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For several years now open source has been fast emerging as one of the most important information sources for defence organisations’ intelligence requirements and decision-making. It is readily accessible, cost-effective, shareable, with an ever-growing number of companies providing advanced OSINT tooling and capabilities.
While the use of OSINT is accelerating, there are obstacles that need to be removed to enable its full adoption. A combination of rapidly advancing technology, opaque (with good reason) marketing from vendors and disjointed articulation of requirements from end-users has contributed to the slow rate of uptake. This has led to a situation where end-users are unaware or ill-informed of what can be achieved using OSINT. Misunderstanding of vendors’ capabilities is widespread and in my experience vendors mistakenly view one another as competitors by default.
If defence organisations could be more transparent about their needs and OSINT vendors more open to collaboration, then together we can present a more compelling solution that meets a much broader spectrum of defence OSINT requirements.
There has been an explosion of open-source information in contemporary warfare. Anyone with a smartphone is now effectively a sensor collecting and transmitting images and information.
People with a miracle of computer miniaturisation in their hands have become part of the military internet-of-things. It is a process that took off during the 2011 civil war in Syria when participants and the civilian population used smartphones to acquire and distribute images in real time. Their ability to take a quick snap generated a trove of open-source information that many overseas organisations and agencies accessed to produce open-source intelligence (OSINT), including, for example, investigative journalists at Bellingcat.
The Ukraine war’s early phases saw the use of similar OSINT reach a much higher level, with hundreds of thousands of civilian smartphones providing important images of columns of Russian tanks and vehicles on the move. The few seconds it takes to photograph the aftermath of a missile strike and upload it into the cloud makes battlefield damage assessment much faster than is possible with a drone or aircraft. The net effect is to hugely augment situational awareness on the ground for the defenders.
Yet both sides in Ukraine have been guilty of naïve use of social media, which continues despite crackdowns. There is already plenty of evidence that geolocation and unit identification has facilitated targeting by the enemy, with disastrous consequences. The Ukrainians gained significant social media intelligence (SOCMINT) from images and videos of soldiers, equipment and infrastructure on Russian domestic platforms including VKontakte, but also Telegram and Tik Tok. On the Ukrainian side, members of at least one tank crew are likely to have contributed to their own elimination by posting photographs of themselves on social media.
Aligning OSINT with traditional forms of intelligence
Open-source intelligence covers the expanding volumes of public information on web platforms, social media sites and forums, messaging apps and blog sites.
The bigger picture here is that OSINT has become vital to defence intelligence operations, which poses a question as to how agencies should integrate it with more conventional classified intelligence sources. To stay on top of rapidly-shifting events and emerging threats, defence intelligence must analyse as much relevant information as possible – which must now include SOCMINT. Neglecting any one source of insight would be inadvisable when the volume of publicly-available data is vaster than ever and constantly expanding.
But whether at war or preparing for it, of the five main sources of intelligence, OSINT has hitherto been the most neglected, compared with HUMINT (human intelligence); SIGINT (signals intelligence); IMINT (imagery intelligence) and MASINT (measurement and signatures intelligence).
Classified environments are air-gapped from the internet for security reasons, but there has also been poor recognition of how OSINT delivers intelligence value far more rapidly than conventional sources. OSINT does not require such extensive verification to produce information that is actionable. The Ukraine experience has changed many of these attitudes even if there are still cultural barriers to break down.
SOCMINT unleashed
SOCMINT, if conducted effectively, not only improves situational awareness for live operations, it contributes to assessments of overall military capability. It can gauge population sentiment, give an indication of casualty rates during a conflict, and identify damaging misinformation or adversaries’ initiatives to sow disinformation. It has also become a hugely effective source in vetting at scale for defence and security and is a vital source in counter-intelligence.
Any technical barriers to adoption of SOCMINT by defence intelligence agencies are now in the past. The OSINT world has created configurable platforms that use AI and data analytics such as optical character recognition specifically for the purpose of extracting insights from the massive volume of social media information out there on the web.
It is not a task humans can conduct manually. The statistics website Statista, for example, predicts the volume of data created, copied and consumed in the world will rise from 182 zettabytes this year to 221 zettabytes next year.
