Open Source Exploitation

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, has proposed a novel approach to the translation backlog for the mountains of Saddam-era official documents seized in Iraq: declassify the entire lot and make it available on the Internet for translation by non-government resources.

Hoekstra said he would like to see the documents posted online, where people would be able to access copies and offer translations and interpretations of the material. He envisions it working like Wikipedia or open-source code on the Internet, where people are able to take original information and review and analyze it. In much the same way, he said the government could then draw from the public review to determine which documents contained important information and which were trivial.

Hoekstra's argument is that given the scarcity of government translation resources, the choice is between his solution and never seeing what's in those documents at all. There is something intuitively persuasive about this; our intelligence exploitation process should not evoke the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Yet there are valid and perhaps equally persuasive concerns about essentially doing the enemy's damage assessment for him, in public, on the Internet. Admittedly, these kinds of document caches may not be the best place to start for a fully open kind of approach (as opposed to, say, some kind of public-private initiative where the participating resources are subject to some screening short of a full security clearance). But certainly one could imagine the existence of a lesser-grade mass of foreign language material of interest that could be made available publicly without raising the same degree of concern.