The report, “Navigating the Intelligence Community IT Roadmap,” analyzes key challenges facing the IC and outlines how existing and tested technology capabilities can help IC components gain a strategic advantage over adversaries.

The report’s timely release aligns with the IC’s five-year IT roadmap, which seeks to advance intelligence operations by promoting seamless collaboration, enhanced data sharing and management and the ability to deploy the newest tech innovations rapidly.

The report highlights a variety of currently available technical capabilities developed by GDIT as part of its long-standing work to support the U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, including:

• DeepSky — a private, multi-cloud, on-prem data center environment developed and maintained by GDIT that facilitates the testing of emerging technology and security capabilities from multiple providers in collaboration with government agencies and their partners. “It’s really difficult to ingest massive amounts of data from a bunch of tools and make it usable for an engineer, an analyst or an executive. So DeepSky helps make those tools work together,” says Ryan Deslauriers, director of cybersecurity at GDIT.

• Mission Partner Environments — a new generation of interoperable networking and data exchange environments. Originally designed to allow military units to exchange data with specific partners, these expanded information-sharing environments enable the selective yet secure sharing of sensitive and classified information with trusted military and coalition partners. MPEs make it possible to take a “full report, break out what can and can’t be released, and push it to the appropriate network virtually and automatically so that information gets to relevant users where they are in a timely fashion,” explains Jennifer Krischer, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who now serves as vice president for defense intelligence at GDIT.

• Raven — a mobile command center tech suite developed by GDIT that fits in the back of a truck. It extends and deploys the data mesh concept to mobile environments. It can be utilized for disaster relief, special forces operations, or disconnected environments, enabling operators to collect and disseminate data from the tactical edge directly to users on the ground and back to the enterprise. Raven is an example of how GDIT “enables teams to conduct their mission without having to develop, build, maintain, and operate the services internally,” notes Nicholas Townsend, senior director at GDIT.

• Federated Data Fabric — creates a unified data environment through a centralized service platform designed to streamline data curation, management, and dissemination and enable seamless access to data independent of its source or security level. It allows users on the network’s edge to discover, request, publish and subscribe to information within a federated network environment.

Workforce commitment

The report also highlights GDIT’s distinctive approach to hiring and training professionals with extensive defense, IC, and technical experience who uniquely understand the needs of the government’s mission.

“Our workforce two to five years from now will need to be different from what it is today and prepared to take advantage of new technology,” notes Chaz Mason, mission engineering and delivery lead at GDIT. Recognizing this, GDIT doubled its investment in tuition and technical training programs in 2023. More than 20,000 employees have taken at least one of our cyber, AI, and cloud upskilling programs, he said.

GDIT’s staff currently numbers 30,000 professionals supporting customers in over 400 locations across 30 countries; 25%+ of the workforce are veterans.

Read more about how GDIT’s vendor-agnostic technology and decades of government customer experience can help achieve the Intelligence Community’s data-sharing vision.

This article was produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop and DefenseScoop and sponsored by GDIT.

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Transcom chief Gen. Jackie Van Ovost shed light on how her team is prioritizing information-sharing with international partners and turning to open-source capabilities — with caution — to help hold U.S. rivals like China and Russia accountable and ultimately deter aggression.

“You see that the information is key, and how we scrape and get that information all together —  for us, bringing it up and combining it with information from other security levels is critical,” she told DefenseScoop on Monday during a media roundtable at AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber Conference.

Broadly, Transcom is a functional combatant command that’s charged with leading the Defense Department’s integrated global mobility operations via land, air and sea in times of peace and war. 

“One reality we’re certain of is that contested logistics will be the norm in any future fight,” Van Ovost explained. 

“China has invested heavily in securing their own logistics. From the largest maritime container fleet in the world to software and infrastructure — they are working hard to reshape the world and they understand that logistics is the soft power with hard consequences across the [diplomatic, information, military and economic spheres],” she also noted.