However, AI enabled tools can analyse petabytes of text and image data on social media platforms in foreign languages, to detect risks relevant an analyst’s mission. Configured correctly these technologies reduce the amount of time an analyst spends collecting and processing information and focus on producing actionable intelligence.
The US is forging ahead with OSINT
From a low point, the stock of OSINT is steadily rising in NATO. In the US, for example, the army released its OSINT strategy in 2023, prioritising open-source data along with AI and advanced analytics. The US Intelligence Community (IC) OSINT Strategy and the US State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research Open Source Intelligence Strategy, were published in 2024, stressing how OSINT is vital and that it delivers its own unique value by extracting actionable insights from a range of sources that are expanding “at breakneck speed”.
The strategy recognises OSINT will require the use of AI but also identifies the need for expert human judgment about the integrity of information sources. The goals set by the IC OSINT Strategy include greater coordination across the IC and the integration of agile processes and workflows to ensure intelligence optimisation. The stated aim is to deliver “credible intelligence to policymakers and war fighters at speed and scale”.
There is a clear understanding of the need to involve the commercial sector and academic expertise, “to keep pace with technical and tradecraft advancements in the open-source environment”.
The role of OSINT in defence vetting for greater speed and scale
Beyond supplying actionable intelligence insights, OSINT also has an important role in vetting defence personnel with access to classified information.
SOCMINT can detect much more than an individual’s associations with criminals, extremists, or other individuals inimical to the national interest. Vetting agencies can use the technology for initial application approvals and for regular reappraisals of serving personnel, revealing where entirely legal behaviour should raise suspicion.
Examples are social media evidence of repeat visits to expensive nightclubs or casinos during the working week, unexplained ownership of top-of-the-range vehicles or frequent visits to areas known for high levels of espionage activity. One of OSINT technology’s advantages is that it can search into more obscure forums and sites, along with the dark web, summarising only what is strictly relevant.
Vetting is another area where technology is essential because manual methods struggle with the sheer volume of social media data. The average UK citizen has four to six accounts, with younger users often maintaining many more across multiple platforms. Statista estimates nearly there are 55 million UK social media users today (79% of the population), which is expected to reach 65 million by 2027.
The development of vetting technology arose from the defence community’s desire for an automated solution to ease the burdens of vetting while increasing accuracy. A national vetting agency in the Five Eyes intelligence network uses the technology to accelerate the processing of more than 5,000 candidates per month. In the first four months of operation, it saved the agency roughly 35,000 hours.
As well as speed, scale and accuracy, one of the great advantages of such open-source intelligence is that there are none of the normal constraints on sharing classified information with allies. In a network like the Five Eyes this has many obvious advantages.
Greater industry collaboration is required
The goal should be for OSINT to provide trusted and timely intelligence that is actionable and provides both immediate and long-term information advantage. This is where OSINT providers can use their different areas of expertise to help.
The OSINT industry should collaborate more closely to cover all the angles defence organisations need. There are a plethora of organisations, Fivecast included, that provide cutting edge OSINT capabilities that are being used to great effect by defence organisations across the globe. However, individually one solution does not solve defence’s open source intelligence requirements. Open source is a wide spectrum, covering an array of requirements that are reflected in the tools and capabilities offered by industry, but the differences between each company's offerings are often misunderstood. This may be due to the catch all use of the term OSINT, but it has resulted in a wary situation where industry and end users view OSINT tools as competitive to one another.
This mindset needs to change. More often than not industry offerings are complementary, providing a different piece to the OSINT puzzle. With more industry collaboration we can provide a more comprehensive solution to defence organisations covering a far greater range of their OSINT requirements.
The next step for OSINT
OSINT, then, is steadily growing in importance for defence intelligence agencies around the world. The Ukraine conflict advanced its cause considerably, and many of the technical challenges have been addressed through the smart application of configurable AI. OSINT is now capable of delivering timely, actionable insights across a range of defence use cases – from situational awareness to large-scale personnel vetting.
Yet cultural hurdles remain, and the OSINT industry must do more to present a unified front. Individual solutions are powerful, but mutual suspicion and commercial competition limit their collective potential. Defence intelligence agencies need trusted OSINT that is layered, integrated, and aligned with classified intelligence. The capabilities exist. What is required now is a collaborative approach that brings them together to deliver speed, scale, and accuracy from the zettabytes of data already publicly available.
