DAVID GAUTHIER
WHAT IS OPEN-SOURCE INTELLIGENCE OR OSINT?
Intelligence Community definition. The recently released Intelligence Community (IC) OSINT Strategy states, “OSINT is intelligence derived exclusively from publicly or commercially available information that addresses specific intelligence priorities, requirements, or gaps.”1
- Generally, open-source intelligence (OSINT) can refer to a wide-range of information and sources that are free, public, and legal to access, including information obtained from the media, such as newspapers, television, and blogs, as well as from professional and academic records, and public government data – for example, government reports.
- OSINT purposefully excludes any data that requires privileged or classified access to government systems.
History of OSINT in the IC. While the IC has historically gathered OSINT from foreign publications, its primary focus before 9/11 was on acquiring classified state secrets. Since these secrets were not publicly available online, the IC placed limited value on analyzing ‘open source’ information. It was only in 2005 that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) opened the Open-Source Center (OSC) in response to the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations to improve the integration of information gleaned from both open and clandestine sources.2 Since then, the OSC has been generating unique value for intelligence reporting, and in 2015, it was moved into the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Directorate of Digital Innovation as the Open-Source Enterprise.
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