Open Source and Our Crises of National Understanding

The challenges that face the United States and our allies require greater understanding on the parts of both government and society. Democratic governance means shared responsibilities. Citizens are not subjects. Open source is the only way to share information and develop a common understanding between our national security communities and everyone else. At our best, Jamestown contributes to this shared understanding and helps decisionmakers inside and outside government decide on an appropriate course of action.

In November, I had the honor of delivering the keynote address for the annual conference of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies (CASIS). The conference was titled “Looming and Open War: The Role of Intelligence in a Time of Shifting Geopolitics.” I shared my thoughts on the challenges faced by Canada and the United States and why open source information and analysis is vital to our response.

The essay below is adapted from my remarks and edited for clarity.

Our world is on fire. The values of democratic governance and human dignity that we hoped would spread throughout the world are under assault from within and without our borders. Among the flames, we face two crises of understanding.

The first is that we in the West do not seem to understand what is happening out in the world, the way in which what we called the liberal or rules-based international order already has changed. The second is that we face a growing perception gap between our societies and our national security establishment in terms of what our adversaries and rivals are actually doing.

The first crisis is apparent in many arguments made today. We see it whenever our leaders gather at major summits and discuss global order and international norms; we hear it when we (mostly the kind of people gathered in this room) talk about how, for example, the presence of North Korean troops in Ukraine does not align with Beijing’s interests; and we read it in articles suggesting that the Chinese Communist Party does not want to overturn the old order from which they benefited so greatly, but instead wishes to merely adapt it slightly. 

We are still debating whether a new round of great power competition is unfolding. There is not. A competition has a score, rules, and referees. Like a boxing match. This is a street fight. There is no VAR (Video Assistant Referee). There are no mulligans. There are no replays.

The world already has changed profoundly. This change has been occurring incrementally right in front of us, but each new development has been dismissed as an isolated incident. As with many intelligence failures, we are passing over individual pieces of information coming in without ever looking back and re-examining the accumulated—and accumulating—evidence. All data is anecdotal if you are ignoring the past. The utility of that data only comes from seeing it in the aggregate, within its proper context.

Take, for example, the international institutions that bear the hallmarks of universal values—not simply democratic, Western, or small-l liberal values. The People’s Republic of China and its ruling communist party have consistently, and with increasing success, pursued a strategy of undermining the efficacy of these institutions and their ability to function in ways that uphold the ideals upon which they were founded. Nevertheless, still today you will hear government officials who should know better say things like, “Isn’t it natural for these institutions to evolve? Given how important the People’s Republic of China is as a player in the world, should we not accommodate Beijing?”

Ignoring for a moment that Beijing agreed to the terms as written when joining these organizations—and, by the Chinese Communist Party’s own claims about who is Chinese, Chinese voices had significant role in their creation—here are a few developments in recent years that warrant our consideration:

• In October, UN Secretary-General António Guterres appeared at the BRICS conference in Kazan, Russia, as the equal of the leaders and representatives of Belarus, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, and Vietnam. Whatever its faults, the United Nations as an organization symbolizes the ideas of universal values and the post-World War II hope for a better world.
• In 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) delayed declaring an international pandemic during COVID. This was because of personnel brought in by Margaret Chan, the PRC representative who served as Director-General of the WHO from 2006–2017. [1] The WHO’s declaration is a legal trigger for dozens of national health systems worldwide to initiate pandemic response plans, so any delay renders many developing countries unable to implement necessary measures. In the United States, these decisions are our own responsibility as we have national global health monitoring systems that fill this role. Most countries, however, rely on the WHO. For many of those, 2020 was a tragedy.
• In 2019, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China found World Bank documents that showed that the international financial institution had provided funds for “vocational training” in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (East Turkestan), and that those funds were used to support the mass internment of Uyghurs in what the United States now recognizes as a genocide. These facilities were even inspected by World Bank staff.
• In 2018, the People’s Republic of China disappeared INTERPOL President Meng Hongwei and refused to comment on his whereabouts for several weeks before commenting simply that he was safe. Meng’s resignation was made public one month later. Beijing has faced no consequences for this and has continued to abuse INTERPOL’s red notice system for transnational repression.

