http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/2013/10/wnc-ends/
CIA Halts Public Access to Open Source Service
Categories:
<http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/category/intelligence/>Intelligence,
<http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/category/resources/>Resources
For more than half a century, the public has been
able to access a wealth of information collected
by U.S. intelligence from unclassified, open
sources around the world. At the end of this
year, the Central Intelligence Agency will terminate that access.
The U.S. intelligence communitys Open Source
Center (OSC), which is managed by the CIA, will
cease to provide its information feed to the
publicly accessible World News Connection as of
December 31, 2013, according to
<http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/Digest/Government-WNC-Feed-Shuts-Down-92436.asp>an
announcement from the National Technical
Information Service (NTIS), which operates the
<http://wnc.dialog.com/>World News Connection (WNC).
The WNC is an online news service, only
accessible via the World Wide Web, that offers an
extensive array of translated and
English-language news and information,
<http://www.ntis.gov/products/wnc.aspx>an NTIS
brochure explains. Particularly effective in its
coverage of local media sources, WNC provides you
with the power to identify what really is
happening in a specific country or region.
Compiled from thousands of non-U.S. media
sources, the information in WNC covers
significant socioeconomic, political, scientific,
technical, and environmental issues and events.
The information is obtained from full text and
summaries of newspaper articles, conference
proceedings, television and radio broadcasts,
periodicals, and non-classified technical
reports. New information is entered into WNC
every government business day. Generally, new
information is available within 48-72 hours from
the time of original publication or broadcast.
For over 60 years, analysts from OSCs domestic
and overseas bureaus have monitored timely and
pertinent open-source materials, including grey
literature. Uniquely, WNC allows you to take
advantage of the intelligence gathering
experience of OSC,
<http://www.ntis.gov/products/wnc.aspx>the NTIS
brochure says. Soon, that will no longer be true.
The <http://wnc.dialog.com/>WNC public feed from
the <https://www.opensource.gov/>Open Source
Center is a highly attenuated version of what is
available to official government users. Within
government, copyright considerations are ignored,
but for public distribution they must be
respected, and so (with some exceptions) only
information products whose creators have signed a
royalty agreement with NTIS are publicly released.
Even with that significant limitation and the
attendant public subscription fees, the NTIS
World News Connection has remained a highly
prized resource for news reporters, foreign
policy analysts, students and interested members of the public.
I check it almost every day. Recently, for
example, I have been following official
statements from Russian officials who allege that
the U.S. is covertly developing biological
weapons for use against Russia in a military
laboratory in the Republic of Georgia. The claim
seems bizarre, but may nevertheless be
politically significant. Detailed
English-language coverage of the matter, or of
many other stories of regional interest and
importance, is not readily available
elsewhere. (Moreso than in the past, however,
portions of the material that is publicly
accessible through WNC can be obtained elsewhere,
through other news services or foreign websites.)
The reasons for the decision to terminate the
World News Connection are a bit
obscure. Producing it is not a drain on U.S.
intelligence the marginal costs of providing the
additional feed to NTIS are close to zero. (The
total budget for open source intelligence was
about $384 million in FY2012, according to
classified budget records obtained by the
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black-budget-summary-details-us-spy-networks-successes-failures-and-objectives/2013/08/29/7e57bb78-10ab-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_story.html>Washington
Post from Edward Snowden.) However, the program
is a headache for NTIS to manage, particularly
since NTIS officials had to negotiate numerous
contracts with media source providers to offer
their products to the public. But the large
majority of that work has already been
accomplished, and now it will be rendered useless.
Mary Webster of the Open Source Center had
initially proposed to cancel the public
information feed as of September 30, according to
an NTIS official. Then she was persuaded to
grant a six month reprieve. But in the end, a
cut-off date of December 31, 2013 was set.
If that comes to pass, it will be a blow to
researchers and proponents of public
intelligence. The Federation of American
Scientists had previously argued that the U.S.
government should actually expand public access
to open source intelligence by publishing all
unclassified, uncopyrighted Open Source Center
products.
(<http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/2011/08/open_up_osint/>Open
Up Open Source Intelligence, Secrecy News,
August 24, 2011.) Instead, even the current
range of publications will no longer be
systematically released. (Only a small fraction
of
<http://www.fas.org/irp/dni/osc/index.html>publicly
unreleased OSC records ever seem to leak.)
Although the <https://www.opensource.gov/>Open
Source Center is managed by the Central
Intelligence Agency, it is formally a component
of the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence. Yet the move the terminate public
access to OSC products seemed to catch the ODNI unawares.
Obviously our attention is on a possible lapse
in appropriations, but we are looking into this,
said an ODNI spokesman on September 30, just before the government shutdown.
