Open source intelligence
March 5th, 2008 | by admin |Did you already hear this term? Open source intelligence is not, in fact, a new endeavour. Some definitions are below:
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is an information processing discipline that involves finding, selecting, and acquiring information from publicly available sources and analyzing it to produce actionable intelligence. In the Intelligence Community (IC), the term “open” refers to overt, publicly available sources (as opposed to covert or classified sources); it is not related to open-source software. OSINT includes a wide variety of information and sources:
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- Media - newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and computer-based information.
- Public data - government reports, official data such as budgets and demographics, hearings, legislative debates, press conferences, speeches, marine and aeronautical safety warnings, environmental impact statements, contract awards.
- Observation and reporting - Amateur airplane spotters, radio monitors and satellite observers among many others have provided significant information not otherwise available. The availability of worldwide satellite photography, often of high resolution, on the Web (e.g., Google Earth) has expanded open source capabilities into areas formerly available only to major intelligence services.
- Professional and academic - conferences, symposia, professional associations, academic papers, and subject matter experts.[1]
- Most information has geospatial dimensions, but many often overlook the geospatial side of OSINT: not all open source data is unstructured text. Examples of geospatial open source include hard and softcopy maps, atlases, gazetteers, port plans, gravity data, aeronautical data, navigation data, geodetic data, human terrain data (cultural and economic), environmental data, commercial imagery, LIDAR, hyper and multi-spectral data, airborne imagery, geo-names, geo-features, urban terrain, vertical obstruction data, boundary marker data, geospatial mashups, spatial databases, and web services. Most of the geospatial data mentioned above is integrated, analyzed, and syndicated using geospatial software like a Geographic Information System (GIS) not a browser per se.
More on these in wikipedia. Now another example:
In the world of secret services, Open Source Intelligence (OS-INT) means useful information gleaned from public sources, such as scientific articles, newspapers, phone books and price lists. We use the term differently. In the followings OS-INT means the application of collaborative principles developed by the Open Source Software movement [1] to the gathering and analysis of information. These principles include: peer review, reputation- rather than sanctions-based authority, the free sharing of products, and flexible levels of involvement and responsibility.
Like much on the Internet in general, including the Open Source Software movement, practice preceded theory also in the case of OS-INT.
Many of the Internet’s core technologies were created to facilitate free and easy information sharing among peers. This always included two-way and multicast communication so that information could not only be distributed efficiently, but also evaluated collaboratively.
See more aboutin the following link: http://www.firstmonday.org/Issues/issue7_6/stalder/
