Sir,
There is hardly any guide available on offline OSINT.
Also I have been seeking for some map that can show the distribution of open source info (newspapers, journals etc) in South Asia and China.
Dear Colleague,
Each of the “eight tribes” has its own way of organizing guides or directories to offline information, but realistically, the one best guide is always human.
In the academic arena, depending on the country and the language, you have guides by research librarians, specialist information brokers, citation analytics, lists of new dissertations, and gray literature including market surveys that are not sold to the public.
Most of what I see today is absolute crap.
Remember that books are generally ten years old (not counting the click bait books that are now rushed to press with self-publishing such as Amazon has made possible; good investigative articles now all too rate are roughly ten months in the planning and execution; and even newspaper articles are ten days old in the planning and execution.
And of course we now know that from Associated Press to Reuters to the New York Times to the major national newspapers around the world, real journalists are a dying breed and we have a mix of automated article production and Deep State servants producing crap for the masses.
Matt Taibbi offers an excellent appraisal of how the media has been destroyed:
Review: Hate Inc. Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi
There are directories that are starting points, for example
but please remember that journalists are allowed to publish at best 10% of what they know, and nothing that contradicts the “party line” being dictated by the Deep State or its political servant class.
There is no substitute for an “on the ground” presence and by “on the ground” I mean someone with intelligence and integrity who speaks the local language fluently and is able to move easily in the provinces. This immediately eliminates almost everyone in any given Embassy, whether US or other, and it also eliminates the baby spies now being trained to move around combat zones with idiot bodyguards in large black vehicles.
For any given country and any given topic you should be able to pull together, at a minium:
- Academic person published in the local language
- Civil Society labor or religious leader in the local area
- Commercial manager with business in the local area
- Government official from the local area
- Law Enforcement official from the local area
- Media journalist responsible for writing about the local area
- Military officer from home country as well as other attaches traveling there
- Non-profit officials who are active in the local area.
Anything that does not rise to this standard is useless.
SEE ALL
Note: Short URL for the entire series including new posts is
https://tinyurl.com/OSINT-India
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