Van Ovost spotlighted some of the recent military and economic pressure China has been putting on its neighbors in the Indo-Pacific region — while also “clearly threatening Taiwan” — which, in her view, already demonstrates certain complex and emerging challenges associated with military logistics and associated operations of the present and future.

For instance, she noted a new national map that the Chinese government rolled out last month, claiming certain disputed territories and waters as its own. 

“I don’t think that expansion is going to stop and, frankly, our allies and partners in the Pacific are really very aware of this now, and the number one thing we can do is to build them together to try to have a common understanding of what is happening — and to name and shame when things occur,” she said.  

That “naming and shaming” has been a necessary tactic particularly lately, she suggested, as China’s Coast Guard and maritime militia have attempted to harass members of the Philippines military conducting resupply missions to their outpost at Second Thomas Shoal.

“They were shouldered by the China Coast Guard and they were water-cannoned by the China Coast Guard — which can hurt the boat and people onboard, right? And now there’s overhead imagery that shows the aggressive maneuvers by China, which became unclassified and sent out for people to see. So, name and shame — just like we did with Russia as they started building up on the border with Ukraine prior to their full scale invasion,” Van Ovost said.

But as her command increasingly leans on information-sharing and open-source capabilities to keep their own personnel and international partners informed, they’re also being deliberate about ensuring that data and insights are not tampered with or influenced by adversaries. 

“We do see how Russia is trying to take it and make it misinformation, and they take a piece of it that’s factual and they build a whole story around it. That is happening in other areas — we fully expect to be attacked in that way,” she said.

“So, our discernment is key,” Van Ovost told DefenseScoop.

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Mike Barretta is the senior manager of solution architecture for the US public sector at Elastic. He brings over two decades of industry experience in software development, data science, system administration and technical consulting.

Open software has long been recognized by federal civilian, defense and intelligence agencies for providing lower starting costs, faster development processes and community-driven support compared to proprietary software. But agencies often fail to capitalize on the full potential of open software.

One way they can realize greater value, save time and money, and deliver mission objectives faster is by asking a couple of critical questions: Is there a company affiliated with this software? And do they provide features or support that would help our efforts and reduce risk?

By answering these critical questions, mission leaders can make more informed decisions, improve operational capabilities, and ultimately reduce wasted spending.

A common scenario at many agencies occurs when users or developers download and adopt a free tool without taking the time to understand its origin or the additional features available with a license. As a result, agencies typically end up using as little as ten percent of the software’s full potential.

Build vs. Buy

Another key consideration relates to the “build versus buy” dilemma. Open products provide developers tremendous flexibility but usually require additional customization. This is a good thing: open software products are meant to be adapted to fit users’ specific needs, and that is one reason they are so important. All too often, however, developers opt to re-build existing features and solutions instead of considering licensed solutions already available in the product. These customizations can be brittle, poorly supported, and tightly coupled to a specific version of the product as compared to the features built by product engineers. The unfortunate outcome is a system unable to take advantage of the new features, optimizations, and security patches present in newer versions without substantial redevelopment costs. For instance, Elastic consistently rolls out new features and functions every six to eight weeks, ensuring the software remains cutting-edge and an effective fit for evolving missions. This is a challenging pace to match.

The advantages of partnering with open software companies

Working directly with open software companies like Elastic and engaging with their community offers several advantages. Agencies can tap into the expertise of those responsible for the software’s development, ensuring timely updates and influence on new features. Moreover, direct engagement streamlines the integration process, allowing mission leaders to maximize the benefits of open software while minimizing associated costs and time constraints. Additionally, as regular updates can be swiftly implemented, so is the process of safeguarding systems against emerging threats.

