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Harnessing Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT)

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Our comprehensive solution for the intelligence community and DOD mission needs

Harnessing open-source intelligence (OSINT)—publicly available information from around the world—is an essential element of the National Intelligence Strategy. By taking greater advantage of OSINT, big data, AI, and advanced analytics, and by building more expertise in languages, technologies, and cultures, the intelligence community (IC) and Department of Defense (DOD) can better understand competitors’ intentions and capabilities.

The U.S. government has long relied on OSINT to meet specific intelligence requirements. The IC and DOD collect and analyze this public information from radio, television, newspapers, journals, websites, commercial databases, videos, graphics, and drawings. This mission is increasingly important. While OSINT will never replace classified intelligence collection and analysis, it's the “INT” that best balances the traditional need for secrecy with the increased need for rapid information sharing to address emerging threats. To unlock the full power of OSINT, the IC and DOD need to address several key challenges.

Overcoming Key Challenges

Finding the Talent

The IC and DOD need to access rare talent with the right blend of language skills, OSINT experience, and research know-how. Such talent can both execute missions and train and professionalize the workforce.

Planning to Scale

With limited funding, the IC must generate more actionable insights at scale. Also, the IC and DOD need to continue developing policies and frameworks guiding OSINT, and plan future investments in tools, training, and tradecraft.

Taming the Data

The IC and DOD need to decide how to acquire OSINT data, how to collect it in a secure fashion, how to analyze it, clean it, and how to get it into a data lake.

Translating on Demand

OSINT teams need to be able to automatically translate writing from all around the world into English.

Serving Up the Data

Data must be served up in an accessible format to enable analysis so it can be evaluated, fact-checked, and assigned confidence levels.

Enabling Analysis

The IC and DOD need to decide how to execute OSINT analysis that will produce timely, accurate insights about competitors’ intentions and capabilities.

Bridging the Tool Gap

New OSINT tools are coming out all the time, but many are redundant. Most of the tools are not being developed by OSINT professionals with the know-how to solve key workflow challenges. OSINT teams need to move with increasing speed and professionalism to keep pace with the dynamic data environment and emerging threats. To do so, they need innovative tools designed to meet OSINT mission needs.

For instance, websites that supply valuable OSINT can disappear overnight due to adversarial actions to limit access from other countries without warning. With unique managed attribution tools, however, OSINT teams can hedge against this risk by gaining access to otherwise inaccessible public information in key locations around the world. In addition, automation, decentralized data processing, and AI/machine learning (ML) capabilities can accelerate the exploitation of data previously requiring manual efforts.

OPEN-SOURCE OVERLOAD:

Mobilizing Publicly Available Data for National Security

OSINT strikes a balance between secrecy and rapid information sharing, offering new perspectives on intelligence collection processes. The key is to identify valuable data, decentralize its exploitation, and integrate it with AI/ML technologies.

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Delivering a Comprehensive OSINT Solution

Now, the IC and DOD can rely on Booz Allen’s people, processes, and technology to overcome OSINT mission challenges: Our comprehensive solution addresses finding the talent, scaling to mission, taming the data, translating on demand, serving up the data, and enabling analysis.

We understand the full spectrum of the OSINT mission—and we supply an end-to-end solution.
We bring the full OSINT story to IC and DOD clients: We are analysts, as well as linguists, data scientists, tradecraft specialists, AI practitioners, and more.
Our highly skilled OSINT teams, equipped with unique innovative capabilities, are ready to meet urgent mission needs.

Booz Allen helps IC and DOD clients gain access to rare OSINT talent, conduct OSINT operations at scale, manage vast amounts of data, translate text on demand, prepare data for review, and execute analysis to generate timely, accurate insights on competitors’ intentions and capabilities.