One important function of independent open-source intelligence is that it can allow governments to compare the quality of analysis they get from open and classified sources (Agence Olloweb/Unsplash)

Open sources and the future of spying

Countries spy to overcome an information deficit. But we now live in a world of information super-abundance.

Sam Roggeveen

20 March 20243 min read

Understanding military-industrial production is critically important to the outcome of the Ukraine conflict. Just how many weapons can Russia produce? Making such an assessment doesn’t require a well-placed source to leak Kremlin secrets, just dogged analysis of figures, photos and other information that is readily available in public.

A recent report from an open-source intelligence outfit called Rhodus does exactly this on Russia’s missile production capacity. Among other sources, the report uses propaganda footage of Russian factories to identify where Russia’s machine tools are made. It even examines Russian job adverts for clues about the skills these factories are looking for.

“The Russian ability to overcome its enemies on the battlefield relies upon its capacity to outproduce them on the factory floor”, the report notes. That capacity is overwhelmingly dependent on Western sources of machine tools and their spare parts. The sanctions regime has evidently not handicapped this capacity, or at least, not enough.

But the report also offers a good excuse to revisit the topic of open-source intelligence analysis. Last December, my former Lowy Institute colleague Ben Scott published a paper calling for Australia to create a new intelligence agency focused solely on open sources.

There’s no stopping the tsunami of unclassified data, and open-source intelligence will inevitably become a more important tool for understanding it.

The Rhodus report is a good example of what such an agency could achieve. Maybe it would be an even better report if the analysts who wrote it had access to classified sources, but that’s far from certain. For one thing, these experts may not have received the clearances necessary to join an intelligence agency. And with access to secrets, they may have spent less time looking for unconventional sources such as LinkedIn job advertisements for machinists.

If a non-government organisation can produce high quality reports without using classified intelligence (see also Bellingcat, among a growing number of such outfits), do we even need to create a new government agency? It looks increasingly like non-government agencies can solve this problem, especially if governments hand out contracts or grants to focus investigations on subjects they care about.

Scott’s paper argues that “The strongest argument against this option is that it would make the integration of open-source intelligence and secret intelligence even harder”. It’s a reasonable concern but must be weighed against the benefits of competition. One important function of independent open-source intelligence is that governments can compare it to the analysis they get from secret sources, and then set budgets accordingly. This may present a threat to established intelligence agencies, but so be it – governments should know whether the billions they spend on espionage is value for money.

Finally, we should think about the benefits of transparency. Is it better or worse for Western policy goals that a detailed paper about Russian missile production exists in the public realm? To put it another way, would NATO be more or less secure if this kind of reporting existed only in classified form?

The question is probably moot: there’s no stopping the tsunami of unclassified data, and open-source intelligence will inevitably become a more important tool for understanding it. Governments simply don’t have the resources to interpret it. Espionage is essentially a response to an information deficit, but we now live in a world of information super-abundance. It takes a crowd to make sense of it all.

About the author

Sam Roggeveen

Sam Roggeveen is Program Director of the Lowy Institute’s International Security Program. He is the author of The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace (Opens in new window), published by La Trobe University Press in 2023.

Topics

Intelligence & security