UPDATE of 28 Apr 06. We recently conducted a quick evaluation of FBIS reporting and were shocked at the degree to which two problems were immediately apparent:

1) In the aftermath of 9-11 they evidently decreased their reliance on foreign translators; in consequence their translations are now worse than before.

2) Their translators are meeting their quotas with active fabrication. By cutting and pasting their translations into Google we actually found cases where translators were taking old information previously translated, and pretending they had translated it from an article published that day. This is both fraud on the part of the translators, and incompetence on the part of FBIS, which is simply not doing quality control.

Naturally we despise those contractors who use FBIS and the Library of Congress at no cost, and who steal from Factiva and others, in order to simulate a Global Coverage capability. It has taken us 18 years to get to where we are today, and while we appreciate the fact that everyone is now giving lip service to OSINT, neither the beltway bandits or aggregators (LEXIS-NEXIS and Seisint are great for US data in English, they suck at everything else) are credible if you both write a good Statement of Work and do a good job of evaluating past performance rather than claims. There is no other company on the planet that has the OSINT past performance survey letters that we do. We exceed the U.S. Government's own mediocre capabilities at the national level for three simple reasons:

1) We do not get hung up on clearances and citizenship. We use truly expert foreigners with appropriate access.

2) We have the integrated processing system for making sense of everything we collect (that includes finding fraudulent submissions and anomalies) and

3) We are focused on foreign language content relevant to operational inter-agency needs, provided in very short time frames, and presented as actionable intelligence.

We tried for 18 years to help CIA and FBIS heal themselves. That period is over. They are dead and awaiting resurrection. We are going to continue to question the rationality of spending $60 billion a year on secrets and next to nothing on open sources. Over time we will create the multinational multiagency multidiciplinary multidomain information sharing (M4IS) network that is needed to achieve strategic outcomes in the near, mid, and long terms. It is Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and coalition information sharing, not secret intelligence, that is the driver of strategic outcomes in the 21st Century. We recommend that the Secretary of Defense give serious thought to reducing the budgets of the NRO, NSA, and NGA by 20% each, redirecting that money to the Defense Open Source Program under the executive agency of a new Combatant Commander for Intelligence (such as STRATCOM), while assigning DIA a policy and program oversight role, but not executive agency. The Army's attempt out of Fort Huachuca to take over OSINT should be crushed--these people have no idea what they are doing and are also too inclined to fund the mis-adventures of the well-intentioned but largely ineffective ADDNI/OS, who worked as a sergeant for General Fast when she was a Colonel in charge of the 66th.

This is real simple: there is a war going on between the OSINT wanna-bees attempting to abuse their power to capture resources, and the OSINT pioneers, including the COCOM practitioners that have suffered at the hands of ignorant leaders (the Virtual Information Center in PACOM is gone, a huge strategic mistake by that Command). The pioneers will win because they have the right knowledge, the right attitude, and integrity.

OSS CEO Note: For those who seek to evaluate the claims of the so-called Open Source Center (OSC) at the Central Intelligence Agency, the linked documents below will provide all the history necessary to establish that these folks have refused, since we brouight this issue forward in 1988, to be serious about OSINT. Ballerinas don't do football. CIA employees don't do OSINT. That's the end of it. We move on without them. DoD COCOMs are the center of gravity, as are the colaition nations and their militaries that serve as "hubs" for harnessing the seven tribes in their respective nations. Any DoD person foolish enough to listen to OSC should receive appropriate remedial counseling. We have wasted 18 years because of these people. It could reasonably be said that had they listened to General Al Gray, and Steele, in 1988-1992, that 9-11 would have been prevented and the rise of the global culture of hatred spawned by Saudi Arabia and Bin Laden would have been detected and countered. The field of Information Operations would have matured faster. The OSC is a placebo, not real medicine, and the FBIS culture will never, ever, in our lifetimes, get a grip on either real world localized information in all languages, or the needs of the military, or anyone else (e.g. DHS, State, Justice, or state & local governments). St.