One Voice or Many? Stakeholder Interactions in Building a Public Intelligence Culture

Hybrid threats weaponize the right to freedom of expression and make democratic societies vulnerable by further subverting trust in publicly available information. In this context, citizens become a target of ill-intended information operations and, subsequently, broadcasters of hybrid aggressors’ narratives, unwarily favoring foreign actors’ interests, with negative impact on the security of their own countries, against liberal democracy and, eventually, against their own interests. Intelligence Communities (ICs) have perfected methods of collecting, processing, analyzing, and evaluating information in order to provide threat assessments to policymakers. The public dimension of intelligence has rarely been approached and seldom as more than a risk or vulnerability to be mitigated or accepted only in extreme situations. Therefore, intelligence products are not generally open to citizens, as ICs have self-imposed limitations concerning what and to whom they communicate, as they need to protect sources and processes and to remain outside of the political debate. We argue there is a need for a public intelligence culture, which would translate into a sharing of intelligence-related skills and cocreation of knowledge involving a wider pool of societal actors. The present research aims to define the concept of public intelligence culture, with a focus on its dimensions and on the opportunities it offers to empower citizens in liberal democratic societies, making them resilient in the face of hybrid threats

Business · Organizational culture · Political science · Public relations · Stakeholder · Competitive and Knowledge Intelligence · Intelligence, Security, War Strategy