HONOR MAHONY
The democratic uprisings in north Africa have exposed the limits of member states‘ on-the-ground knowledge of the region, but a project sponsored by EU money aims to get national intelligence agencies used to the idea of sharing information on everything from brewing conflicts to migration flows and terror threats.
In an unassuming building a stone’s throw from the European Commission’s headquarters in Brussels, a group of experts is overseeing the development of software that will make it easier to deal with what intelligent experts call the „tsunami of information“ in the public sphere.
While the information is in the open – either in traditional sources such as newspapers or radios or online in blogs and social networking sites – harvesting and analysing so-called „open-source intelligence“ in order to better anticipate or manage events is hampered by a lack of compatible technology. (more on euobserver.com)
