USNA News Article

Intelligence Expert Discusses Cyber Awareness at Naval Academy

September 13, 2012

By MC2 Alexia Riveracorrea

Chief Intelligence Strategist Jeffrey Bardin of Treadstone 71 spoke to Naval Academy midshipmen, faculty and staff Sept. 11 about the importance of open source intelligence and the variety of tools the military, and its enemies, can use to gather information.

Open source intelligence is a form of intelligence collection management that involves finding, selecting and acquiring information from publicly available sources. Treadstone 71 is a company that analyzes this information to make recommendations to its clients.

Adversaries, cyber criminals and hackers use multiple collection efforts targeted against these open sources of organizational and employee information. An organization’s enemies can scour blogs, forums, chat rooms and personal websites to piece together information that is used to harm government and commercial organizations.

“There is so much information you can find in newspapers, forums, tweets, websites, video and audio without breaking the law,” said Bardin. “You take those data points, produce them and organize them in such a way that it starts to form information. Then you analyze that information even further and it becomes something actionable, something that you can use from an intelligence perspective for policymakers, senior leadership, and officers, depending upon the organization they are in.”

For example, some of the tools Bardin shared have the ability to track users, find out the first 10 tweets a user ever produced, and track their first 10 followers.

In the open source arena these tools and methods are used for espionage, competitive intelligence and intellectual property purposes while maintaining anonymity. It can also be used as a defense.

“You can take that information to execute counter-strategies and for warfare psychological opportunities,” he said. “That information can be used to defend yourself or deceive or attack your enemy.”

Bardin said this knowledge is important for midshipmen because of the wide use of social media online. People don’t realize how the information they post online can potentially give away operational security secrets.

“Almost everyone at the Naval Academy uses Facebook and Twitter, and they publish everything online without thinking of the consequences of what is going on out there,” he said.

Everything is tied together from a cyber perspective, Bardin said. Even our weapons systems are based in the cyber realm.

“If we don’t start securing our capabilities right from the beginning, which we don’t do in a lot of cases, we suffer the breaches we see all the time in the newspaper.”

Bardin served as a cryptologic linguist in the U.S. Air Force and later as an officer in the Air National Guard. He has bachelor’s degree in Middle East studies and Arabic from Trinity College and a master’s in information assurance from Norwich University.

He is a professor in the master’s programs in cyber intelligence, counterintelligence, cybercrime and cyber terrorism at Utica College.