As national security operations become more and more digital and threat actors shift their operations to cyberspace, one of the most critical tools in the pursuit of US national security is data. Decision makers rely on data feeds from a variety of sources, including intelligence programs of record, analytic assessments, and publicly available information (PAI). There is notable progress by the intelligence community in leveraging the growing pool of PAI data sources to predict future events and threats. Event and threat prediction would give analysts and warfighters a significant advantage in the battlefield to preemptively counter threats before they come to fruition. While the next battlespace rapidly shifts to the internet, the modernization of information technology systems in all aspects of modern life have created an explosion of data about people, places, things, and events that decision makers can use to gain a critical advantage in Operational Security (OPSEC) posture and knowledge about adversaries and their activities. The velocity and variety of PAI that decision makers need to analyze has rapidly outpaced the human ability to parse it in a timely manner. This leads to significant intelligence gaps and delays in the production of intelligence that create significant disadvantages for those who do not effectively grapple it. Modern forces need to use every edge available to make analysis of PAI quicker and more effective to gain insight on threat actors and achieve critical defense objectives. However, the quest for information can quickly lead to an unintended breach in security posture when patterns emerge in queries or collections of that publicly available information. Commercial entities routinely fuse multiple factors like network heuristics along with client information such as search terms and source technology information to create a persona that rapidly exposes and exploits what a user is interested in well beyond their expectations. Rapidly gaining insight across disparate information modalities in publicly and private information domains and fusing them together to create a dynamic operating picture can prove extremely challenging and resource intensive. Black Cape engineers have decades of experience supporting Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and the intelligence community in exploitation and analysis of publicly available information without exposure to specific national security interests. Decision makers must rapidly integrate the deluge of PAI into their intelligence production processes to fully understand a rapidly changing technical battlefield.
