Steven Holt: “Mr. Chairman, we have discussed this matter quite a bit in the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and we agree…”

“Mr. Chairman, we have discussed this matter quite a bit in the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and we agree that there should be more use of open sources. In fact, it should be routine, an integral part of every analyst's and every agency's work. It may not be necessary to have a center, as the gentleman suggests in his amendment, but I think as a sense of Congress this amendment is useful to emphasize the importance that open sources of information bring. Excessive reliance on information obtained from secret sources is not necessarily a good thing, and time and again, in example after example, we have discovered that openly published and openly discussed information is indeed superior, more correct than some of the secret information that analysts have been relying on excessively. So we think this is heading in the right direction.”