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The Open Source Center, which replaced the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, is doing more analysis and outreach than its predecessor and is also exploring new media, said Mr. Naquin in a recent speech (pdf).

“We’re looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence,” he said.

“We have groups looking at what they call ‘Citizens Media’: people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the Internet. Then there’s Social Media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs…. A couple years back we identified Iranian blogs as a phenomenon worthy of more attention, about six months ahead of anybody else.”

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

Sir John Sawers is due to take over as chief of the Secret Intelligence
Service in November, putting him in charge of all of Britain’s spying
operations abroad.

But entries by his wife Shelley on the social networking site have exposed
potentially compromising details about where they live and work, their
friends’ identities and where they spend their holidays. On the day her
husband was appointed she congratulated him on the site using his codename
“C”.

Lady Sawers had put virtually no privacy protection on her account, making it
visible to any of the site’s 200m users around the world who choose to be in
the open-access London social network on Facebook.

Since BRIDGE is Dan's brainchild, I've asked him to convey its purpose and function:

BRIDGE is designed to enable crowd-sourcing of intelligence applications--following the iPhone AppStore model--by providing a low barrier-to-entry platform to stimulate innovation and enable analysts to discover next generation capabilities that have value to their mission.

BRIDGE takes the Wiki model which enabled end users to easily contribute textual content en masse, and extends it to technology providers, enabling them to contribute technologies that enhance the intelligence mission in a matter of days. It is important to emphasize BRIDGE is not a Web2.0 tool, it is a low barrier to entry environment where promising Web2.0 tools can be placed - and analysts can use them to uncover their value prior to acquisition.

Since BRIDGE exposes key web services that emulate the mission environment, promising tools can be plucked from BRIDGE and quickly integrated into classified environments. This enables providers to develop against these endpoints in an unclassified setting, get feedback from users enabling shorter development spirals, mash-up new combinations of services, and dramatically reduce the time it takes to transition software to the mission setting. BRIDGE uses a "perpetual beta" model giving users an EARLY look at technologies--and a chance to provide feedback while they are still maturing.

Another unique characteristic of BRIDGE is that it provides an environment for Analytic Outreach--a place where IC analysts can reach out to expertise elsewhere in federal, state, and local government, in academia, and industry. New communities of interest can form quickly in BRIDGE through the “web of trust” access control model--access to minds outside the intelligence community creates an analytic force multiplier.

insular, stove-piped work is being replaced with barrier-busting exchanges of informed viewpoints across the globe. Here’s how the NIC authors break it down:

Global Trends 2010: “… relied exclusively on expertise within the U.S. Intelligence Community.”

Global Trends 2015: “…engaged more numerous and more varied groups of non-US Government experts, most of whom were American citizens.”

Global Trends 2020: “…we greatly expanded the participation of non-American specialists by convening six seminars on five continents.”

Global Trends 2025: “In addition to increasing still more the participation of non-USG experts from the United States and abroad to develop the framework for the current study, we shared several drafts with participants via the Internet and a series of discussion sessions across the US and in several other countries.”