China’s open-source intelligence collection could give it advantage

Why it matters: Beijing's open-source intelligence collection could give it an advantage.

The United States and China are facing increased adversaries, with the US investing more in their intelligence collection capabilities.

With Beijing's investment in big data, mining publicly available information sources could give China an advantage in collecting intelligence on the United States and its allies.

While autocratic countries like China hide information about their army, the United States, as a democracy that tries to be responsive to its public, offers a vast amount of information about its military capabilities, doctrine, and planning.

China can mine that information for its own military advantages, looking for material it can use. The report details some of the work one prominent Chinese open-source intelligence company has done to analyze publicly available insights from the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon's in-house think tank. Recorded Future also reflected on how China has tried to gather information put out by the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.

Navy War College has a China Maritime Studies Institute and it produces a lot of open-source research on China, according to Zoe Haver, a threat intelligence analyst with Recorded Future. However, it is done in an academic setting, and eventually foreign governments consider it valuable intelligence. The military officials did not immediately respond to the report's findings.

China is mining information about the U.S. military.

China's intelligence-gathering skills have grown significantly in recent times, and Beijing's investment in open-source information has increased significantly in the past decade.

The definition of open-source intelligence is broad, but Recorded Future looked at information that the Intelligence agencies of China's People's Liberation Army were using to help them make plans and develop the military.

Recorded Future has scrutinized contract agreements the army has issued to private Chinese companies to gather a range of open-source information, including material about the U.S. military and its work on Taiwan's defense.

A. very much assumes the United States will, in some form, intervene in a Taiwan conflict, and they work very hard to prepare for that type of scenario, she said.

Many of the data collected by Beijing is likely to be available to one Chinese spy agency or another. According to Recorded Future analysts, China's intelligence agencies are walled off from each other and do not share information. And it may be easier for parts of the P.L. A. s intelligence arms to develop open-source information about American capabilities than to request classified information from a sister spy agency.

Recorded Future acknowledges there are security concerns given the data the United States and its allies make public, but cutting off broad access to the data may not be the answer.

But Haver said Recorded Future's awareness of Chinese Open-Source Intelligence gathering would help private-sector companies, the military and other government agencies better manage that risk and make it harder for automatic web crawlers to scrape information from public databases or websites. She also encouraged private companies to conduct thorough due diligence regarding Chinese firms seeking to obtain their information.

At the end of the day, we don't expect Western countries to close off their information environments, Hasr said. That would not even be a good thing. We value openness.