ansatz

Everything we find is already public.
Finding it is the work.

Ninety percent of intelligence comes from open sources. The other ten percent, the clandestine work, is just the more dramatic. The real intelligence hero is Sherlock Holmes, not James Bond.1

Lt. Gen. Samuel V. Wilson, director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, 1976 to 1977

  1. Quoted in Terrance M. Paulson, Intelligence Issues and Development (Nova Publishers, 2008), p. 78. The ninety percent is an estimate, not a measurement, and technocrats have challenged it in quantitative studies. The professional consensus remains that Wilson had the order of magnitude right.