OPINION — As we approach the April 2024 expiration of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), it is heartening to see a robust debate in Congress on how the US government and its commercial partners can balance the imperatives of safeguarding the privacy of US citizens with ensuring the physical and cyber security of the nation and our allies.
Threats to American and allied interests worldwide are rising. Against this backdrop, we see it as only good that members of Congress in both parties are recognizing that responsible and compliance-focused American companies – and the innovation and technology they bring – can support national security goals through best-available, trusted open-source intelligence (known as OSINT, and pronounced “oh-SINT”). The use of OSINT, composed of both publicly available information and commercially available information, has grown dramatically in the past decade, and has become a key tool in supporting national security missions worldwide.
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Partnerships between the public and private sectors have led to better informed decisions that ultimately save lives, solve investigations, uncover terrorist plots, apprehend criminals, thwart fraud, and help direct smart international investment.
Accordingly, as Congress evaluates amendments to Section 702, we urge a thoughtful, deliberate, and transparent process that acknowledges the critical role that OSINT, and the intelligence analysts that drive OSINT collections, play in upholding our national security.
Our adversaries, of course, have no limits in their efforts to undermine the US through mass data thefts and purchasing and scraping of private data on individual Americans and allies. We see elevating risks based on the activities of advanced state-backed threats from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and networks of proxy actors on every continent, which has led to increased risk and scale of cyber and physical attacks, ranging from ransomware to destructive malware campaigns and threats on critical infrastructure.
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It would therefore be devastating to US agencies and our foreign allies not to be able to leverage commercially available data and insight. As a result, while we encourage a nuanced and thoughtful debate around how OSINT can be leveraged in an ethical, privacy-focused way, amendments to Section 702 must not sacrifice the ability of agencies to swiftly and effectively use this data without draconian restrictions.
Fortunately, we need not sacrifice civil liberties and fundamental privacy rights to benefit from the great power and scale of OSINT and commercial intelligence. These technologies and practices which empower better illumination of hazy threats also empower better protection of civil liberties and privacy.
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