Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. We are coming to you from our home in Jerusalem, and today we are doing things a little bit differently. Usually, our housemate Daniel sends us an audio prompt to get the gears turning, but today, we actually decided to pick the topic ourselves. There has been so much happening in the world lately, especially with the shifting dynamics of global conflict and technology, that we wanted to dive into something that has been sitting at the intersection of our interests for a long time.
Herman Poppleberry here, and Corn, I am so glad we are doing this one. We are talking about Open Source Intelligence, or what everyone calls OSINT. It is a field that has basically exploded over the last five to ten years. It used to be this niche hobby for people who liked looking at flight trackers, but now it has become a multi billion dollar industry that is genuinely challenging the way traditional intelligence agencies operate.
It really is the OSINT paradox, right? You have situations now where the most accurate, up to the minute intelligence on a global conflict is often found on X, formerly Twitter, or Telegram, rather than in the classified briefings that are sitting on a general desk. I remember seeing a post a few months ago where a single user on a laptop tracked a Russian troop movement through a combination of TikTok videos and satellite imagery before the Pentagon had even issued a formal statement. It is wild to think that the barrier to entry has dropped so low that a dedicated person at home can produce intelligence that rivals a state actor.
And that is what I want to explore today. We are going to look at the transition from this being a hobbyist activity to a professionalized powerhouse. We are going to map out the landscape of who these people actually are. Are they just guys in basements? Are they former spooks? Or are they active state affiliated accounts laundering information? Plus, we really need to get into the career side of this, because geospatial intelligence and data fusion are becoming some of the most sought after skills in the corporate world.
It is a massive topic. I think we should start by defining the spectrum. Because when people hear Open Source Intelligence, they often think it is just people sharing screenshots on social media. But there is a huge range of players here. You have the Bellingcat style open source investigators who focus on human rights and war crimes. Then you have the professional firms like Janes or Stratfor. And then you have this murky middle ground.
Right, the open source part of the name is almost a misnomer now. Open source technically just means the information is publicly available. It does not mean it is free. If you want high resolution satellite imagery from Maxar or Planet Labs, you are going to pay for it. If you want the high end analytical tools to parse millions of data points, that costs money. So, the democratization of intelligence is real, but there is still a massive divide between what a hobbyist can do and what a professional firm can do.
That is a great point. Is it really open if the tools are proprietary and expensive? I mean, we talked about this a bit back in episode seven hundred and six when we were looking at building a personal intelligence dashboard. The data might be out there, but the triage is the hard part. We have moved from a world of information scarcity, where the goal was just to find out what was happening, to a world of information triage, where the goal is to filter out the noise and figure out what is actually true.
It is a shift from collection to analysis. In the old days of the Cold War, getting a photo of a new Soviet submarine was a massive intelligence win. Now, you can probably find a photo of that submarine on a dozen different satellite feeds or social media posts within an hour of it surfacing. The challenge now is not finding the photo, it is verifying that the photo has not been doctored, figuring out exactly where it was taken, and understanding what it means for the broader geopolitical strategy.
Well, let us dig into the players then. When we look at social media, especially during a crisis, you see these accounts that have suspiciously good info. I am sure everyone has seen them. They are posting maps of the front lines in Ukraine or the Middle East with incredible detail. Who are these people?
It is a mix, and you have to be really careful with your source hygiene. First, you have the genuine hobbyists and citizen analysts. These are the people who got into this during the Syrian Civil War or the early stages of the Ukraine conflict in twenty fourteen. They are incredibly dedicated. They spend eighteen hours a day cross referencing shadows in a video with Google Earth imagery to find the exact street corner where a missile hit. Many of them have no formal background, but they have developed a level of technical tradecraft that is honestly breathtaking.
But then you have the former military and intelligence folks, right? The guys who have retired from the Central Intelligence Agency or the British Secret Intelligence Service and now they are operating in the open.
Yes, and they are a huge part of the ecosystem. They bring the analytical frameworks that they learned in the classified world and apply them to open source data. These are often the accounts with the best insights because they know what to look for. They understand military doctrine. If they see a specific type of logistics vehicle moving toward a border, they know it is not just a random truck, it is a sign that a specific type of offensive is being prepared. They have the network to get tips, too. Someone in their old unit might send them a direct message saying, hey, keep an eye on this specific airfield.
