On the 'power' of Open Sources...

While reading the article “Tennis Shoes and Stolen Toilets – Russia’s military ‘renaissance’ “, by Reuben F. Johnson, in the November 24^th edition of “The Weekly Standard”, I came across a couple of paragraphs worth citing:

“At the top of the list of Russian failures should be the intelligence agencies. Like their counterparts at the CIA and so many other spy services around the world, Russian intelligence officers have lived by the axiom that “information is not worth anything unless it has been stolen.””

“Almost all the data on purchases made by the Georgian air defense forces and the radar networking modernization contracts that had been carried out by Aerotechnica in Kiev and other Ukrainian firms was available in the Russian-language press, on the Internet, and from other open sources, but no one at GRU (the Russian military intelligence service) seemed to be paying any attention.)”