NPR ran a piece this week with Kimberly Dozier, intelligence correspondent for the AP, talking about the use of social media to gather open source information for intelligence. As Dozier notes, most of these professionals have ‘masters of librarian science’ (!) which enables them to find material ordinary folks never could, earning the title ‘ninja’ for their skills. The story even made Forbes. Few seemed to suspect anything really worrying in this or in the potential for such work to extend into our discomfort zones though there are some who are thinking a little more deeply about this (thank you, Kris Kotarski of the Montreal Gazette) I suspect we will be seeing more educational opportunities like our own certificate in Global Media and Research which aims to educate information professionals for intelligence work. Yes, there really is an art and science to mining information from open data sources and the intelligence community is very aware of it. As I blogged earlier on my experience at the IAFIE conference this year, there is a significant gap between existing intelligence education programs and the information educators that each group could usefully try to bridge.
[that ‘masters’ title mistake apparently irked some listeners and forced NPR to run a follow up explaining the correct form of degree for aspiring LIS folks. Can I suggest “Ninjomatics”? Ah, too late, it’s taken ]
V.M Daniel Regents Professor of Information