Many open source intelligence (OSINT) techniques are not applicable to the work of an international affairs professional. Even if you take a top ranked online OSINT class, it would at best be a fascinating distraction, unless you’re supporting vetting or a criminal investigation.
International affairs professionals need OSINT techniques specific to the daily grind. And only someone who’s actually done the job and found solutions that colleagues want to learn is in a position to teach these techniques.
Know the type of OSINT that’s right for you
Traditional OSINT has been around a long time and there are many different types. Not all types are right for international affairs professionals who answer situation dependent government or corporate leadership questions about a foreign country that can be broad or specific.
Information becomes OSINT after it’s refined, organized, or combined with other information. Many believe information becomes OSINT only when it answers someone else’s question, like a client or boss. However, international affairs professionals have an additional reason to make OSINT—they must to deepen their own understanding and prepare for questions they’ll likely get asked.
OSINT is drawn from sources anyone can access. This includes mainstream and social media, public databases, satellite imagery, forums, code repositories, academic papers, and the open, deep, or dark web. The goal of traditional OSINT techniques is to extract specific valuable insights to support investigations or research in various fields such as threat intelligence, law enforcement, business intelligence, investigative journalism, as well as national security.
After many OSINT investigations into a specific matter for a specific pre-defined question, a higher-level strategic report might be available for an international affairs professional.
In the international affairs knowledge industry (IAKI), a practitioner needs to provide timely, relevant, convincing, and actionable recommendations and situational awareness. Techniques for investigating single companies and single people are only useful if you support vetting or law enforcement. While international affairs professionals might research single events with multiple entities, most research is for broader context and is usually in a foreign language, with search timeframes spanning ancient history to modern times.
International affairs professionals aren’t full-time OSINT investigators, yet OSINT remains essential to the job. To succeed in IAKI, you need tailored OSINT training. One size does not fit all.
OSINT tools you won’t use
Despite the hype around new digital data, most of it is peripheral for the majority of international affairs professionals. If you’re vetting or supporting criminal investigations, then there’s going to be new data sources available that you’ll need to learn. If that’s not you, don’t get distracted with all the hype and waste your budget on new tools you won’t use.
For example, most international affairs practitioners won’t use social media scrapping tools unless the foreign country representative or company is active on a U.S. social media company’s platform like X, LinkedIn, or Instagram. Even then, knowing the personal network or sentiment shifts of a single person is not important to the vast majority of international affairs practitioners.
If you’re supporting diplomats, they’re meeting with so many foreign counterparts who usually only discuss pre-cleared talking points. Nuances in each person’s social media presence matters more to investigators working on longer timelines, not international affairs practitioners with bosses heading off to more meetings.
Other tools such as those for public record database mining are useful if you’re interested in a native English speaking country or its companies, because most tools are developed for English language databases.
To use the wealth of information in foreign public record databases, you’d first need to use something like the free Authoritative Source Checklist. International Affairs Thinker LLC developed this checklist to help practitioners take the first steps to develop lists of the databases and relevant foreign language keywords. Without these lists, you’ll stare at the foreign search menu wondering where to start, wasting valuable time, energy, and focus. IAThinker demonstrated how to use the Authoritative Source Checklist here.
Outsourcing OSINT is a half solution
If you offload your OSINT research tasks to an in-house artificial intelligence (AI) tool, all you’re getting is an AI summary of Google’s first few pages. You’ll still need to use all the same analytic tradecraft and mindset techniques to understand how best to prompt AI tailored for your work. You’ll also still need to review its outputs, including the sources.
Outsourcing OSINT to another organization shares the same limitations of new OSINT strategies. You’ll only get what you asked for weeks ago. You’ll still need to do research on the curated dataset. You’ll still wonder if there was something they left out. You’ll still go and do your own internet search.
The worst part is that this half solution leaves you relying on contractors for keywords, cultural and language skills, critical thinking, and curiosity. Aren’t those the parts of the job you value most?
Outsourcing OSINT gives you a false belief that the curated dataset is somehow a complete picture. Professionals working at OSINT companies that do foreign language research like Janes have to make the same tradeoffs between what is timely, relevant, convincing, and actionable to determine what to provide to you.
OSINT you can use
OSINT for international affairs practitioners requires foreign language research methods paired with de-biasing techniques.
See the value for yourself with three free and pre-tested techniques:
- The Crossthink Process for when you need to be thorough faster.
- The Authoritative Source Checklist for when you need to search databases in a foreign language.
- The Technical Expertise Builder for when you need to answer cross-disciplinary questions on a foreign country or company.
IAThinker also previously made six recommendations for organizations to include in new OSINT tradecraft training. These six must-haves are the bare minimum to ensure contractors provide training directly applicable to the work of most international affairs practitioners:
- Require analysts to build a topic specific engagement calendar so they’re prepared to collect important information around events and anniversaries.
- Practice quick-to-apply research methods with de-biasing built in, like the Crossthink Process.
- Teach analysts how to build keyword lists in their native and relevant foreign languages to search multiple search engines and databases.
- Provide tailored international affairs research methods with free, publicly available artificial intelligence tools.
- Provide elite performance training tailored to staying focused and driven in research.
- Demonstrate how cross-cultural communication mishaps can lead to biased research results, and what to do about it.
Shutdown
Don’t bandwagon by riding the OSINT funding wave and end up with more tools and data you won’t use. Take the opportunity to actually fix the persistent problem of overlooking the thinker behind the international affairs analysis with training on foreign language research with de-biasing. Successful international affairs professionals will tell you that you need foreign language research capabilities, with or without any new AI tools or datasets.
You can use IAThinker’s three free techniques directly on the job and even post the one-pagers up in your cubicle for quick reference. At the very least, use this information to frame your needs to a OSINT tradecraft trainer of your choice. If you face pushback, organizations and motivated individuals can take the online International Affairs Professional Development Course on your own time.
Remember, you need foreign language research capabilities, with or without any new AI tools or datasets. You don’t need to be a native speaker or take time off for immersion. And you can do better than machine translation.