There are many more such examples, and likely many yet to be uncovered.

Given what already has happened, what is there left to accommodate? How much more do we want to see international norms warped beyond these examples?

For decades, the CCP’s leaders have made clear their ambitions for “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” By “made clear,” I mean repeated in policy documents, in speeches to the party faithful, in actions, and in budgeting—and budgets are moral documents making clear one’s commitments. Part of these ambitions has been to remake global institutions so that they recognize and respect—if not revere and reinforce—the CCP’s methods of governance. Yet we have ignored these facts and this context. Arguably, we ignored the facts at first because we lacked the context; however, such an excuse is no longer viable.

Today, the People’s Republic of China, Russia, Iran, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), along with their proxies like the Houthis and Hamas, are cooperating and/or acting in parallel in ways that we have not seen: Ukraine; the Red Sea; the Arctic; the Sea of Japan. Despite this, our dominant narrative is that these relationships are limited and weak. This narrative is based on projecting a mirror image of our own ahistorically tight alliances in which we cooperate in hitherto unheard of ways rather than being driven by a shared strategic interest in remaking this world and by the values that underwrite the way in which nation-states engage.

This emerging reality is a world ripe for competitive actions; the kind of world in which intelligence should thrive. In both the United States and Canada, however, there is ample evidence of atrophy and rot: in the relationship between policymakers and intelligence, and in our ability to actually collect, analyze, and transmit intelligence for decision advantage.

In some ways, there also are some rather positive developments. For example, we are watching innovation in open-source intelligence that enables action on export controls and research security. This is fueled by a demand for tools that help action officers sort through complicated records and information on foreign entities. Unfortunately, this innovation is not a substitute for understanding. It is merely the economic-statecraft equivalent to putting a target on a terrorist.

This can be seen in our systems’ inadequate approaches to enforcing technology and human rights controls. These systems—from the cabinet to the action officers—are lacking the “why?” to motivate action. We have an abundance of information, but a scarcity of understanding.

Open-source information is much more—and much more important—than media, corporate records, AIS data, and the like. Open source has a deeply human element rooted in experience and observation.

Jamestown was founded more than 40 years ago to help Americans and our allies understand our adversaries in their own words and on their own terms. In the early years, we helped defectors like Romanian intelligence leader Ion Pacepa and UN Undersecretary-General for Political Affairs Arkady Shevchenko find meaning in their new lives in the United States.

After the Cold War, Jamestown evolved, reorienting toward media analysis. Many of our analysts, especially those who provide our coverage of Eurasia and global terrorism, come from or live in the regions on which they are writing. Jamestown serves as a bridge between these analysts, who may not have a clear sense of what matters to decision-makers in Washington, D.C. (and other capitals), and our readers, who do not have visibility on or the context for what is happening on the ground. For our other analysts, their value and insight comes from steeping themselves in the sources, day in and day out. They are prospecting with a purpose: to inform our readers of strategic developments that shape their region of coverage. This continuous monitoring gives you a perspective that cannot be found in other ways.

Jamestown’s analysts all have deep expertise. However, some of the most important insights from our work are relatively simple. Many of our analysts from Central & Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia have a firmly grounded view of Russian imperialism. This imperialism, which is the original sin of the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, is so pervasive that even many Russian liberals and dissidents subscribe to it. Our analysts’ contextual knowledge of how Moscow behaves allowed them to see the moves on Georgia in 2008, the purpose of Nord Stream 1 and 2, and the 2014 invasion of Ukraine well before Moscow’s aggression was beyond doubt.

