The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) will deliver an initial tasking, collection, processing, exploitation, and dissemination (TCPED) system for the open source defense intelligence enterprise and select U.S. allies. The system, known as POSTMAN (Primary Open Source Tasking Management Aggregation Network), will provide a single platform for open source intelligence (OSINT) collection and dissemination.
First reported by SIGNAL magazine, POSTMAN is expected to be available across the defense intelligence enterprise by the end of 2024. According to Alan MacDougall, who leads the Science and Technology Directorate at DIA, fully developing all POSTMAN functionality will take three years.
The platform will also be available in the other “Five Eyes” nations: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
The DIA Science and Technology Directorate is home to the Open Source Intelligence Integration Center. In February 2024, federal systems integrator Leidos was awarded a $143 million task order to support the platform.
POSTMAN: A new era in OSINT for the U.S. Intelligence Community
POSTMAN represents a paradigm shift in defense intelligence. This transformative initiative, powered by AI and cloud computing, promises to deliver faster, more accurate, and actionable open source intelligence.
“Artificial intelligence and machine learning really are about applying the technologies associated with very agile compute to identify patterns in data. When you do so — because the computers operate much faster than certainly my brain — it can really enhance the efficiency by which we both collect the data and interpret the data, as well as the effectiveness, in other words, the relevance of the data or the insights it can provide against targets or threats of interest to us,” MacDougall was quoted in SIGNAL magazine.
AI-Automated efficiencies for OSINT
The amount of data available on open-source platforms has continued to rise exponentially. The intelligence community has increasingly focused on harnessing the data accessible on public forums, social media channels, and platforms and applying it to their missions.
The unending scale of data has resulted in laborious toil across analysts trying to draw correlations and understand the context for missions. The human bottleneck of analyst workflows is untenable at data generation and transmission speed. Faster data processing and analysis enable rapid and informed decision-making, which is crucial in time-sensitive situations.
However, many U.S.-based privacy laws and intellectual property rights have made obtaining the data legally challenging. It has also led to the rise of data brokers who legally acquire and resell data collected from various platforms and services, such as credit brokers, mobile apps, and prescription providers.
Open source intelligence remains a valuable but challenging domain amidst a sea of data. POSTMAN has ambitious objectives, but if it succeeds, it will completely change OSINT for U.S. intelligence and its Five Eyes partners.
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