Open-source intelligence

"[6] According to political scientist Jeffrey T. Richelson, “open source acquisition involves procuring verbal, written, or electronically transmitted material that can be obtained legally.

In addition to documents and videos available via the Internet or provided by a human source, others are obtained after U.S. or allied forces have taken control of a facility or site formerly operated by a foreign government or terrorist group.”[7] Former Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis Mark M. Lowenthal defines OSINT as “any and all information that can be derived from overt collection: all types of media, government reports and other documents, scientific research and reports, commercial vendors of information, the Internet, and so on.

The Center was established to collect information available from "the Internet, databases, press, radio, television, video, geospatial data, photos and commercial imagery.

Specifically, In-Q-Tel, a Central Intelligence Agency supported venture capital firm in Arlington, VA assisted companies develop web-monitoring and predictive analysis tools.

A cottage industry of both for-profit and not-for-profit investigative and educational groups such as Bellingcat, IntelTechniques, SANS and others offer indices, books, podcasts and video training materials on OSINT tools and techniques.

Books such as Michael Bazzell's Open Source Intelligence Techniques serve as indices to resources across multiple domains but according the author, due to the rapidly changing information landscape, some tools and techniques change or become obsolete frequently, hence it is imperative for OSINT researchers to study, train and survey the landscape of source material regularly.

These include VPNs, cached webpages, digital archive services, URL and file scanners, browser sandbox applications, and antivirus software.

According to the OSC, its goal is to "help standardize our profession and demonstrate that our members are Legal, Ethical, and Competent practitioners of investigating and analyzing Publicly Available Information."

Their certification program "provides participants with an opportunity to work through a real-world scenario and demonstrate that they can produce an intelligence product that meets a high professional standard.