Commercially supported open software significantly reduces supply chain risks. Modern and secure development practices, audited release artifacts, and legal liability help open software companies to ensure the products they release are as free from vulnerabilities as any closed software product. Further, since the source code is available to the world, commercially supported open software is often more secure than closed since there are a great number of eyes looking for and reporting vulnerabilities. At Elastic, we have a bug bounty program through HackerOne that pays researchers, hackers, and others to find what we might miss. This proactive approach not only encourages the identification of security flaws but also shows a commitment to continuous security improvement.

The benefits of open software are increasingly evident as public sector and mission leaders face challenges in managing the volume of data they collect. According to new research, 45% of public sector organizations need help managing data volume. In addition, 31% of public sector leaders say they’re not utilizing data optimally across departments because data sits in siloed databases, or teams lack a single source of data truth for collaboration, analytics and data sharing.

Elastic is a prominent example of an open software company making a significant impact in the intelligence community. IC agencies can enhance mission delivery and citizen services by using Elastic to search massive amounts of data and derive insights. Through its innovative solutions, IC agencies can enhance mission delivery and improve citizen services by harnessing Elastic’s capabilities to search and extract insights.

Empowering the intelligence community with an open ecosystem of technologies

We believe that building a robust community requires collaboration, resource sharing, and sharing expertise. This collaboration leads to more effective use of software and tools. We also promote an open ecosystem, encouraging users to freely adopt and integrate their tools. As a company, we are agnostic about how their tools are used and support users’ freedom to experiment with different approaches.

Openness also extends to sharing. We encourage open standards as they enable sharing, reuse, and the easy adoption of best practices by others. We are active contributors to other open software projects, recently donating our data schema, ECS, to OpenTelemetry, a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) with a widely used set of open standards and tools for Observability.  Furthermore, these efforts benefit customers by fostering a collaborative environment and ensuring seamless integration into existing systems.

Decision-making is also a collaborative, data-driven activity as described in the IC data strategy. The new strategy presents four areas that agencies can act on over the next few years, including data interoperability: a core feature of open software like Elastic. As highlighted in a recent blog post, Elastic gives agencies the freedom to share code and architecture with other projects and systems when needed. Unlike the walled gardens of some closed systems, data is stored in non-proprietary formats, meaning both data and analytic methods are transferable within an enterprise architecture or to cross-agency initiatives. 

Elastic is a firm believer in the power of open software to power and grow our national security advantage.

 Learn more about how Elastic can help enhance mission delivery with open source.

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Over the course of the war so far, the group has used open-source technologies to supply dozens of intelligence reports with evidence of Russia-led efforts to force passportization on Ukrainians in occupied areas, destroy the nation’s cultural heritage sites and major medical facilities, and — among other international violations — force the relocation of thousands of Ukrainian children without consent from their parents. 

Historically, “in most cases, the victims of the things we document are dead. Here, in the children’s case — it’s the rarest thing I’ve seen in my career — the victims are alive. They’re kids and they’re in a hostage situation,” human rights investigator Nathaniel “Natty” Raymond told DefenseScoop in a recent interview.

Known for his demonstrated expertise tapping open-source capabilities to uncover war crimes and devastation around the globe over the last nearly two decades, Raymond now serves as executive director of Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab and a key Conflict Observatory researcher. The State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations officially unveiled the hub in May 2022, as an independent project it was supporting in collaboration with Esri, Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, PlanetScape Ai, and others.

Since then, Raymond and his colleagues have generated a platform to steadily and widely disseminate records and assessments regarding Russia-perpetrated war crimes, and — separately, but using similar methods and tools — an asset to remotely monitor intensifying conflict activities in Sudan.

In a recent briefing with DefenseScoop, he discussed how the U.S. government is shifting into a future where decision-support information and intelligence operations are largely “about leveraging open source to develop facts that can affect actions and outcomes.”

In the earliest days of government satellite imagery, data was primarily viewed “by the president and like three to four other people,” Raymond noted — whereas now, people have an expectation to see things that were once limited to the nation’s most secretive observation capabilities.

