Global intel collection seeing a sea change

A sea change is taking place in the intelligence collection and dissemination processes in western democracies. It has thrown the classical “intelligence cycle” to the wind. It is not clear whether this will augur well for the reliability of collected information. Although these changes were noticed earlier too, their constant use during Ukrainian resistance after the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, has made them ‘trendy’.

The traditional institutionalised collection of intelligence is being partly replaced by what is called ‘crowd-sourced open-source intelligence’ which had sprung up even before the Ukraine war started. Think tanks are acting as spokespersons instead of official channels.

On February 25, 2022, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) released a paper, ‘Ukraine Through Russia’s Eyes’, based on documents accessed with the help of the Ukrainian intelligence. It said a February 2022 pre-invasion survey by the ninth Directorate of Russian intelligence Federal Security Service had found favourable conditions for a government change in Ukraine. Around 67 per cent of the Ukrainian public was ‘distrustful’ of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Although the majority trusted the army, that confidence did not extend to other institutions such as the police or even Parliament. In fact, 40 per cent of the respondents said they would not even join their army to defend Ukraine. Another point which swayed the decision towards invasion was a religious assessment that at least half of the Ukrainian population owing allegiance to the church would follow Moscow Patriarchy’s wishes.

Simultaneously, not every component of the western intelligence alliance had shared the majority’s cautious optimism that Ukraine would be able to resist the massive Russian thrust. On June 4, 2022, the American Public Broadcast Service (PBS) said there was a feeling in the US Senate and House Intelligence Committee that the White House did not extend all-out support to Zelenskyy before the invasion began due to reticence by US intelligence services, perhaps based on their bad experience with the then Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who fled in August 2021.

The PBS quoted Lt Gen Scott D Berrier, Director of Defence Intelligence Agency, who admitted to having told a hearing in March 2022 that it “was a bad assessment” on his part to have earlier concluded that “Ukrainians were not ready as I thought they should be”. However, he admitted that this did not represent the entire intelligence community’s feelings. On the other hand, he said the Ukrainians had fought “bravely and honourably”.

An assessment by a team of scholars at Brunel University, London, on

May 19, 2022, had said a new model of cooperative government-public intelligence infrastructure was set up where the highlight was ‘crowd-sourced open-source intelligence’. Under this model, strategic intelligence collection has “transmuted into a distributed, globalised and even ‘democratised’ enterprise as open-source information has exploded in terms of scale and capabilities”.

According to them, Russian reverses happened because they were unaware of the massive public-private capability of the NATO-backed coalition in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, whereas Moscow, with a controlled media, was following the Cold War bureaucratic model of the intelligence process. In particular, they found that the Russian communication and intelligence infrastructure was failing. Consequently, they often used “in-field makeshift solutions such as mobile phones or unencrypted high-frequency radio which the Ukrainian military and even radio enthusiasts could have easily intercepted”.

This assessment came true on January 1 when Ukraine conducted massive missile strikes on Makiivka in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region. This was described as one of the deadliest attacks on Russian forces, caused by careless use of mobile phones by Russian soldiers revealing their location, leading to a claim by Kyiv that 400 Russian soldiers had died and 300 injured. The Russian Defence Ministry has admitted to 63 deaths. A senior pro-Russian official of the region conveyed through ‘Telegram’ that a vocational school where the soldiers were housed was hit by the American high-mobility artillery rocket system (Himars).

Significantly, Gen Jim Hockenhull, Commander of the British Strategic Command, had described the current battle as the ‘first digital war’ at a December 2022 Royal United Services Institute seminar. He said much of this digital capability was coming not from the traditional military sources but from “commercially available sources”. This creates “enormous opportunity, but also creates a real burden in terms of being able to deal with intelligence”. He said, “As many as 127 new devices are being connected to the Internet every second across the globe and there is a real challenge over the veracity of the available information.” He added a note of caution that this information was being used not just by sources inside the military but is being projected “for all to see and for all to interpret”.

American academic Amy Zegart has said in Foreign Affairs that the Ukraine war has proved that “intelligence isn’t for government spy agencies anymore”. She said a volunteer group at Stanford University led by retired US Army veteran Allison Pusccioni, an open-source imagery analyst, has been providing evidence of Russian human rights violations to the United Nations. Zegart mentions that Bellingcat, an amateur investigators’ group, had identified the Russian hit team that tried to assassinate Sergei Skripal, a Russian renegade intelligence officer, in the UK. She recommends a permanent agency for the US to deal with only open-source information.

In my opinion, this huge problem will have to be tackled in future by global security services. In my recent book on the history of intelligence, I had mentioned that even in 2007, all 16 US intelligence agencies were collecting one billion pieces of data everyday — much beyond their capacity to interpret.

The explosion of social media contents as “Add-ons” to strategic and tactical intelligence creates a serious challenge to the analytical capabilities as our agencies do not have time or capacity to monitor billions of terabytes of open information which might have bearing on security. Such an agency could also openly liaise with media outlets and technology enterprises and also work as a technology innovator.

Views are personal