Honorable Robert Simmons speaks
Robert Simmons, former enlisted and officer of the US Army and Army Reserve and former Congressman for Connecticut. Rob Simmons has been the strongest advocate of Open Source in Congress. He currently serves as Connecticut’s Official Business Advocate.
“Today is a great day for Open Source Intelligence!”
He started out in HUMINT and IMINT (GEOINT) and was introduced to Open Source as a discipline 20 years ago, using the Yale Library for research. Then computing power and the internet changed things. He worked with, then Sergeant, Eliot Jardines.
The fight to use Open Source has been going on for more than 20 years, but a few years ago a few things took place. We were attacked on 9/11 and the intelligence was wrong in the analysis of the WMD threat in Iraq. This was a failure of imagination. The IC could not imagine the threat that Osama Bin Laden and his group could be to the United States. The FAA assessed that hijacking a plane would be the last resort in 1999. A book, also in 1999, was published on Bin Laden, based on open sources. the book assessed that Bin Laden was not to be ignored and was the biggest ideological threat.
The 9/11 Report concluded that the IC was dead wrong and was not able to collect good information on Iraq’s WMD program. In both cases, Mr. Simmons believes, that solid and robust Open Source Intelligence could have prevented both those events from taking place.
He says that public and private partnerships are critically important. Must make it possible for academic scholars, the media and the business community to participate.
