Intelligence Case

If you had that one piece of the puzzle that would have prevented the bombings of the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon on September 11 2001 would you know it? If you saw someone do something weird or suspicious before the attack on September 11 2001, would you have called the police? If someone had walked into a United States Embassy in a foreign country and said that they know someone was going to use a plane to destroy New York in two days, could this have stopped the attack? Intelligence Analysis puts the raw sources of information together, make predictions based on the data, and finally publish the results.

The Intelligence Cycle is an [effective], but outdated model. Essentially, it attempts to visualise intelligence as a process, and not merely a product. As such, by attempting a simple outline of a complex procedure, the cycle will be prone to misrepresenting dynamic changes; operational realities and either over, or under value particular parts of the process. However, it's core strengths lie in it's simplicity: shifting through the alphabet soup that is the Intelligence Community and making sense of the entire process is daunting: the Intelligence Cycle attempts to define its movement. This offers people within and outwith the Intelligence Community the ability to understand the essential tenets, or goals, within intelligence; that it is essentially a service . Further, simplicity allows change to better suit the environment.

Throughout my research, it became apparent that the acceptance for an accurate definition of 'Intelligence' is still an issue to date. One reason could be because experts tend to view 'intelligence' through their own specialty, and would be fair to say that this could possibly be because officers within the intelligence community do not have strong bridges connecting them to each other or to policy makers, which would therefore enhance communication and sharing practices of raw findings and improve the processes of collection and analysis of information that it is to be turned into intelligence and disseminated back to the policy makers.

Open sources have provided a useful stream of information for all source collection and analysis within the intelligence community. The use of open source information by the intelligence community is not a new phenomenon. During the technological boom of the 21st century open source has expanded well beyond its original capabilities. There is an important difference however between mere information and intelligence. Open source information is defined as "any and all information that can be derived from overt collection" (Lowenthal 2006, p. 273) comparatively open source intelligence (OSINT) is the transformation of legally available information using analytical exploitation (Gibson 2004).