The Curse of Abundance: How Open-Source Intelligence has Exacerbated the Fog of War
A destroyed city block in Kyiv, Ukraine. Credit: Алесь Усцінаў, Pexels
In any violent conflict, a single event can dramatically change its course. For a few hours, the pivotal moment in the current phase of the conflict between Israel and Palestine seemed to be the entrance of Lebanon’s powerful militant group, Hezbollah, into the fray on Oct. 11.
Following the brutal incursion by the militant group Hamas (which also rules the Gaza Strip) on Oct. 7, Israel retaliated by staging widespread airstrikes and eventually a ground assault. Tensions were already running high as foreign countries and non-state groups debated the extent to which they should get involved. A full entrance by another actor could mean the start of a broader regional war.
As a result, when several Twitter accounts dedicated to rapid updates from the frontlines quickly reported that nearly two dozen fighters had entered Israel from the north on paragliders, it generated significant attention. The catch is that no such escalation occurred. Despite the footage plastered all over the Internet of airborne militants and reports of aircraft intrusions into Israeli airspace, Hezbollah never entered its southern neighbor. The unsourced footage was from a separate part of the country, and the intrusion alerts were nothing more than a false alarm. The instantaneous nature of these posts reduces the ability of more accurate, detailed information to enter the public consciousness.
Intelligence agencies are covert operations and are careful in how information is collected, distributed, and utilized. If the enemies obtain certain pieces of intelligence, people can die. Open-source intelligence, often shortened to OSINT, epitomizes the opposite approach and embraces the power of freedom of information. The variety of data up for grabs is almost as vast as classified intelligence; according to the Wall Street Journal, it “comprises everything from commercial satellite imagery to social media posts and purchasable databases.” The expansive nature of the Internet creates endless places for important information to hide in plain sight.
Its power became especially apparent following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year. Many of the more popular OSINT accounts on Twitter and the messaging app Telegram found traction in posting about munitions sales and up-to-date troop movements. They may have even predicted the war itself. As the Economist explains, publicly accessible footage and satellite imagery “[corroborated] Western claims that Russia was preparing an invasion.” In the most generous interpretation of OSINT’s potential, the impact that effective use of publicly available intelligence may have on threat detection is nothing short of revolutionary. It acts as a novel front in the information war in these violent conflicts, one where the line between investigative journalism and intelligence becomes blurred.
This became especially apparent in the case of a blast in a parking lot at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in the north. Online debates raged on for several weeks as geospatial experts and traditional media outlets grappled with the small pool of online footage that exists. It was an open scramble of thousands of people to piece together what occurred in a jigsaw puzzle of blurry photos, smartphone video, and satellite imagery. Even U.S. intelligence stated they used a combination of traditional intelligence and public footage posted online to conclude that the culprit was likely a missile fired by a Palestinian militant group.
This supposed potential begs an important question, however; why hasn’t the American intelligence community (IC) taken advantage of such groundbreaking developments? They have not gone unnoticed, with U.S. intelligence identifying arms connections between Russia and Iran through drone parts found through OSINT. This should theoretically lead them to make massive investments in this treasure trove of data and potentially even restructure how we approach intelligence.
However, the Americans likely recognize its limits even as they attempt to harness it. Gavin Wilde, a former senior analyst for the National Security Agency, describes the IC’s competitive advantage as having the ability “to collect and analyze what no one else can and how no one else can.” The closed-sourced intelligence collection and analysis systems that currently exist already offer more concrete, reliable results for national security purposes. The sheer scale of data that OSINT provides may lead to what Wilde describes as “mission creep,” when the amount of information overloads an intelligence apparatus’ ability to effectively utilize it.
As was demonstrated with recent conflicts, using open-source intelligence as the primary source of evidence by which countries take military action creates unnecessary risk. The massive amounts of data only creates more uncertainty, putting the lives of soldiers and civilians alike in peril.
It is a curse of abundance, a cruel irony that contradicts the promise of more accurate intelligence. Rather than overtly improving existing intelligence techniques, OSINT serves more as an easily-accessible resource useful for corroboration rather than a primary strategy for ensuring national security. Attempting to unlock its supposed lofty potential is not worth the bloody cost of getting it wrong.