He shed light on how the Conflict Observatory’s unfolding research and measurable impacts demonstrate ways open-source technology is beginning to reshape military and humanitarian operations in real time. 

“This doesn’t change everything, but it changes a lot. And it’s not just about human rights and human security, it’s about the increasingly forward-facing, public-facing roles of technologies and tradecraft that were once only for classified spaces,” Raymond said.

‘They’re taking selfies’

“The Conflict Observatory provides a platform to independently document, verify, and disseminate open-source information on likely human rights abuses, war crimes, and other atrocities in countries of interest. This information is collected and preserved consistent with international standards for use in ongoing and future accountability efforts, including potential civil and criminal legal processes,” a State Department spokesperson told DefenseScoop on Thursday.

The nascent organization analyzes what the official noted State views as “reliable data,” to verify reports from other sources, like the media, first-hand accounts, and field reports.

“We are engaging with a broad range of efforts to preserve and document evidence of potential war crimes and other atrocities. In the case of Ukraine, this includes inquiries carried out by the United Nations, the Government of Ukraine, the expert missions established under the Moscow Mechanism of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, accountability-focused civil society organizations, and other international partners,” the spokesperson said in response to DefenseScoop’s questions regarding the agency’s application of such technologies.

Open-source intelligence, or OSINT, is generated via the capture, preservation, evaluation and analysis of publicly available raw data and information to answer specific questions. 

Nowadays, the term “open source is thrown around all the time — to the point where it’s like artificial intelligence — you could be talking about one thing, you could be talking about 30 things, you could be talking about nothing,” Raymond said.

“The way I define it is that there’s sort of four baskets of things that end up being relevant to open source,” he explained.

The first basket encompasses anything that any person can find on the internet. The second, in his view, is commercial data that not everyone can find on the internet — but that can be purchased or acquired often under licenses.

The third basket is “heuristic information, which is information about network functions,” Raymond said. Essentially, this is informatics or information about how records and data are processed, transmitted and stored.

The fourth basket — algorithms — builds on the other three. As researchers can track how all the information moves, from there they can use algorithms “to get from noise to signal quicker,” Raymond noted, and also comb through it all and provide needed insights at a quicker pace. 

“Often, having those algorithmic capacities itself allows insights from basket one that you wouldn’t have if you just had basket one. And so, really, it’s a workflow — everything on the internet to everything you can buy and license, to then everything you can begin to build sets around to understand when, where, how and why it moves. And then moving to [basket] four, which is then how can you build information filters and fusers to then accelerate your collection-to-analysis-to-action cycle — that’s the trick,” Raymond told DefenseScoop.

In addition to leading the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab, Raymond is also a lecturer in the Department of the Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases. His research interests concentrate on health implications of the forced displacement of humans; methodologies for assessing large-scale disasters; and the human rights and security implications of information communication technologies for vulnerable populations, and specifically in armed conflict.

He’s known in the field for helping pioneer the application of satellite imaging and remote sensing to spotlight deteriorating humanitarian conditions and record evidence associated with alleged mass atrocities and crimes against humanity. 

Building on that career, Raymond was teaching at Yale for about four years when he said a good friend and former colleague from State called him up in early 2022 to talk about the need for a means to preserve and use publicly and commercially accessible information and records as evidence of possible future war crimes in Ukraine.

“I felt like Paul Revere level — hopping on the horse and going to Lexington and Concord — because, even before the attack started, we were moving into position to be ready,” Raymond said. 

The team of experts he was working with shared a “critical two weeks at the start of February” right before Russia’s invasion, he said, which involved identifying proper personnel systems and data sources and developing workflows. From there, they started making “assumptions, which turned out to be right,” he noted, about what the nature of the violence was going to look like, against what the confounding variable factors were going to be in the imagery and data availability. 

“We made a decision that our first focus was going to be on attacks on hospitals. And we thought that was going to be one of the critical battle fronts — which it turned out to be, with Mariupol — so we developed the base layer, and we started trying to get as much imagery to do change detection as possible,” Raymond explained.

