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The Open Source Revolution
I was an early advocate of transparency at the United Nations. Ultimately I resigned from the World Organisation, because it refused to tackle corruption amounting to at least $10 billion dollars, in what was supposed to be a humanitarian program for the benefit of destitute Iraq civilians. I eventually turned to journalism and wrote an Op-Ed article for The Wall Street Journal, in which I called for (what became) the largest, global anti-corruption investigation in history. Most of the findings confirmed by the investigation relied on open sources that had been available to us all along. Since that experience I have seen Open Source reporting lead the way in reporting on corruption and human rights abuses. In fact, some of the most significant events of the past few years, including the covid Pandemic and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, were first detected by Open Source reporting. The Open Source Intelligence Center is dedicated to offering news junkies, researchers or would-be "Citizen Journalists" a GATEWAY to the online world of Open Source Intelligence Sources and Methods.
OSI and the Ukraine War
OSI is easy to find online if one knows where to look. The following summary was sourced from Wikepedia
In the early hours of 24 February, just before the start of the invasion, OSINT researchers at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey used Google Maps to track a significantly large traffic jam on a road in Russia leading to the Ukrainian border. Jeffrey Lewis subsequently tweeted "someone’s on the move." An hour later, Russian troops began the invasion.
Netherlands-based investigative journalism group Bellingcat has published interactive maps of destroyed civilian targets and has worked on authenticating potential documentation of war crimes.[9][10][11] In July 2022, Bellingcat was banned as an undesirable organisation by the Russian government, with the Prosecutor-General of Russia saying that it posed "a threat to the security of the Russian Federation."
Oryx gained international prominence through its work during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, counting and keeping track of material losses based on visual evidence and OSINT from social media. It has been regularly cited in major media, including Reuters, BBC News, The Guardian, The Economist, Newsweek, CNN, and CBS News. Forbes has called Oryx "the most reliable source in the conflict so far", calling its services "outstanding". Because it reports only visually confirmed losses, Oryx's tallies of equipment losses have formed absolute minimum baselines for loss estimates.
The Free Buryatia Foundation, which was founded in opposition to the invasion, has used open-source intelligence to try to track the number of Buryats killed in action in Ukraine. As of April 2022, the Foundation has estimated that around 2,8% of Russian casualties were Buryat, one of the highest death tolls among the Russian federal republics.
The HALO Trust, the world's largest mine clearance charity, has also conducted open source research into the conflict to understand the types of weapons used and the subsequent contamination across Ukraine, which requires clearance.
OSINT groups have also used tools such as facial recognition apps to try to identify perpetrators of war crimes, such as the Bucha massacre. Many of these findings have led to criminal charges involving crimes against humanity, taken up by the international criminal court in The Hague.