Название: Open Source Investigations in the Age of Google
Автор: Henrietta Wilson, Olamide Samuel, Dan Plesch
Издательство: World Scientific Publishing
Серия: Security Science and Technology
Год: 2024
Страниц: 388
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 11.4 MB

How did a journalist find out who was responsible for bombing hospitals in Syria without leaving his desk in New York? How can South Sudanese activists safely track and detail the weapons in their communities, and make sure that global audiences take notice? How do researchers in London coordinate worldwide work uncovering global corruption? What are policy makers, lawyers, and intelligence agencies doing to keep up with and make use of these activities?

In the Age of Google, threats to human security of every kind are being tracked in completely new ways. Human rights abuses, political violence, nuclear weapons deployments, corruption, radicalisation, and conflict, are all being monitored, analysed, and documented. Though open source investigations are neither easy to conduct nor straightforward to apply, with diligence and effort, societies, agencies, and individuals have the potential to use them to strengthen human security.

This interdisciplinary book presents 18 contributions by prize-winning practitioners, experts and rising stars, detailing what open source investigations are and how they are carried out, alongside the opportunities and challenges they present to global transparency, accountability and justice. It is essential reading for current and future digital investigators, journalists, and scholars of global governance, international relations, humanitarian law, or anyone with an interest in the possibilities and dangers of this new field.

With the rapid development of technology, the creation of the internet, the introduction of social media and the proliferation of media outlets and mechanisms for transmitting information (and disinformation), the challenge facing analysts has shifted from how to collect data to how to process it. It is becoming critical for OSINT analysts to be equipped with high-value skills related to linguistics, tradecraft and technical programming to be able to turn such data into meaningful analytical insights.

Tools that have previously been available only to government intelligence agencies are now becoming widely accessible to the public, either for free or for a price (such as the newspaper content behind paywalls). This opens the OSINT field to a broader audience, from the private business sector and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to individual researchers and hobbyists. However, the challenge still persists: How to derive intelligence from the never-ending, constantly shifting stream of massive amounts of data from an ever-increasing range of sources? The authors contend that one possible solution is further democratization of OSINT through collaboration.

"As an OSINT-specialist for decades the importance of a book like this cannot be stressed enough. Whether you are starting in OSINT or Online Investigations, or a veteran, this book will give you great insights into practical approaches, understanding ethical and legal dilemmas and the power of proper intelligence collection." --Nico Dekens, Dutch_OsintGuy

"With the huge growth in modern monitoring methods and tools, more and more institutions and individuals are generating insight akin to what intelligence communities have long considered 'actionable intelligence' ― including the monitoring of nuclear weapons proliferation and tracking ongoing military operations. These techniques are now increasingly available for public consumption with no government oversight. Because of the significance of the findings of these new approaches, and the direct-to-public conduit of dissemination, it is critical that practitioners and consumers of this work carefully reflect upon best practices, publication standards, and ethical implications of this emerging tradecraft, which was once so closely associated with spycraft. This book is such a reflection: from the much-needed discussion about who is qualified to practice, why quality of content is important, ethical implications of the work, the need for public literacy, even the very name of this field, is explored. Indeed, this book helps to define this emerging field of global security sense-making and its role in democratizing insight that affects us all." --Allison Puccioni, Principal and Founder at Armillary Services