The Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) has gained considerable eminence in recent years. Conventionally, the intelligence has been referred to as the discovering of secrets using a closed system of collections and classified information. Today, it is estimated that Open Source Intelligence provides between 80 to 95 percent of the information used by the intelligence community.

Since the attacks in the US on 11 September 2001, many government agencies have had to contend with the securitization of their core concerns, whether it is transport, food, water, environment or the human life. To broaden the security measures, the demand for more information has raised and initiated a new strategy to gather intelligence from openly available sources of information.

For the purpose of meeting specific intelligence requirement, Open Source Intelligence has been introduced. The media, public agencies, universities, internet, social media websites, dark web, publicly available images, NGOs, and the private sector all constitutes open sources of information.

Dramatically, the range of issues that intelligence agencies are required to deal with has risen. Today it includes terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, organized crime, fragile states, intra-state conflict, illegal immigration, and energy security that in turn has fostered a growing appreciation of the value and utility of OSINT.

The evolution of the internet and the emergence of the shared web have alerted security professionals to the potential of new tools and technologies for collecting, analyzing and distributing information. The large number of websites, portals, blogs and other online sources for information has sometime made relevant information unavailable and out of reach from the intelligence professionals. For that open source investigation is required to identify hidden details from the content that somehow can help us to locate enemies, terrorist and different locations where are residing.





There are many cases where terrorist used internet to tell about their progress and sometime about their plans. But at the same time they remain untraceable. Open source intelligence help us to identify the objects that are out of sight and are most important to track them.
As Google Earth provides more geospatial intelligence, it is the best platform to locate any activity. The Google street view can help open source investigator to locate the nearby locations from an image.

Open source intelligence has already helped a lot to locate many ISIS supporters around the world that are definitely greatest threat to the world right now. Intelligence agencies are working towards such openly available information to locate more and more.






How Open Source Intelligence is benefiting us?

After the world trade center incident, the world has changed. The terror is increasing every day that includes mass killing, bombing extortion, kidnapping and other severe cases. The world already spent billions of dollars in this cause and still nowhere of ending this terrorism and threats.

Open Source Intelligence is the most inexpensive type of intelligence in which there is no need to spend millions and billions on classified information to reach the target. The researchers and journalists working in the field, for example, are a valuable source of human intelligence, not only the professionals but terrorist as well. Sometime they contact us through social media networks that somehow help us to expose their Geo-location through Open source Intelligence professionals.

Open source intelligence is way too much helpful to the countries and organizations that have very limited budget to conduct any investigation. They can find many Helpful communications intelligence from blogs and forums dedicated to international affairs, as well as in the letters pages of every quality newspaper.

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All the Information collected by one organization can be given to another at little or no cost. That makes information shareable and easily accessible to many out there. OSINT collected using ethical means can be used in legal proceedings without risking the exposure of sensitive intelligence assets. The intelligence gathered from authoritative public sources can be used to inform about the serious threats to national security.





Moreover, OSINT provides a context and awareness that is critical to an understanding of the global security agenda. The growing complexity of the world and declining certainty and predictability in the field of intelligence has underlined the importance of long term strategic intelligence method like OSINT that draw on the knowledge of multiple sources and disciplines.

The best part of beginning with open source intelligence is there are millions of sources to gather the information. But it requires some expertise to filter out the relevant information from the propagandas and rumors. You can learn different techniques to become master in collecting useful resources from freely available data from the OSINT training challenge by EH Academy. Most of the time, many useful, critical and secret information remain inaccessible from Google crawler, so you must be well known about the techniques to dig from the dark web and other underground resources on the internet as well.