“Intelligence in a Datadriven Age by Cortney Weinbaum and John N.T. Shanahan”

Abstract

Accessing and analysing news from around the world has become the key to understanding the global security environment. In view of this, in 1941, United States (U.S.) President Franklin D. Roosevelt established an office called the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), to be run out of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The office's mandate was simple: translate the news from around the world for US policy-makers to make informed decisions. However, in the past, there was only a handful of electronic and print media which needed to be scoured for news by analysts. But, in the current times, the situation has changed drastically. In today's world, there is a multitude of news platforms that produce an immense amount of news data that require a large number of analysts to process the information—making such an organisation uneconomical and unwieldy.