Former CIA Official Says OSINT Can Help US Intel Community Crack Chinese Leadership’s Code

GovCon Wire | Dennis Wilder

The United States' intelligence agencies are using open-source intelligence in an effort to understand the internal political messaging of the Chinese Communist Party, since it has been difficult for them to recruit top-level human sources in Beijing. According to former CIA official Dennis Wilder, it is necessary to have extensive knowledge of both language and history in order to analyse state propaganda publications such as the People's Daily and the People's Liberation Army Daily.

Since algorithms are unable to understand these classical references, it was not by means of explicit statements but through historical comparisons to Mao Zedong that the removal of General Zhang Youxia in January—who was the vice chairman of the Central Military Commission—was communicated to the troops. On the other hand, Chinese intelligence agencies make active use of American social media sites in order to detect insider threats, as demonstrated by the case of a sailor who was prosecuted for selling Navy secrets to China. This kind of digital exposure allows adversarial parties to focus on research and development professionals who publicly declare their sensitive security clearances, thus systematically weakening the security of the United States' research sector.

Comment

The use by the Chinese Communist Party of subtle, historically based messages in publications such as the PLA Daily is a deliberate way of countering Western signals intelligence. When it sends out important political and military instructions via public allegories in an analogue style, Beijing takes advantage of the inherent weaknesses in the automated systems used by Western intelligence agencies. These automated parsing algorithms are unable to understand the historical allegories.

As a result, the analytical bottleneck causes the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency to have to redirect their resources from pure technical collection to in-depth linguistic translation. This change eventually leads to a longer tactical warning cycle for the Western commanders who are keeping an eye on the decision-making processes of the Central Military Commission.

Strategic Question for Discussion

What would be the effect on the division of labour between technical signals collection and human-centric open-source analysis in the prevention of serious warning failures if the Central Military Commission tends to use historically coded allegories when communicating its decisions?

The evidence points to a trend in which a move towards the use of historically charged messaging diminishes the value of direct technical interception and instead raises the importance of specialised open-source analysts. I believe that this development shows a necessary convergence in which signals intelligence should mainly be concerned with indicating when communications take place, while in-depth cultural translation is responsible for understanding the true intention. As a result, there is a greater risk of misjudging important changes in direction within the Central Military Commission if the two fields are kept strictly separate.

Share your assessment in the comments below.

To read in details click here