“At its best, OSINT is the complete marriage of the proven process of intelligence, from requirements definition and collection management to timely analytics, with all — and I do mean all — legally and ethically available sources. It is important to emphasize the paucity of those endeavors that are limited to English or the main European languages. If one cannot work in 29 plus languages on a 24/7 basis — that is in real time and near real time, — one is not serious. Print and broadcast media are actually the smallest part of the open source universe. Untapped perceptions, oral histories, informal exchanges, limited edition local publications, pre-prints, and geospatial as well as imagery information of all kinds — including photos from cells phones with geospatial positioning system information — this is the larger open source universe.

Lest you might believe that the U.S. government does OSINT, but does not advertise, I will briefly highlight the fact that in August 1995, in an overnight exercise, I defeated the entire U.S. intelligence community — all agencies — in what is now known as the Burundi exercise. I did this with six telephone calls on my way to the airport. It was not a fair contest — if you believe that only secrets matter, then you will tend to not know where to go for the non-secrets. There has been no real change since then, despite the best intentions within the FBIS community and the federal research Division at the Library of Congress, because of persistent opposing mind-sets at the highest levels.” -From “THE NEW CRAFT OF OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE: HOW THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE SHOULD LEAD”