1. Baseball Analogy Harnessing the Power of the Crowd
OSINT
HUMINT
SIGINT
IMINT
MASINT
Our team likes analogies. Here’s mine. If the information universe is a baseball game, then we can liken the governments to the team, and the rest of the world to the crowd. The governments’ traditional tools for winning the information game are the secret disciplines. HUMINT tries to recruit a player to predict where the ball will go, and send someone to catch it—or not. SIGINT plants a listening device in the dug-out, trying to overhear plans and intentions. IMINT takes an overhead photo of the field every three days and tries to call the game that way. MASINT sniffs for the ball, and the gloves. OSINT changes the rules—we give everyone in the audience a glove, and any catch by a member of the crowd is an out. That’s how we handle the information explosion—everyone gets to play, and they know we will pay cash or kind when they send us the ball they caught. It is a universal unstructured winning order of battle.