Most of us—and that includes myself in years past—listened to Russian President Vladimir Putin but did not hear. We glossed over his talk of national glory and his bizarre statements about places like Ukraine not being real countries. We dismissed the warnings of those who had once been under the Russian yoke as post-Soviet traumatic paranoia. So, despite invasions of Georgia, Ukraine, and invasive meddling in Estonia, Moldova, and elsewhere, many still disbelieved that Russia would stage a full invasion of Ukraine as late as February 2022. To the extent that people believed in this eventuality, many of them would share the character and experience of people who choose to work in national security.

Our second crisis is the growing gap between our national security community, broadly defined, and our societies at large in how we understand the threats to our countries and democracies. The PRC and Russian weaponization of space is a great example. U.S. Space Force Commander Chance Salzman is in Europe this week talking about the People’s Liberation Army’s “mind-boggling” expansion in space. Those of you in government or who held a clearance in the last decade probably have some idea of what General Salzman means. The rest of you probably have no idea.

We cannot survive on selective declassification to our own countries if for no other reason than that it will look and sometimes be entirely political. Canada’s foreign interference debacle and debate serves as a cautionary tale in this regard.

Our adversaries explicitly define this global street fight as a systems confrontation. They are targeting our societies in the form of influence operations, economic espionage, corporate sabotage (pitting our companies against the full force of a nation-state for technologies the PRC wants), preparation and proof of concept for attacking civilian infrastructure in cyberspace, as well as efforts to undermine the integrity of elections and policymaking.

Among the many different and difficult things that we can do to address these challenges in our understanding, I want to focus on one particular aspect. That is the need to re-establish dialogue across the gap. The good news is that never before has the professional experience of this audience, of the intelligence profession, been so valued—many officers from the young to the retired have been able to find meaningful work that draws upon their skills.

One of the crucial pieces of our effort must be to build a standalone open source agency that operates mostly in the open and keeps a reliable flow of information about critical countries accessible to our governments and civil societies.

For too long, we have treated open source as a byproduct of analytic work. We do not expect analysts to collect and validate their own human intelligence, signals intelligence, and geo-spatial intelligence. The reporting from those other intelligence disciplines contains boundaries about its potential meanings as well as clear statements about the way that information was acquired or derived. Translation of open-source materials, however, rarely contains those statements. An analyst is left on their own to make that judgment, which both creates a conflict of interest for the analyst’s interpretation and sets the analyst up for a clash of expertise and interpretation with senior management.

In the old days, the public dissemination of translations from the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) and its partners in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, British Broadcasting Corporation, and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation established a common baseline for discussion. This allowed academics and corporate analysts without a clearance to engage national security professionals on ground that all knew could be discussed. There were more interesting conferences and academic outreach events. National security professionals were more likely to publish journal articles or otherwise contribute to public discussion, because they had ready access to unclassified materials and there was a need to debate how we understood events happening half-a-world away.

A new open source agency would need to have a few key characteristics. First, it must regularly disseminate translations of foreign media and other relevant information. This must be routine and automated, so that there is no sense of politicization that comes from selective disclosure. This is a public good and must be treated as such. Second, it must be oriented toward collection and processing. Our rivals are becoming more and more adept at hiding and removing relevant information, especially once they become aware that foreign individuals have found potentially sensitive or actionable information. The agency would be a critical part of creating the public record of what our rivals are doing. Third, the agency would need to serve as a gateway or an airlock between the classified and unclassified worlds. Right now, they are increasingly air-gapped and never the two shall meet. This connectivity must include both people and information, as we need the open source world informed by national security concerns just as the classified world must be informed by a broader range of sources and experience.

Notes:

[1] Margaret Chan was a civil servant for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), who served as the Hong Kong Director of Health from 1994 to 2003. Hong Kong became part of the PRC in 1997 as agreed in the Joint Declaration of the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the People’s Republic of China on the Question of Hong Kong of 1984 (also known as the Sino-British Joint Declaration).