ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to navigate that evolving open source intelligence (OSINT) landscape, pointing out in the process some of the challenging terrain of this new world, along with some of it sunny uplands. Open sources exploded and with it the old OSINT model of observing and understanding ‘broadcast’ sources came under unmanageable strain. The social media entrepreneurs, feeling their way to making money from Metcalfe’s Law, added a new paradigm to the increasingly cluttered OSINT landscape – that of the ‘many to many’ interaction. Recognising the OSINT impact of the social media’s ‘many to many’ paradigm has led a former senior member of the UK intelligence community, and a noted academic, to coin the term Social Media Intelligence – social media intelligence. OSINT has clearly delivered value to its users for more than a millennium, transcending the revolutions of print, the telegraph and analogue broadcast media.
