Category: Design

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Answers on OSINT for India 32 – SOCMINT is Idiocy

Design

SOCMINT, or “Social Media Intelligence” is both an oxymoron and a scam. What is really going on here is budget building — people creating work to justify more senior positions and larger budgets.

SOCMINT is far removed from reality and particularly far removed from real people both within the USA and abroad.

We know that over half of Facebooks accounts are fake and that most people in the bottom four billion of humanity do not use Facebook — or Twitter or any of the other “social media” platforms.

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Answers on OSINT for India 31 – OSINT Primer for Spies

Design

Sir,

I constantly encounter two issues:

First, the spies think that Wikileaks and everything online is OSINT, they do not factor in analog sources or even human sources that are not controlled agents.

Second, and related,  they think that the best open source information is to be found within the government agencies, and do not consider external sources or what you call the “eight” tribes.

Is there a 3-7 paragraphs and 3-7 graphic primer for spy leaders willing to entertain new ideas?

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Answers on OSINT for India 29 – Case Studies, Persuading a Station Head to Use OSINT

Design

Sir,

Do you have any case study on some OSINT op? How does one persuade a Station Head to use OSINT in support of his  clandestine and technical operations? I am finding that there is more information about secret successes than there is about OSINT successes at the same time that OSINT was eclipsed by the “false God” of the Internet pretending to be OSINT.

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Answers on OSINT for India 28 – What OSINT is NOT!

Design

Sir:

In my paper, I am including ‘What OSINT is not'. Imagine that you are telling a stubbornly dedicated SIGINT operator about OSINT. The operator believes OSINT to be some simple net surfing used for gaining cursory information on anything. Or he relates OSINT to needle-in-haystack kind of discipline where discoveries are made by chance. How would you proceed to teach OSINT to such a person?

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Answers on OSINT for India 26 – The Internet is NOT OSINT!

Design

Sir, if you would have been given the task to tell about OSINT to an audience that has no idea about it or an audience that confuses it with internet, how would you introduce OSINT to them?

I am facing this problem.

After defining OSINT, I have to draw some background on it. The material available correlates OSINT with the US IC and the Cold War era. None of these will attract the Indian audience. Is there anything generic available on OSINT? Please help.

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