PDF 27 pages: 2008 Fleisher on OSINT English and Spanish
Abstract: The development of open sources as a viable source of inputs for intelligence efforts has been gaining in popularity. Both national intelligence agencies and business/commercial organizations have been ramping up their open source intelligence (OSINT) efforts, attempting to add even greater value to the overall intelligence endeavor through its utilization. This progress has occurred while both intelligence practitioners and their organizations wrestle with the challenges that arise from gathering and fusing the information flowing from this channel with flows coming from better established means.
This paper will focus principally on the challenges and opportunities that OSINT entails for the business/competitive intelligence (B/CI) analyst and consider its impact on the analysis process itself. Using research gathered from studies of scores of global enterprises, it will describe the current state of the art in analysis efforts of OSINT in business/commercial enterprises, examine the planning and execution challenges organizations are experiencing associated with effectively using and fusing OSINT, and provide guidelines associated with the successful use of OSINT within a number of leading private sector enterprises.
