[bladegash]

You hit the nail on the head, but think aside from information being more accessible to analyze/share when it isn’t classified/there isn’t a need to protect sensitive sources and methods, is the benefit vis-a-vis translations.

Finding native speakers of languages like Chinese, Russian, Farsi, etc. who are also eligible/want to have a clearance is a challenge (it’s expensive and self-limiting, since US citizenship is a requirement).

Training people already cleared in those languages takes a ton of time, expensive, and yields linguists with mixed-usefulness (think understanding formal Spanish taught in highschool versus Spanish actually spoken amongst peers/friends). There’s slang, intonations, etc. that non-native speakers have to spend time learning/may misunderstand.

In other words, OSINT has a much larger talent pool that yield arguably/presumably better translations.