When someone brings up the current state of national intelligence, “open” is hardly the first word that comes to mind. Surprising, then, that “open sourcing” was the buzzword at this week’s Department of Defense Intelligence Information System conference, titled Leveraging Technology to Enable the Warfighter, held in Chicago.

From Dale Meyerrose, chief information officer in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to Scott McNealy, chairman of computer networking powerhouse Sun Microsystems Inc. and Sun Microsystems Federal Inc., the conference’s 2,000 attendees and speakers projected the same message: Open is the new closed.

Before America’s enemies take heart, though, it’s worth explaining—in true government-speak—that open doesn’t exactly mean open.

On the government’s side is open source intelligence, a strategy that arose out of post-9/11 criticisms of various intelligence agencies’ inability to communicate information to each other. On the techie side is open source software, a strategy designed to make public the codes and specifications of computer applications and operating systems with the ultimate goal—hard to believe—of heightened security.

“In my business, it’s about the data, stupid,” Meyerrose said on Monday. “We’re trying to make 16 centers of intelligence work collectively better,” referring to the 16 intelligence agencies overseen by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell.

Between the agencies, as well as with state and local outlets combating similar problems, sharing information with each other requires sophisticated computer systems designed to share relevant intelligence with concerned parties, which sometimes means passing information from a secret environment, like the government’s supremely secure Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System, to a non-secret environment, like, say,  the Chicago Police Department’s 24^th District headquarters, located in the city’s Rogers Park community.

“In the past, we’ve overprotected that information,” said Don Black, spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which organized this week’s conference. "We’re moving toward a need to share that between analysts.”

Openness also means the ability of anyone with a dot-gov e-mail address (including state and local agencies) or a U.S.-government affiliation (contractors, for example) to access the Open Source Center, a giant worldwide search engine of every kind of public intelligence translated into English and searchable by keyword. The center was created in 2005 in on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission.

A recent search on “nuclear reactor” turned up 31,000 results ranging from a Persian Press piece on Iran-France relations to a Casablanca newspaper story about the activation of a Moroccan nuclear reactor to a STRATCOM “Influential Communicators Report.”

The Open Source Center “finds anything from bumper stickers to T-shirts to Web sites to blogs,” said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the DNI. “It’s information that’s out there that doesn’t require clandestine sources.”

Thankfully, despite the open-source buzz, clandestine sources are still exactly that. And though it sounds counterintuitive, intelligence security is depending increasingly on the other kind of open source: open source software.

“[Open source solutions] have been a trend, starting as early as the 1990s,” said Bill Vass, president and chief operating officer of Silicon Valley-based Sun Microsystems Federal Inc., in a telephone interview. “It has been evolving in the intelligence community, and more and more in defense.”

Sun, though not required to disclose exactly how much, does “a good chunk” of business with the national defense and intelligence community, according to Vass.

The foundation of open source software—everything from operating systems to applications—is public access to the actual  program code.

An entire community of programmers, then, can access the code, make it better and sniff out problems before they explode. This is a similar—but not identical—approach taken in Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia maintained and continuously developed  by anyone in the world who cares to contribute a new article or update an existing article on its site.

In this case, though, wary non-programmers should be assured  that access to code does not mean access to revealing data; the ability to build a system is not the same thing as the ability to find already-classified information.

“Secrets are what get you in trouble,” said Vass’ partner Scott McNealy, chairman and co-founder of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun Microsystems and Sun Federal. “If there’s a secret, a back door, a loophole, that secret’s going to get breached and it’s going to create a problem. With open source, you have no secrets, no vulnerability.”

“Historically, there have been issues with proprietary [software] companies having Trojan horses,” Vass said, using computer science-speak for programs designed to appear legitimate, but with destructive effects. “If the Trojan horse had been made of glass, Troy never would’ve fallen.”

According to McNealy and Vass, whose open source Solaris operating system is the default system at the Department of Defense, cost is another reason the government is interested in open source software products: They’re free. (Sun’s hardware, though, is not free, nor is its system support and various other products—all allowing Sun to amass more than $13 billion in revenue in 2006.)

In competition with Sun—or , as Vass calls it, “co-opetition”—a  cross between competition and cooperation, is North Carolina-based Red Hat Inc.  Red Hat is best known for its wide-selling version of the Linux operating system, a competitor to Microsoft Windows.

Matthew Szulik, Red Hat’s chairman, CEO and president, was a conference keynote speaker along with McNealy. “The [Department of Defense] has been quick to recognize the importance of open source software,” Szulik said in his speech. He called current systems “broken and dysfunctional” and referred to open source as “a national destiny.”

Red Hat’s open-sourced SELinux system is currently used within the intelligence community, according to Michael Byrd, director of Red Hat’s government channel sales.

“Most of the code that was written for SELinux was written by the National Security Agency,” Byrd said, pointing to another professed advantage of open-source systems: the ability of programmers within government agencies to easily code to their agency's unique specifications.

According to Byrd, SELinux solves the problems alluded to by intelligence officials like Meyerrose. “It’s a very flexible system,” Byrd said. “Analysts can look at data from [separate agencies] and can pass information from one environment to another—secret to secret, secret to non-secret.”

Like Sun, Red Hat is not required to disclose the extent of its business dedicated to the government. Byrd, however, called it a core part of their operation.

Paul McNabb, chief security architect at Argus Systems, based near Champaign in Savoy, Ill., attended this week’s conference and agrees with the executives from Red Hat and Sun regarding the trend toward open source, and called it a positive step. “The government and the world in general is using more and more open source, and we’ll see that continue,” he said. “Right now we’re in the phase of coming out of 100 percent proprietary, so the net trend is open sourcing going up, and it will be for some time.”

Argus, designer of products that “enhance an operating system to take it to an extremely high level of security,” partner with both Sun and Red Hat and do approximately 10-15 percent of their business with governments worldwide, McNabb said.

As opposed to Sun and Red Hat, both outspoken champions of the open source movement, McNabb was willing to point out its disadvantages. “It does dampen certain types of [software] development by eliminating the financial reward,” he said. “And it results in software with no clear ownership and responsibility, so you can’t hold a company’s feet to the fire the way you can with a proprietary company.”

Even so, according to those gathered at the conference, open sourcing is the direction of the future, both in software and intelligence, the one helping to enable the other. And according to Meyerrose, they both boil down to one thing: “making sure folks in the trenches have the tactical intelligence that they need.”