by Aaron Mannes

Jim was invited to attend the annual Information Operations, Open Source Intelligence & Peacekeeping Intelligence conference last week. He couldn’t make it so he sent me.

The conference was sponsored by oss.net. Broadly speaking they encourage governments and NGOs to use open source intelligence and explore ways to better gather and organize useful material from the Open Source world.

Unfortunately, because I was also busy that week, I could only attend a smattering of the conference myself. What I saw was an eclectic mix of journalists, intelligence consumers, and intelligence community members. It did not seem to hang together very well, but, in fairness I only saw a limited segment of the conference. I missed the training sessions on Monday and the speakers on Tuesday. I caught some of the programs on Wednesday and Thursday.

Among the speakers I saw were:

Mario Profaca, a Croation journalist who discussed his techniques for garnering open source intelligence

Ralph Peters, retired US army officer and writer on international affairs, fed some red meat to the right-wingers in the crowd and perturbed all of the Europeans with his broad-brush predictions of world affairs for the next 20 years

Arno Reuser, Chief Librarian for Dutch Military Intelligence, was a real highlight of the conference - he has been a major force in the Open Source movement (with a giant white beard he looked the part of a prophet) and discussed some of the systems he has developed to better enable the retrieval of information

Moses Naim, Editor of Foreign Policy, was giving away copies of his most recent book Illicit (I got two, one for me and one for the lab) on the globalized crime networks that engage in smuggling drugs, people, and goods

Steve Edwards. detective with Scotland Yard, who described the nuts and bolts of how some of these criminal networks operate

Colonel Jan-Inge Svensson, from the Swedish military, spoke about the role of intelligence in peacekeeping operations

I missed many of the highlights, including a video-conference with Alvin Toffler.

Many attendees were knew of MINDSWAP and the Semantic Web and were interested in how our work could meet the challenges of sorting open-source intelligence. We are also hoping to meet with the conference organizer and OSS.Net CEO Robert Steele at the lab in the near future.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 22nd, 2006 at 12:34 am and is filed under Personal Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.