[TeMPOraL]

It's a weird term. My impression is that it mostly means "randos LARPing spies", though there's a commercial angle too, it being to intelligence what PMCs are to the military. May or may not be called after "Open Source Publishing, Incorporated", featured here: [0].

--

[0] - https://irp.fas.org/congress/2005_hr/062105jardines.pdf

[red-iron-pine]

it is not a weird term, and is absolutely a thing. a big deal in 2024, really.

back in the day it was just "reading the newspapers and talking to the local cab drivers", but on 2024 you're scanning forums and social media, on top of news sites.

go to a military-related subreddit and start asking questions about stuff, and you'll eventually get an expert to chime in. Make wrong & stupid claims and then have them slap you down and spill some details -- that's how they got dudes to release classified tank info in Warthunder.

dudes in Palestine and in Ukraine are getting killed because they post selfies and tweets that have GPS coordinates in the metadata. Not hidden behind any top secret firewall, easy to find if you're checking VK or Instagram, but very real implications for dropping bombs.

OSINT is also absolutely a thing in Cyber, where you can get a lot of details about a target by reading their press releases -- "Corp X signs big new deal with Oracle" -- which can give you a new attack surface. Phishing, on a long, broad timeline, has a very high success rate, so go onto Linkedin and start connecting to people. Figure out their tech stack, create a Sales Guy account, and start reaching out to Architects and Managers, and then map out the teams that might have elevated access...

[jolmg]

> OSINT is also absolutely a thing in Cyber

First time I see "cyber" used as a noun. Is that short for "cyberspace", i.e. the internet, or is it something else?

[Suppafly]

the military uses it to describe all things relating to the internet, the rest of us used to use it to mean cybersex, which why you mostly only ever hear it from military folks and c-suite type people now and the rest of us kinda chuckle under our breath every time they mention it.

[cwillu]

Five-sided thought is a hell of a drug, are you _sure_ you want to know?

[wkat4242]

Cybersecurity i think.

[jjmarr]

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/open-secrets-ukraine-in...

To summarize, there are many people in government who are interested in open source intelligence.

Traditional sources of intelligence are gathered with secret means and therefore must be restricted in distribution to prevent burning the source. This means you can have the best possible intelligence but be unable to a) act on it or b) distribute it to people who can.

The value proposition of using open-source intelligence is that you can distribute it very widely to decisionmakers since it's already "out in the open". Intelligence isn't about hoarding secrets for the sake of such; it's about getting information to people who can use it.

The political issue is that people assume that "secret = higher quality" when there's no inherent value to secrecy. So, spy agencies overinvest in secret-gathering, get a ton of info, and are unable to do anything with it.

Meanwhile, if someone posts a tank manual on the WarThunder gaming forums you can give that to every soldier that might encounter that tank.

This is doubly important in tech because many big tech companies play a significant role in national security but cannot get intelligence that would help protect them, and by extension, American interests.

[rightbyte]

Ye they are larpers that sell security consulting etc.

It is a scam. Especially attribution of hacks to states that are on the Washington shit list. There is just no way to know.