US Spies Struggle to Find Secrets in Mountains of Everyday Data

Spying used to be all about secrets. Increasingly, it’s about what’s hiding in plain sight.

A staggering amount of data, from Facebook posts and YouTube clips to location pings from mobile phones and car apps, sits in the open internet, available to anyone who looks. US intelligence agencies have struggled for years to tap into such data, which they refer to as open-source intelligence, or OSINT. But that’s starting to change.

In October the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all the nation’s intelligence agencies, brought in longtime analyst and cyber expert Jason Barrett to help ...