That initial phase was particularly difficult because it played out during a harsh winter, with significant cloud cover and snow — causing a lack of baseline imagery in certain critical places they needed to see how things were going to change over time. 

“The way I describe it, from February and April, is it felt like the geospatial equivalent that we were Spitfire pilots in the Battle of Britain, where they slept with their boots on in the cockpit. There was a point where within I think it was four to six weeks … we did over 250 [battle damage assessments] in 20 operational days. That meant we were at a point where, across the team, we were doing artillery damage assessments, fire damage assessments on an average of almost like 30 to 45 minutes to target. So it was Battle of Britain-like, I think. Obviously I don’t know within [the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and National Reconnaissance Office] how fast they’ve gone — but it is manually the fastest BDA tempo I’ve ever seen in my life,” Raymond told DefenseScoop.

The Conflict Observatory uses commercial imagery data from Maxar, BlackSky, and PlanetScape Ai and others, as well as commercial synthetic aperture radar data, produced from sensors that give off energy and then document the amount of that energy reflected back after engaging with Earth. This essentially provides the capability for humans to “see through” dense clouds. 

Early on, the observatory was leaning heavily on Maxar’s capabilities, but since then — across Sudan and Ukraine efforts — the team is “now ‘playing the orchestra more’ and being able to do tip and cue,” Raymond said.

In its most recent publication on Ukraine, the hub presents “evidence of systematic and widespread attacks on medical facilities in Mariupol during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine” from Feb. 24 to May 20, 2022. 

Researchers geolocated all medical facilities in Mariupol and cross-corroborated them in a minimum of two publicly available databases. Two or more analysts then conducted pre- and post–satellite imagery damage assessment — ultimately finding that 77% of buildings providing medical care sustained damage in that siege. Building sizes were not correlated with damage, the analysts noted, which they said suggest “the targeting of medical facilities or indiscriminate, ubiquitous destruction.”

“This is the first evidence of the scale of alleged war crimes in an ongoing conflict,” the researchers wrote.

In prior reports on devastation in Ukraine, the Conflict Observatory has also uncovered evidence of damage and looting to more than 1,680 Ukrainian cultural heritage sites; discoveries of mass, unmarked graves at Pishchanske Cemetery in Izyum after the city’s liberation from Russian control; a decrease of Kyiv’s nighttime light production following a wave of missile and drone strikes; and a Russian filtration system to register and detain Ukrainian citizens in the eastern area of Donetsk Oblast — in that case violating international humanitarian law.

“Our most well-known report since we started on both Sudan and Ukraine is the children’s report from February of this year, which helped catalyze the indictment of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and [Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights] Maria Lvova-Belova on two war crimes — charges of illegal transfer and deportation of Ukrainian children,” Raymond said.

His team asserted in their report that they confirmed at least 6,000 Ukrainian children detained by the Russian government and identified a network of more than 40 stations where toddlers, kids and teenagers were being held in custody.

“Imagery was involved in that, but it was a significantly junior player, compared to OSINT,” Raymond explained.

The work was essentially what he called “a synthesis of social media data” from various apps, combined with photogrammetry analysis of selfies of Russian officials. Satellite imagery was helpful in geolocation, but it was a supporting character to OSINT in ways it could not have been in certain places perhaps in Africa, where the digital infrastructure is much different.

Raymond said his team knew they wanted to analyze evidence that could inform allegations for a report on what it deemed Russia’s systematic program for the re-education and adoption of Ukrainian children. 

“We were banging our head against the wall until our head went through the wall,” he said.

Experts did not feel that the data they had access to was ready for application in the summer of 2022, but by the fall, they realized there were Russian officials on the local level, Raymond noted, who “appeared to be the heart of the chain of command implementing this program — and they’re taking selfies.”

His team used those selfies to geo-locate an associated logistics network and network of camps holding young Ukrainians. 

