Competition brings improvement, and the intelligence community is facing no shortage of competition. As the Russia-Ukraine war and its troop movements provide a proving ground for open-source intelligence (OSINT) — the approach of using public information from anyone to produce intelligence — it’s clear that spy agencies are no longer the sole or even the timeliest source of information for policymakers. The impressive capabilities online sleuths have repeatedly demonstrated have driven intelligence officials to vow once again to give OSINT the big stage it deserves.

That’s no doubt welcome news, but for OSINT to be on prime time, spy agencies need to provide a level playing field for this new approach to compete with and potentially outperform other, traditional tradecrafts. However, a mechanism to validate the efficacy of different technologies apparently doesn’t exist in the intelligence community.