The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released a document outlining citation and reference standards for open source intelligence, commercially available information and publicly available information, Federal News Network reported Tuesday.
The Intelligence Community Standards, or ICS, document signed on Dec. 2 seeks to standardize how intelligence agencies should cite open source data and commercial information, including artificial intelligence-backed services, in their reports and products.
“In many ways, this has made the citing of PAI, CAI and OSINT much easier to do,” Eliot Jardines, director of operations at the OSINT Foundation, said of the new IC document.
The former head of open source efforts at ODNI stated that the ICS replaces a 2017 standards document that was not open for the public.
“Having this standards document be unclassified means it’s available for industry to use, and certainly for academia to use so those future open source officers can be trained,” Jardines said.
The president of Gnosis Solutions noted that the new document provides transparency and enables the protection of privacy and civil liberty.
“At the same time, because the standards are so well articulated in when we need to be completely explicit about where we get this and where in other instances we might not want to do that, it also enhances operational security,” Jardines added.