I remember one of the leaders of Al Qaeda saying that they got 70% of their most useful intelligence from social media. A state actor with high tech resources could probably get an obscene amount of useful information from it - just need to find one guy who breaks opsec to upload a photo of themselves with the geo tags still on it.
Fun fact USA wanted google to not show US bases but surprise a ton of people use a running app called Strava that tracks your runs. A ton of US mil bases got mapped thanks to Strava and soldiers uploading their runs. It's incredibly easy to have one guy post a ton of info.
That's what OSINT was originally intended to help achieve but almost all the things using OSINT as a label now have become glorified propaganda feeds and essentially just try to get views by resharing everything all the other OSINT feeds are sharing. None of them do work and they tend to steer audiences away from the spaces where people are trying to do the real digging and work. Gameification really hurts trying to create groups for collective efforts.
I remember one of the leaders of Al Qaeda saying that they got 70% of their most useful intelligence from social media. A state actor with high tech resources could probably get an obscene amount of useful information from it - just need to find one guy who breaks opsec to upload a photo of themselves with the geo tags still on it.
Fun fact USA wanted google to not show US bases but surprise a ton of people use a running app called Strava that tracks your runs. A ton of US mil bases got mapped thanks to Strava and soldiers uploading their runs. It's incredibly easy to have one guy post a ton of info.
That's what OSINT was originally intended to help achieve but almost all the things using OSINT as a label now have become glorified propaganda feeds and essentially just try to get views by resharing everything all the other OSINT feeds are sharing. None of them do work and they tend to steer audiences away from the spaces where people are trying to do the real digging and work. Gameification really hurts trying to create groups for collective efforts.