Wild Bill Donovan【A1】______the Internet. The American spymaster who built the Office of Strategic Services in World War II and later laid the【A2】______for the CIA was fascinated with information. Donovan believed in using whatever tools【A3】______to hand in the "great game" of espionage—spying as a "profession. " These days the Net which has already re-made such everyday pastimes as buying books and sending mail, is reshaping Donovan’ s vocation as well. 

The latest【A4】______isn’ t simply a matter of gentlemen【A5】______other gentlemen’ s e-mail. That kind of electronic spying【A6】______on for decades. In the past three or four years, the World Wide Web has【A7】______ a whole industry of point-and-click spying. The spooks call it "open source intelligence, " and as the Net grows, it is becoming【A8】______influential. In 1995 the CIA held a contest to see who could【A9】______the most data about Burundi. The winner, by a large【A10】______, was a tiny Virginia company called Open Source Solutions, whose clear advantage was its【A11】______ofthe electronic world. 

Among these firms making the biggest splash in the new world【A12】______Straitford, Inc. , a private intelligence- analysis firm based in Austin, Texas. Straitford makes money by selling the results of spying(covering nations from Chile to Russia) to corporations like energy-services firm McDermott International. Many of its predictions are available online. 

Straitford president George Friedman says he【A13】______the online world as a kind of mutually【A14】______ tool for both information collection and distribution, a spymaster’s, dream. Last week his firm was busy vacuuming up data bits from the far corners of the world and【A15】______a crisis in Ukraine. "As soon as thatreport【A16】______, we’ll suddenly get 500 new internet sign-ups from Ukraine, " says Friedman, a former political science professor. "And we’ ll hear back from some of them. " Open-source spying does have its risks, of course, since it can be difficult to tell good information from bad. That’ s where Straitford earns its【A17】______. Friedman relies on a【A18】______staff of 20 in Austin. Several of his staff members have military- intelligence backgrounds. He sees the firm’ s outsider status as the key to its success. Straitford’s briefs don’ t sound like the usual Washington back-and- forthing, 【A19】______agencies avoid dramatic declarations on the【A20】______they might be wrong. Straitford, says Friedman, takes pride in its independent voice.