Open Source Intelligence in 2017 Are We Doing Enough?

Being an open source intelligence analyst is like having twenty people write a book on the same subject, and then reading the first half of those books and trying to guess the ending. 2017 will be coming to a close, and I encourage all intelligence analysts to take a look at how their year went in terms of efficiency and growth. For me, being an intelligence analyst is more than a job, it’s a trade. I grew up in a family of tradesmen and something I took from that is to take pride in your work. To always work toward improving the way things are done to deliver your best performance in your trade. In my trade, I am constantly looking for new ways to monitor global events. We must take a good hard look at ourselves and really ask are we doing our due diligence for our respective companies? Are we checking for new open source tools on a regular basis? Are we conducting thorough investigations into global events or are we just perusing the news and letting intelligence fall in our laps?

It is my opinion that we really need to define what active monitoring is; are daily checks on an incident enough? How about relying on vendor resources? If that is all active monitoring is going to consist of, artificial intelligence (AI) will be doing our jobs in a few short years. Real active monitoring is using constant feeds of resources i.e. Twitter feeds, Facebook live videos and Snap Map. We also need to make sure we are leveraging the resources appropriately, requesting information from government agencies through social media sources. I have found that when reaching out to government agencies via Twitter and Facebook they will provide you with a lot of information in relation to the event if it does not put anyone in danger. It is also essential when monitoring major events within the United States to use the scanner websites to monitor radio traffic from police and fire agencies. They will paint a very clear picture of the events on the ground for any given event.

Open source intelligence has made significant changes in the last twenty years. 2017 was an extremely busy year for our industry and it pushed the ability of most analysts to their limits. However, with the promise of a never-ending wildfire season in the west and the threat outlook on the 2018 hurricane season predicted to be even more devastating. Now is the time to take advantage of the break in between and polish are skills for next year. We live in a world where the threat landscape is always evolving. The continued advancement of technology and the ever-increasing trend of globalization not only increases the exposure of the companies we work for, but also their vulnerability and risk. It’s our responsibly as intelligence professionals to provide accurate, reliable, actionable intelligence; the value added. We must always strive to do better, to be better.

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