Lawmaker calls for CIA center to become independent agency

A senior Republican lawmaker on Wednesday called for removing the nation's center for publicly available intelligence from the CIA, arguing that it not adequately supported and haunted by past scandals.

House Homeland Security Intelligence Subcommittee Chairman Rob Simmons, R-Conn., said the Open Source Center at Langley, Va., should be turned into an independent agency. The center was created last November by National Intelligence Director John Negroponte and then CIA Director Porter Goss as the government's premiere agency for collecting and processing "open source intelligence," such as information that is available to the public in newspapers and books.

Simmons, speaking at a forum in Washington hosted by LexisNexis, said the use of this type of intelligence should be considered its own discipline within the intelligence community.

"Every discipline needs a home and the current open source center ... is still part of the CIA, so it's still the ugly stepchild of the intelligence community," he said. "But I think they need more independence to reach the level that I think they need to reach for this discipline to survive and prosper."

Simmons said he fears non-governmental entities, such as universities, will not interact with the center if it remains at the CIA. "Why is that?" he asked. "We all know that in the late '60s and '70s the FBI and the intelligence community conducted operations that encroached on the academic community."

Simmons lambasted critics of open source intelligence who claim it is not as important as other activities within the intelligence community, such as signals intelligence and human intelligence. "It is a discipline. You collect the information. You don't collect the intelligence," he said. "You process it and you analyze it and then you produce something out of the information that you have collected and processed and analyzed, and what you produce is called intelligence."

He added that open source intelligence is "relatively cheap" and "the products are exportable and sharable." But he also acknowledged that some progress is being made on integrating open source information into intelligence activities. For example, at least 30 reports based on open source intelligence have made it into the president's daily brief this year, which is one of the most highly valued intelligence documents within government.

"I think the time is right for open source. I think we know the benefits. We still know it's the ugly stepchild but at least the ugly stepchild is getting a chance to go to the dance. Getting in the PDB is kind of like getting an invitation to the dance," Simmons said.

Simmons also acknowledged that excessive classification of information impedes information sharing. "I do believe that there are some real problems with over-classification," he said. "Today, with the focus on information sharing ... people are realizing how difficult it is to operate at a state and local level ... if you have all these classification restrictions."