The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is launching a new research program to help anticipate significant societal events, it was announced Wednesay.
The Open Source Indicators program, through the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, will develop and test methods that could assist intelligence analysts in anticipating the events.
ODNI said the OSI program will focus on events that include political and humanitarian crises, mass violence, mass migrations, disease outbreaks, economic instability, rescue shortages and responses to natural disasters.
Many large events are preceded by big changes in communications, consumption and population movement, ODNI said. The OSI program will use statistical methods that combine public data to alert analysts of changes in population behavior.
“OSI’s methods, if proven successful, could provide early warnings of emerging events around the world,†said Jason Matheny, OSI program manager.
It has taken this long to launch such a program. Something like this has been on my mind for ages. We know from a long life’s worth of experiences that ‘stuff’ is going to happen, and after a few
years between certain major stuff , something is going to happen within a time range . It’s almost like clock work and an alarm going off. You may wake up shortly before the alarm goes off, but you know it is going to go off. Same thing with events . Your mind is restless, knowing something is bound to happen soon because it has been within that range that certain events take place. Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case!!!