Information Service -- FBIS to insiders -- in 1941, when it was charged with monitoring publicly available media and translating it. Its pastel-hued booklets became a familiar presence throughout government. At the height of the Cold War, it was FBIS translators who pored through the latest issues of Izvestia and Pravda from the Soviet Union, providing the little hints such as a word change that might signal something broader for the CIA's Kremlinologists.

By the 1990s, the office had fallen on hard times. Some advocated abolishing FBIS, saying it was irrelevant in the age of 24-hour cable news. It survived, but had its personnel slashed 60 percent, according to Naquin. Sept. 11 gave it new purpose, as "open source" became an intelligence buzzword. Across government, policymakers began to debate how to find the nuggets of genuine information hidden in the Internet avalanche.

"We weren't going to be just a translation service anymore," Naquin recalled. Now, with the new name, FBIS is "repositioned," he said. "Our definition of open source is anything that can be legally obtained," whether how-to-build-a-bomb manuals or inflammatory T-shirts.

Rhode Island Government Experimenting with RSS

The Rhode Island state government is experimenting with RSS and other new information dissemination tools through its REX project.

This is the kind of project that promises to re-define the communication methods of government with its citizens.

You can subscribe to REX RSS feeds here.