The information provided through NTIS makes an
irreplaceable contribution to U.S. national
security, wrote Prof.
<http://new.sipa.columbia.edu/faculty/gary-sick>Gary
G. Sick of Columbia University in
<http://www.fas.org/irp/fbis/sicklet.html>an
October 1999 letter, in response to a previous
proposal to curtail coverage in the World News Connection.
The World News Connection informs us about other
countries in ways that otherwise would be nearly
impossible,
<http://www.fas.org/irp/fbis/sicklet.html>Dr.
Sick wrote. It costs virtually nothing in
comparison with almost any other national
security system. It is not as sexy as a bomber or
a missile, but its contributions to national
security can be attested to by generations of
policy-makers. I was in the White House during
the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis,
and my respect for the power of this information
was born at that time. I often found it more
helpful than the reams of classified material
that came across my desk at the NSC.
8 Responses to CIA Halts Public Access to Open Source Service
<http://home.comcast.net/%7Emister-cat1>don
October 15, 2013 at 2:09 PM
<http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/2013/10/wnc-ends/#comment-274286>#
The complaint here is that the CIA is not
providing free access for journalists and
scholars to open source materials the CIA
translates as part of their intelligence work.
The rationale for the CIA to stop doing it is
that navigating copyright law is a pain in the
ass. There is a different copyright threshold for
internal government use (I use the full OSC
products every day so Im familiar with what they do and how useful they are).
Key sentence: However, the program is a headache
for NTIS to manage, particularly since NTIS
officials had to negotiate numerous contracts
with media source providers to offer their products to the public.
This is the era of the internet and automatic
translation programs. If academics want free
access to translations of foreign copyrighted
materials they can use Google or mess with hiring
translators and dealing with copyright law
themselves. These dislike the CIA anyway, now
they want to complain because they dont want to
pay for the services they scam off the agency
they hate? I think they might want to rethink
their complaint. But thats just me :)
Note: Thanks for the comment. I should have made
it more clear that the World News Connection is
not a free service. It is offered by NTIS for
subscription at a fairly hefty fee. Steven Aftergood
Sheldon Simon October 16, 2013 at 11:55 AM
<http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/2013/10/wnc-ends/#comment-275683>#
As a scholar who publishes regularly on Asian
international politics, the FBIS Open Source
Center has been my primary research source for
decades. The utility to the government is that it
provides additional points of view to those
available inside the government and additional
assessments to government analysts who frequently
dont have the time to parse open source
information. To the public, its availability
enhances the knowledge of the informed
publicessential to an effective democracy. I am
appalled that the WNC is being shut down for
reasons of bureaucratic convenience. Penny wise and pound foolish.
James Milichich October 22, 2013 at 3:31 PM
<http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/2013/10/wnc-ends/#comment-286206>#
I believe this is more of a problem with NTIS,
rather than the CIA, which seems to have operated
as a profit center since the early 1980 s.
Around the mid-1990 s the General Management
Staff of the CIA wanted to make the electronic
format of the Foreign Broadcast Inforamtion
Service/Joint Publications Research Service
(FBIS/JPRS) products available on Elseviers
NEXIS database. Part of the idea, I think, was
that the intelligence community would use NEXIS
to access the data. I argued against this
approach for a couple of reasons. One, FBIS and
JPRS reports were already available to the public
for free through the Government Printing Office
Depository Library Program. Would that go away?
Two, I didnt like the idea of taking information
collected by the government at taxpayer expense
and being given to a private company for resale
at premium prices. And, three, what about
copyright and For Official Use Only (FOUO) issues?
Ultimately, the Open Source Center was created
and the Agency developed its own restricted
system for the Intelligence Community and peddled
off the UNCLASSIFIED/UNLIMITED to the World News
Connection which Ive seen available on DIALOG
Information Services, commercially, and I
suspect, directly from NTIS to academia where I
tested it at the College of William and Mary (my
opinion, the search engine and the result
displays were poor especially compared to the
restricted version). Still, if this goes away,
will the GPO Library Depository Program still
receive UNCLASSIFIED/UNLIMITED Open Source Center material?
Robert O. Freedman December 2, 2013 at 3:20 PM
<http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/2013/10/wnc-ends/#comment-355067>#
This is a huge mistake. I have long been
dependent on the WNC for materials that I have
found crucial to my research and that of my
students at Johns Hopkins University. This decision must be reversed.
Robert O. Freedman Johns Hopkins University
_______________________________________________
Swlfest mailing list
[email protected]
http://montreal.kotalampi.com/mailman/listinfo/swlfest
To unsubscribe: Send an E-mail to
[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe, or visit the URL shown
above.
For more information on the Fest, visit:
http://www.swlfest.com
http://swlfest.blogspot.com
