Chris Rasmussen

Tearline Project Manager National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

Chris Rasmussen serves as the Tearline Project Manager at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and was instrumental in the establishment of the initiative. An Analytical Outreach initiative, Tearline enables NGA’s collaboration with expert private groups. This collaboration aims to increase public-facing, authoritative open source intelligence on various under-reported strategic, economic, and humanitarian topics.

Working for the Department of Defense and IC for nearly two decades, Chris was the architect behind the Unclassified GEOINT Pathfinder initiative, which aimed to transform GEOINT into a discipline more rooted in open source intelligence (OSINT) to prepare for the rapid commercialization of GEOINT. Tearline is an award-winning OSINT program that came from GEOINT Pathfinder, but Pathfinder also produced more subtle reforms such as classification guide modernization. Chris served on NGA’s classification guide rewrite effort representing OSINT equities that downgraded and declassified legacy and overclassified line items.

Chris serves as an official DoD liaison to the OSINT Foundation. The OSINT Foundation is an association of OSINT practitioners aimed at professionalizing and elevating the discipline of OSINT in the IC and DoD.

He also drove the initiative that made NGA the first intelligence agency to open source software on GitHub and place apps into the Apple Store and Google Play.

While serving at NGA earlier in his career, Chris was also instrumental in pioneering the IC's use of "Web 2.0" capabilities for knowledge management and information sharing such as wikis, blogs, social tagging services, and internal social networks to apply the process benefits of collaborative platforms to the enterprise voice, especially on unclassified networks.

Mr. Rasmussen has received several prestigious awards for innovation and leadership such as the OSINT Unit of the Year Award, IC Transparency Official of the Year, NGA Challenger Award in 2014 for spearheading the GitHub initiative, and the Director of National Intelligence “Exceptional Pioneer Award” in 2007 for helping pioneer the Intellipedia movement. He was selected as one of the “Federal 100” by Federal Computer Week in 2008. He's also a frequent speaker at conferences and events spanning industry, defense, and intelligence circles.

Chris holds a Bachelor of Arts in History from California State University, Fullerton, and a Master’s degree in National Security Studies from California State University, San Bernardino.