COVID-19 Highlights Need for Public Intelligence

Hobbled by secrecy and timidity, the U.S. intelligence community has been conspicuously absent from efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, the most serious national and global security challenge of our time.

的流下nce of intelligence today represents a departure from the straightforward approach of then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats who offered the clearestpublic warning2019年1月，参议院情报委员会年度威胁听证会上大流行的风险：

“We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support,” DNI Coatstestified.

But this year, for the first time in recent memory, the annual threat hearing was canceled, reportedly to avoid conflict between intelligence testimony and White House messaging. Though that seems humiliating to everyone involved, no satisfactory alternative explanation has been provided. The 2020 worldwide threat statement remains classified, according to an ODNI denial of a Freedom of Information Act request for a copy. And intelligence agencies have been reduced torecirculating提醒从疾病控制中心洗手并练习社会疏远。

The US intelligence community evidently has nothing useful to say to the nation about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, its current spread or anticipated development, its likely impact on other security challenges, its effect on regional conflicts, or its long-term implications for global health.

These are all topics perfectly suited to open source intelligence collection and analysis. But the intelligence community禁用其开源门户去年。公众是禁止even from that.

It didn’t — and doesn’t — have to be that way.

1993年，美国科学家联合会创建了一个国际电子邮件网络，称为Prom-Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases— which was intended to help discover and provide early warning about new infectious diseases.

Run on a shoestring budget and led by Stephen S. Morse, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, Jack Woodall and Dorothy Preslar, ProMED was based on the notion that “public intelligence” is not an oxymoron. That is to say, physicians, scientists, researchers, and other members of the public — not just governments — have the need for current threat assessments that can be readily shared, consumed and analyzed. The initiative quickly proved its worth.

In fact, it has continued to prove its worth up to the present day.

“正是注意到的是，Prom首先提醒世界2003年的SARS爆发，这是一篇关于Promed的帖子on Dec. 30, 2019— about chatter on the Chinese social network Weibo — that first spread word of a novel coronavirus, soon identified as the cause of COVID-19, outside China.” See“The doomed 30-year battle to stop a pandemic”保罗·威尔斯（Paul Wells），Maclean’s, April 21.

ProMED, which is now managed by the International Society for Infectious Diseases, is unclassified, free, andopen to subscriptionby anyone.

“ProMED illustrates how NGOs can, in some cases, efficiently accomplish what large, bureaucratically burdened institutions cannot even begin,” theFAS公共利益报告said in 1996.

Today, when national and global security concerns touch almost every household, the need for public intelligence is greater than ever, and it could become one focus of a reconfigured U.S. intelligence apparatus.