Intelligence work — both in government and in the private sector — has changed more in the past decade than at any point since the end of the Cold War. The challenge today is not only gaining access to information, but managing its volume, velocity, and uneven quality.  The fastest-growing streams available to U.S. national security decision-makers come from  commercial satellites, public social media, sensors embedded in civilian infrastructure, academic research, and private-sector cybersecurity reporting.

Commercial geospatial constellations, high-cadence imagery, and real-time open-source analysis have made battlefields and supply chains more transparent to states, firms, and non-state actors alike. Open and commercial sources now sit alongside — and often ahead of — traditional classified reporting, with the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) adopting formal strategies to treat them as first-class sources rather than afterthoughts. The task for the next generation of collectors, analysts, and engineers is to extract coherence and trust from this flood, turning an information environment defined by abundance and noise into one that still supports timely, defensible judgments. 

Students tend to imagine intelligence as espionage or covert action — a world of stolen secrets. The reality is that most intelligence today involves separating signal from noise across open,  commercial, and classified data and then synthesizing it into meaningful insight. Both the intelligence community and large companies now confront the same structural problem: threats and data streams are multiplying, but budgets and headcount are not, creating a growing gap between what can be collected and what can realistically be processed. Private-sector threat intelligence teams, working with far smaller staffs, have often moved faster in deploying automation and AI to tame open-source and cyber feeds — but they wrestle with data overload,  noisy indicators, and source-reliability issues every bit as much as government does. 

This symposium is meant to expose engineering and international-security students to this reality and to give them a window into where strategic intelligence is headed in an increasingly complex information environment. Panelists will show that the next generation of intelligence professionals will have to integrate open-source intelligence, commercial data, and classified reporting into coherent assessments — and that doing so is as much a design and workflow problem as it is an analytic one.