Five Ways a Good OSINT Platform Differs from a Mediocre One

Understand what you can experience with a truly good OSINT solution before you choose

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) has come a long way in the last 10-15 years. There are plenty of vendors who offer “OSINT,” but before you buy, be aware of the five critical differences between “just OSINT” and a professional-level OSINT solution for mission-critical needs.

1. Data: Access to oceans of open-source data, not just the social media pond
2. Comprehensive search: The ability to automatically expand a simple search and return results from all sources in one interface, and AI to rapidly review the themes and ideas in the results.
3. Precise search: Enriched data with intuitive, powerful ways of searching put the most relevant results at the top of the queue.
4. Responsive performance: Rapid results from even the most complex search queries.
5. Vendors who understand your mission: Professional services and support delivered by tradecraft experts who know exactly how to efficiently capture what you need to know.

1. Data

It seems too obvious to say: First make sure that you are fishing in the ocean, not a pond. A good OSINT solution provider has billions of documents that go beyond mainstream social media to include the dark web, forums, news, blogs, product reviews, publicly available databases, and thousands of domains in hundreds of languages. Especially for investigations, the data should be captured and available to search days, weeks, or even months later so that now-deleted posts and documents can be interrogated for metadata and its connections. A good OSINT tool should be like looking through a picture window, not a tube.

2. Comprehensive search

Comprehensive means the OSINT platform increases the efficiency of one analyst by 10x. Consider a platform that automatically expands searches through an ontology of curated related terms in many more languages than one person could know. The name of a prominent world leader might expand to over 100 nicknames and slang in English and yet more in hundreds of languages. How many relevant results would an analyst miss without automated query expansion happening in the background? And for the non-polyglots, the system should invisibly auto-translate results to their language without laboriously clicking each one for translation.

Generative AI is a must-have to instantaneously summarize and highlight themes and facts based on your search results without hallucinating. Users can follow up with a Q&A conversation with the AI to dig deeper into the relevant content. While AI can’t apply the same level of tradecraft as people, it can uncover — at computer speed — new avenues to investigate.

At the same time, the AI must have strict controls to safeguard your searches or data from being used for model training.  

3. Precision search

High-precision search has two requirements: data enrichment and search tools to let you slice and dice the data the way you like.

Data enrichment is essential preparation akin to researching the habitats of your target species, their feeding patterns, and preferred bait. For an OSINT platform it means deduplicating documents, AI-tagging for sentiment analysis, and presence of “violent intent.”

At search time, the platform will have myriad means to filter or define the search to quickly eliminate the noise. The loop of “search => review results => refine query => search again,” is only as productive as the tools allow. The tools should be equally accommodating for researching entities (people and organizations) as answering strategic questions. “What are fishing vessels from country X doing in the South China Sea?” After a violent change in a country or organization's leadership, a good OSINT platform will let you start from a general question to discover who is filling the power vacuum.

Powerful search tools are absolutely required for analysts to make full use of the massive data at their disposal and turn around timely analyses. The ability to set up persistent searches to continually look while you sleep is also invaluable. Otherwise, the data might as well not be there.

4. Responsive performance

Massive data is, by definition, cumbersome to search and process. A good OSINT platform has the infrastructure to deliver the data you need now (not later after you’ve paid them). And the platform shouldn’t be spidering all its data on-demand. Why? Complex queries grind to a near halt if the system interrogates data as it’s scraped. Now-deleted posts will be lost forever. Analysts cannot afford complex searches to be so slow that they can only perform the “search => review => refine” process a few times a day.

5. Vendor understands and is skilled in the mission

This last point isn’t about the platform but the vendor. Do they have in-house tradecraft expertise for their customers? If the user license “comes with dedicated analysts,” make sure the analysts are experts in mission-critical OSINT with decades of experience who can apply tradecraft to deftly find answers to your questions.

In conclusion

Look for an OSINT solution that won’t put you at a pond with a hand net. The vendor you choose should be trusted by the most prestigious elite agencies in the world. Ask the hard questions. There are plenty of OSINT vendors out there, but if you want to do OSINT properly, speak with Babel Street to position your organization for success.