Overview[]
The Open Source Center (OSC) is the U.S. Government's premier provider of foreign open source intelligence. The OSC is charged with:
- Collecting, translating, producing, and disseminating open source information that meets the needs of policymakers, the military, state and local law enforcement, operations officers, and analysts throughout the U.S. Government.
- Helping to enable open source capabilities in other parts of the Government and military.
- Hosting open source material on OpenSource.gov for Government-wide use.
OSC produces more than 2,300 products daily, including translations, transcriptions, analyses, reports, video compilations, and geospatial intelligence, to address short-term needs and longer-term issues. Its products cover issues that range from foreign political, military, economic, science, and technology topics, to counterterrorism, counterproliferation, counternarcotics, and other homeland security topics.
OSC also collects "gray literature," which is material with very limited distribution, such as academic papers, brochures, leaflets, and other publicly distributed materials.
OSC provides training through its Open Source Academy, consultative services, and personnel exchanges.
| “ | The OSC contributes to the counterintelligence (CI) community's effort against China by monitoring foreign-language publications and Web sites for indications of threats and sharing this information with appropriate agencies, including law enforcement. OSC translates significant open source information on CI issues and monitors reporting on economic intelligence and industrial espionage. OSC has organized conferences and working groups aimed at countering specific CI challenges and supports a wide variety of ad hoc requests from offices throughout the Intelligence Community.[1] | ” |
References[]
Sources[]
- U.S. National Intelligence: An Overview 2011, at 19.
- 2008 Annual Report to Congress on Foreign Economic and Industrial Espionage, at 7.