“Then we realized, wait a second, each of those transfer acts is a unique offload of children that actually helps us control for redundancy. Then we started to count the numbers, and that got us to the 6,000 number — which we know is low — but we got that by beginning to aggregate the open source where it was the perpetrator themselves that were the decisive information source,” Raymond explained.

The Conflict Observatory measures its impact in multiple ways.

“The first and most important is — are we helping to stop the abuse and to have accountability for the abuse? Or in the case of the children’s report — have the kids come home?” Raymond said. 

In the majority of cases he’s tracked in his career, victims of incidents he helps record are typically already dead. So, using open-source technologies to save people in near-real-time feels to him new and rare.

“But the number one impact for us is — did the people come back? Or did the grave get found? Did the perpetrator go to trial? Did the abuse stop?” Raymond said. 

To date, numbers available to his team from civil society groups facilitating repatriation suggest that approximately 400 children have been returned, he confirmed on Friday.

His crew also considers whether and how their work affects U.S. and global policies. 

“I would say yes, we have, on Ukraine. We’ve put issues on the table — from destruction of grain silos to the children’s issue to the filtration camps — in a way that they were not on the front burner until we really were able to show the meta-trend impact of incidents in aggregate and summarize that and say, ‘Here’s the so-what,’” Raymond said.

Another level of impact, which he noted is easiest to quantify, is if the reports inform the public and change the narrative and literacy around issues being documented.

“Ukraine has the richest production of open-source information in a conflict that I’ve ever seen,” Raymond also told DefenseScoop.

He noted that his team has been able to apply open-source data to reach massive investigative conclusions, where the imagery is not leading — but corroborates — phenomena. One reason why Raymond finds that notable is because future conflicts “are going to look more and more like Ukraine.” 

“And they’re going to look like [that] when we’re doing human security work and evidence collection work. We’re doing that in a highly kinetic, social, digital terrain where, basically, we are changing the environment as we are observing the environment,” he said.

The ‘social digital terrain’

When asked about the original roots of the Conflict Observatory, Raymond said: “Well, the story really begins in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 2005.”

At the time, he was a humanitarian aid worker responding to Hurricane Katrina with Oxfam America. Sitting in old church pews there, surrounded by rubble, he almost immediately noticed that Black communities went “days” in the initial response after hurricane landfall without receiving government assistance.

“And then we went to the wealthier, whiter communities — and they had aid pretty immediately,” Raymond said. 

As he tried to understand why the response in some communities was so slow, he observed that “the population in African American communities had less cell phones than the communities uptown.” He eventually defined that phenomena as “digital invisibility” to highlight this disparity in how quickly responders were getting reports of need and seeing the damage.

Raymond went on to write a memo for Google about how its commercial data and satellite imagery could have improved the common operating picture and decision loop on identifying those demographic groups that were being left out of the response. However, back then access to cell phones was much more of a luxury than it is nowadays. “So, that memo sat in a drawer until October of 2010,” Raymond said. 

Around that time, he was working on an entirely different project investigating abuses against detainees in Defense Department and CIA custody for Physicians for Human Rights, when he got a call out of the blue from someone with a request.

“He was in a hotel room, right then, eating a margherita pizza with movie star George Clooney, and he wanted to share the Google memo with George Clooney, because George Clooney was looking to build a civilian reconnaissance capability to detect potential attacks against civilian communities on the border between Sudan and what was about to be the newest country in the world — South Sudan — which was seceding at the start of 2011, from Sudan under the Nova Scotia accords,” Raymond said.

That conversation eventually led to a check from Clooney, Brad Pitt, Don Cheadle and Matt Damon to build what became the Satellite Sentinel Project. In collaboration with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, the project essentially encompassed attempting to be “the first use of commercial satellite imagery — which had once been really only the domain of ‘Fortune 500’ companies, the U.S. intelligence community and the defense sector,” Raymond noted — for human security analysis and civilian protection in Sudan.

