Open source intelligence

Open source intelligence (OSINT) is an intelligence collection discipline that uses materials available, in principle, to the public. To put "public" in context, some material, for example, might be a foreign-language radio broadcast that has to be transcribed and translated into the language of the intelligence analysts and consumers.

News media, therefore, are a major contributor to OSINT. Most 24-hour intelligence watch and military operations centers have a television set constantly tuned to the Cable News Network. The World Wide Web contributes massively to OSINT.

United States

The National Security Act of 1947 authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to provide "services of common concern" to what became the United States intelligence community. Until the 2004 reorganization of the intelligence community, one of those "services of common concern" was OSINT from the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). FBIS, which had absorbed the Joint Publication Research Service, a military organization that translated documents, which moved into the National Open Source Enterprise under the Director of National Intelligence.

CIA still provides a variety of unclassified maps and reference documents both to the intelligence community and the public.

As part of its mandate to gather intelligence, CIA is looking increasingly online for information, and has become a major consumer of social media. "We're looking at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence," said Doug Naquin, director of the DNI Open Source Center (OSC) at CIA. "We're looking at chat rooms and things that didn't exist five years ago, and trying to stay ahead."

NATO

NATO characterizes OSINT as "unclassified information that has been deliberately discovered, discriminated, distilled and disseminated to a select audience in order to address a specific question. It provides a very robust foundation for other intelligence disciplines. When applied in a systematic fashion, OSINT products can reduce the demands on classified intelligence collection resources by limiting requests for information only to those questions that cannot be answered by open sources."

NATO defines validated OSINT (V-OSINT) OSINT-V is information to which a very high degree of certainty can be attributed. It can be produced by an all-source intelligence professional, with access to classified intelligence sources, whether working for a nation or for a coalition staff. It can also come from an assured open source to which no question can be raised concerning its validity (images of an aircraft arriving at an airport that are broadcast over the media)."