HISTORICAL REFERENCE POINTS OF OPEN SOURCE UTILITY IN INTELLIGENCE
HISTORICAL REFERENCE POINTS OF OPEN SOURCE UTILITY IN INTELLIGENCE

Summary/Abstract: Open sources have proven their utility throughout the last decade, especially for giving the national intelligence communities a whole insight and context of their nation’s state. The evolution of what we call today security environment has been highly influenced by the shift from secret or covert to open-source, leading to a nowadays widely acknowledged OSINT importance. For example, the intelligence communities estimate that OSINT provides between 80 and 95 per cent of the information used in their operations. In other terms, the present paper describes the way open-source has reached its major role in the intelligence activity, by listing the most influential OSINT initiatives and their creators: Sherman Kent, Vannevar Bush and Robert David Steele, and also the most significant moments in the so-called „OSINT Revolution”. From this last point of view, one hypothesis from which we start in this article is that the develop of modern open sources – the internet, especially social media, had encouraged intercultural communication, offering new opportunities for knowledge and the management of transnational security challenges in a constantly changing environment.

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