Blog Wars - Views from the Front Line

Part 4 – The Web As A Weapon

When it comes to the Internet as a weapon in the fight against terrorism and, conversely, as a tool to recruit and plan terrorist outrages, the watchword is OSINT. OSINT means Open Source Intelligence and refers to the immense quantities of data freely available in the public domain over the internet, or any other medium, which can be sifted through in order to provide viable intelligence data.

Some examples of OSINT would be the military blogs listed above, given as how they often refer to tactics, security measures and other privileged information. This is one of the main reasons why the Department of Defence and the British Ministry of Defence like to keep a rein on what is posted on them. Other OSINT sources include government studies, research papers, media stories and essentially anything that might carry useable data which can be used to aid an investigation.

In the modern age, when almost anything worth knowing, from the specifications of military vehicles and order of battles of armies to everything the CIA is willing to tell us about every nation on the planet, to the exact location of, well, anything, it stands to reason that groups like MI6, the CIA, Mossad and Al Qaeda will have teams of geeks scouring the web for useful data. After all, when the President of Iran keeps a blog saying who he’s having round to dinner next week it makes sense to pay attention.

The value of OSINT for basic information cannot be ignored, however it has caused controversy over the role of Open Source Intelligence in the build up to the Iraq war. The so-called Dodgy Dossier presented by British Intelligence as a case for war with Iraq turned out to be based almost entirely on OSINT. 'Based' is perhaps not a strong enough word, considering that typos from some sections of the source material remained in the finished dossier where text had been copy and pasted in. Because of this overt plagiarism the OSINT sources could then be verified by the public and media and shown to be, as the name coined for the dossier suggests, dodgy.

While OSINT and its accompanying legions of geeky spooks are becoming a greater part of the global intelligence scene it seems that for a long time to come HUMINT, or Human Intelligence sources (better known as spies), are still the difference between knowing what’s what and looking sheepish in front of a Foreign Affairs select committee.