Today the German-speaking wire services carried „news“ about Google and the CIA company In-Q-Tel investing in the Cambridge, Mass. data mining and analysis company Recorded Future in order to ramp up their OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) capabilities. Even as I am waiting for the shrieks from our data privacy advocates reaching new heights, I can’t help noting the 3-week delay between this “revelation” by papers such as the reputed “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” and the original piece which Wired.com ran on July 28 – which is now being “disclosed” as an almost literal translation. Come on, this information had been public, and everybody could find it through the search engines… and the German-speaking public is getting this now?
Was H.M. Pharma Consultancy aware of this early? No, because we weren’t paying particular attention to matters of U.S. National Security efforts then, and we aren’t now. Obviously, our focus is elsewhere. However, this is a good opportunity to state, just for the record, that we have been developing and refining what effectively are OSINT capabilities for the past decade. Much of what we have published, especially our more recent analyses in Cambridge Healthtech Institute’s Insight Pharma Reports, would not have been identified without this know-how – which is all about identifying, weighing, linking and synthesizing information that is, in principle, in the public domain. It can be challenging – and it also can be fun – finding out that the “undisclosed” drug candidate a developer company referred to in its public statements is, with a high degree of probability, the known compound “X.” Our recently published Drug Repositioning Report (also see earlier entries in this blog) contains examples of such burrowing.