Open Source Intelligence empowers global organisations to identify and track Political, Economic, Social, Environment and Technological events and information that present opportunities and threats.

1. Unlike espionage or hacking, Open-Source Intelligence does not use illicit methods to gather information. Instead, it focuses on information that is already freely available to internet users, albeit at a huge and insurmountable scale, without OSINT platforms.

Open Source Intelligence can be gathered from any source connected to the internet, but generally, OSINT Platforms, such as AMPLYFI, provide access to sources such as

• • Social media
  • News & Blogs
  • Government data
  • Websites
  • Academic Content
  • Press Releases

Open Source Intelligence analysis is similar to other Market Intelligence analysis practices. Analysis can take several forms:

• • Ongoing Monitoring – looking for new Open Source Intelligence signals that present interesting events or changes
  • Regressive Analysis – looking for emerging trends from larger historic sets of data
  • Summarisation – grouping information thematically to provide insights into a specific topic or question e.g. PESTEL Analysis

As Open Source Intelligence relies on secondary information it is important to check the veracity of facts and information found. Severely approaches can support this:

• • Focusing on reliable sources – where the sources have good processes in place to verify information before sharing it
  • Verifying with Multiple Sources – seeking more than one source for information that is not derived from the same source
  • Using Secondary Sources to Drive Primary Research – as facts and information emerge, seeking independent primary evidence

AMPLYFI is a good example of an Open-Source Intelligence platform that can support organisations in streamlining OSINT processes and delivering more insights from open-source information with less cost and effort.

Open Source Intelligence often borrows Market Intelligence frameworks to present clear and concise information in a familiar pattern. Summaries of insights, briefings and newsletters are all common. For deeper sets of information SWOT and PESTEL reports provide good frameworks for summarising and guiding the creation of OSINT insights.

Like many technology-driven fields, Open Source Intelligence is constantly evolving. Some particular areas of interest:

• Big Data & Knowledge Graphs – gathering larger and larger sets of information in well-organised databases
• Natural Language Processing – extracting structured information from unstructured content e.g. extracting the names and dates of events from news articles
• AI Pattern Recognition – training models to seek patterns in information that represent insights, with some degree of fuzzy matching

Further to this, new areas of content create opportunities and threats:

• User-Generated Content – the growth of social media, reviews, podcasts, vlogs and other forms of user-generated content provides the potential for noisier but more distributed and earlier breaking event coverage
• Fake News – the development of content by “bad actors”, including rogue stats, and possibly leveraging Generative AI to scale information creation presents an ongoing challenge for all of OSINT