What is OSINT? And who cares?

• OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) is the discipline of gathering intelligence from publicly available sources for empowering end-user action.

• Originating as a statecraft tool, broadening use of OSINT has demonstrated it’s potential for social impact, as evidenced by the work of citizen and research organisations like Bellingcat and The Human Rights Centre at UC Berkeley in exposing crimes against humanity.

Current challenges & limitations

• Lack of Modernisation: OSINT’s lagging adaption to contemporary open source landscapes has created persistent operational deficiencies, as made apparent by Western Intelligence agencies’ failure to predict the social-media mobilised Arab Spring uprisings.

• Disinformation & Volumes of Data: public digital platforms are increasingly an information battleground between facts and alternative facts, as Industry 3.0’s advancing democratisation of technology facilitates User-Generated Content by good and bad actors alike. And this noisy Big Data challenge is set to scale dramatically with additional AI-Generated Content and IoT sensor data in the 5G Industry 4.0 era.

Opportunities for improvement

• In these complex conditions both possibilities and hurdles have never been higher. This talk focuses on tackling the hurdle of overdue modernisation.

• We present a socio-technical maturity model that uses Python to update legacy OSINT practices to better investigate today's disinformation activities, emphasising the advantages but also necessities of adopting 21st century capabilities for effective open source reconnaissance.

Goal

• We share this topic for public interest, the real-world Python use-case, and to incentivise the community to get into ethical OSINT hacking!