He said the roots of the open-source analysis and action-based intelligence (ABI) his team at the Conflict Observatory are doing now “at scale and at tempo,” trace back to that work.

During the first and second battles of Fallujah, the Marines used ABI to fuse the temporal and spatial signatures, or the time and place metadata, across many multi-source intelligence streams. They started building spreadsheets to generate means of observing what experts refer to as “the mosaic effect” — the linking of multiple datasets to reveal new information — on what was happening there, for purposes of fighting that battle.

“We basically took the ABI concept and started to use it with commercial satellite imagery for detecting and documenting attacks on civilians,” Raymond said. “What we’re doing now is just an expansion of that proof of concept.”

Now, the Sudan Conflict Observatory remote monitoring platform documents conflict activity in that country, and tracks damage to infrastructure caused by combatants, military equipment movements, and rapid population shifts. Results of those reports are often shared by the State Department.

Offering metaphors on some of the differences between the team’s work in the different locations, Raymond said: “In Ukraine, we’re ‘CSI’ or we’re ‘Law and Order’. We’re Jerry Orbach and Chris Noth trying to collect the shell casings in digital plastic bags for prosecutors. And then in the case of Sudan, we’re the alarm system, we are basically dispatched for 911, and we’re trying to tell humanitarian actors and protection actors and policy actors where they should be focused and what’s next.”

Those demonstrate two inherently different missions. 

“But what joins them together is accountability, early warnings, early response, civilian protection. What joins them together is that the means and the methods are the same — and they are happening in a place which is extremely contested,” Raymond told DefenseScoop.

Technology and societies have changed a lot since 2005, and so has what he deems “the social digital terrain,” or the intersection of informatics, social systems and physical infrastructures.

Access to such infrastructure — and contestation and control of pipes, cell towers and fiber optic networks for strategic advantage between state and non-state actors — are now a feature of modern-day armed conflicts, in Raymond’s view. Civilian security and human rights reporting and protection are thus “hanging in the balance of that infrastructure space that is being contested by companies, by states and by non-state actors — who all understand that controlling that space is not an accessory to the battlefield, it is the battlefield terrain,” he said.

The level of OSINT now occurring in Ukraine isn’t comparable to Sudan, in some ways because, in Africa, the digital terrain is typically more fragile. 

“The Ukraine reports are strategic for prosecutorial direction, and for strategic view of what’s happening and broad trends of potential criminality by Russia’s forces. In the case of Sudan, it’s more on the tactical level of tactically what are forces doing that affect the humanitarian delivery space, the civilian protection space and the day-to-day policy space,” Raymond said. 

He also praised the Biden administration for deciding to authorize the Conflict Observatory and other open-source projects for the public before Russia invaded Ukraine.

“It represents a major shift, which is that, in the past, the goal of decision support — what we produce — happened in a classified space for decision makers,” who Raymond noted would choose methods and a course of action, “then maybe tell the American people” about their approach.

“Now, this is the shift [toward] what happens when you take these capabilities and start to talk to the world with them and put them in a way where they can be read by anyone. What does that do for countering disinformation? What does that do for holding people accountable, both diplomatically and legally in court? What does that do for changing the behavior of bad actors and speeding the decision calculus of good actors? I don’t have all the answers to that — but now we can ask those questions, because we have the Conflict Observatory and other similar activities,” he said.

Raymond also hinted that his team ultimately aims to expand initiatives to nations beyond Ukraine and Sudan down the line. 

“Well, we did one, and now we do two. If we don’t mess up, maybe we’ll do three. But at this point, the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Whether there is a different party in power after the next election — whether this program is renewed or not — the proof of concept has happened. The way I think about it is like [legendary U.S. military pilot] Chuck Yeager with the Bell X-1 Glamorous Glennis. I don’t know what planes are going to come next, but they’re all going to be built in reference to the fact that we broke the sound barrier,” Raymond said.

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