With its “Data Consortium,” the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is creating an online portal and marketplace to make buying access to your data quicker, easier, and cheaper than ever before.
On April 8 the ODNI’s Office of the Open Source Intelligence Executive (OSIE) put out a “solutions solicitations” for the “Intelligence Community (IC) Data Consortium (ICDC),” previously known as the “IC Data Co-op,” which seeks solutions “to manage a commercial data consortium that unifies commercial data acquisition” for US spy agencies.
The Office of the Open Source Intelligence Executive “seeks an approach […] to help streamline access to CAI [Commercially Available Information] for the entire IC [Intelligence Community] and make it available to mission users in a more cohesive, efficient, and cost-effective manner”
ODNI, Solutions Solicitation: Intelligence Community (IC) Data Consortium (ICDC), April 2025
In the spirit of restoring the people’s trust in the US spy apparatus, the intelligence community wants you to know how it intends to use your taxes to buy access to your personal data from commercial data brokers.
The desire to make data collection cheaper and quicker comes from the fact that spy agencies “are unable to rapidly and efficiently vet and acquire data due to the growing volume of data available for purchase and the increasing number of private sector vendors that sell their own and third-party data,” according to the ICDC request for information from August, 2024.
At present, the ICDC solutions solicitation is focused on solving two problems: consortium data acquisition and management, and software creation.
A major part of this effort will be to create an online portal called icdata.gov that will serve as “a marketplace to query and interact with vendor holdings.”
However, according to the ICDC Appendix called, “Building the IC’s Data Consortium Interface at www.icdata.gov,” that URL is currently not operational and may be subject to change.
“ICDATA.GOV is largely a marketplace to query and interact with vendor holdings”
ODNI, Building the IC’s Data Consortium Interface at www.icdata.gov, April 2025
The Office of the Open Source Intelligence Executive “seeks a centralized approach to access CAI [Commercially Available Information] via three primary options—API query, platform access, and bulk data access—from commercial vendors”
ODNI, Solutions Solicitation: Intelligence Community (IC) Data Consortium (ICDC), April 2025
The ICDC has three design principles that emphasize “zero copy” — that is to say that the intelligence agencies, for the most part, aren’t supposed to have copies of your data on their government systems, but rather they are allowed to search and access limited portions of your data from their commercial vendors’ collections.
The Office of the Open Source Intelligence Executive “seeks a ‘zero copy’ technical solution that prevents duplicative data purchases and reduces data replication and other cloud costs by keeping the data in place on the vendor’s IT to the maximum extent possible”
ODNI, Solutions Solicitation: Intelligence Community (IC) Data Consortium (ICDC), April 2025
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America guarantees protection from illegal search and seizure by the government.
However, the government has been skirting around the constitution by simply buying information from commercial vendors.
As a declassified ODNI report from January 27, 2022 states, “Commercially Available Information clearly provides intelligence value, whether considered in isolation and/or in combination with other information, and whether reviewed by humans and/or by machines. It also raises significant issues related to privacy and civil liberties.”
“Although CAI may be ‘anonymized,’ it is often possible (using other CAI) to deanonymize and identify individuals, including US persons,” the report adds.
The Intelligence Community seeks “to leverage a data co-op model to reduce the aggregate cost of Commercially Available Information (CAI) and Publicly Available Information (PAI) and accelerate and improve the IC’s acquisition of and access to CAI and PAI“
ODNI, ICDC Request for Information, August 2024
Now with the ICDC, “The Government is seeking to award OTs [Other Transactions] to small businesses, nontraditional defense contractors, or traditional defense contractors if they propose significant involvement from a nontraditional contractor or provide a one-third cost share, with potential for follow-on sole-source sustainment contracts, to manage a commercial data consortium that unifies commercial data acquisition then enables IC users to access and interact with this commercial data in one place on unclassified systems while reducing data copying to classified computer systems.”
In other words, the US spy community is looking to cheaply buy access to your data from businesses large and small.
And in two more lengthy sentences, the intelligence community explains in so many words something as simple as, “We’re setting up a one-stop shop to make your data cheaper and more accessible to us while claiming to care about privacy:”
“The Sponsor seeks a centralized approach to access CAI via three primary options—API query, platform access, and bulk data access—from commercial vendors by establishing a government funded Data Consortium, which will serve as a clearinghouse for IC data requirements, a single focal point in negotiations with vendors, a compliance vehicle to ensure the IC’s use of the data complies with IC guidance and owners’ terms and conditions, and a mechanism to pool agency funds to achieve economies of scale when pursuing access to targeted commercial data sets.”
“The Sponsor seeks an approach based on repeatable data management plus civil liberties and privacy best practices to help streamline access to CAI for the entire IC and make it available to mission users in a more cohesive, efficient, and cost-effective manner by avoiding duplicative purchases, preventing sunk costs from unused licenses, and reducing overall data storage and compute costs.”
The ICDC solutions solicitation came on April 8, the same day that National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard announced the establishment of a new task force called the Director’s Initiatives Group (DIG) with the goal of “restoring transparency and accountability to the Intelligence Community.”
Why was trust lost in the intelligence community to begin with?
With over decades of scandals like overthrowing democratically-elected governments abroad, conducting experiments on civilian populations through programs like the CIA’s MK Ultra, and spying on its own citizens through the NSA, has the US intelligence community ever been trustworthy?
Image Source: AI-generated by Grok
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