That leads us to the more controversial group. The active duty adjacent accounts. We are talking about state affiliated information operations. If you are a country like Russia, Iran, or even a Western power, why wouldn't you use the OSINT community to push your narrative?
Oh, they absolutely do. It is called intelligence laundering. A state intelligence agency has a piece of information they want to get out into the public, but they do not want it to come from an official government spokesperson because that lacks credibility or creates diplomatic headaches. So, they leak it to a seemingly independent open source analyst. The analyst posts it as a discovery they made, the media picks it up, and suddenly it is a fact. It provides the state with plausible deniability while still shaping the narrative.
It is a brilliant strategy, really. It exploits the trust people have in the OSINT community. People think, oh, this guy is just an independent researcher, he has no agenda. But if he is getting his best tips from a specific government, he is effectively an extension of their information warfare department. We have to be especially mindful of this in our neck of the woods. The information war in the Middle East is just as intense as the physical war.
It really is. And it is not just about spreading lies, it is about selective truth. You share the open source data that helps your side and ignore the data that hurts it. But let us talk about the technical side for a second, because that is where things get really fascinating. The role of commercial satellite providers has changed everything. Companies like Planet Labs and Maxar have basically ended the era of secret military movements.
Planet Labs is the one that always blows my mind. They have a constellation of over two hundred satellites, they call them Doves, and they image the entire landmass of the Earth every single day. That is a level of persistence that even the most advanced government spy satellites struggled to achieve twenty years ago.
And while the government satellites might have better resolution, meaning they can see smaller details, the persistence of Planet Labs is what matters for OSINT. You can do change detection. You can look at an airfield on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. If a new row of tents appears on Friday, you know something is happening. You do not need to see the serial number on the planes to know that a deployment is underway.
And then you have Synthetic Aperture Radar, or SAR. We should explain why that is such a big deal. Most people think of satellite photos as just regular pictures, like the ones you take with your phone. But if there are clouds or if it is nighttime, a regular camera cannot see anything.
Right, but Synthetic Aperture Radar is a game changer because it uses radar pulses to create an image. It can see through clouds, it can see through smoke, and it works perfectly in total darkness. In the early days of the Ukraine conflict, the Russians tried to use cloud cover to hide their movements. But commercial SAR providers like Umbra or ICEYE were providing high resolution radar imagery that showed exactly where the tanks were, even in the middle of a storm. This democratization of SAR has made it impossible to hide.
We actually touched on this back in episode five hundred and sixty seven, The Orbital Shell Game. We talked about how AI and satellite deception are evolving. If you know a SAR satellite is coming over, you can try to use reflectors to spoof the image, but it is becoming harder and harder as the number of satellites increases. There is nowhere left to hide.
And it is not just satellites. We have to talk about ADS-B and AIS data. For our listeners who are not aviation or maritime geeks, ADS-B is the system aircraft use to broadcast their position, and AIS is the equivalent for ships. This data is technically public. You can go to websites like Flightradar twenty four or MarineTraffic and see where almost every plane and ship in the world is in real time.
Well, almost every plane. Military aircraft often turn off their transponders when they are on a mission. But even then, the OSINT community has ways around it. There are networks of hobbyists with radio receivers who pick up signals that the big tracking websites might filter out. They can identify a tanker plane circling over the Mediterranean, and even if they do not know what it is refueling, they know that if a tanker is there, there are fighters nearby.
It is like a giant puzzle. You take a bit of radio data, a satellite photo of a port, and a TikTok video of a soldier in a grocery store, and you fuse them together. That brings us to the professional side of the house. It is not just hobbyists on X anymore. The industry around this is massive. You have legacy players like Janes, which has been the gold standard for defense intelligence since the late eighteen hundreds. If you want to know the specifications of a Chinese destroyer or a French missile, you go to Janes.
And then you have the more modern geopolitical firms like Stratfor, which is now part of RANE. They focus on the why. Not just what is happening, but what it means for the next ten years. They are like a private Central Intelligence Agency for corporations. If you are a multinational bank and you are worried about stability in West Africa, you are not going to wait for a State Department briefing. You are going to hire a firm like RANE to give you a risk assessment.
And then you have the data fusion giants like Palantir. They do not necessarily collect the data themselves, but they provide the platform that allows governments and big companies to take all these disparate open source and classified feeds and make sense of them. It is about finding the signal in the noise. When you have millions of data points, you need machine learning and AI to flag the anomalies.
This is where it gets really interesting for anyone looking at a career in this field. The professionalization of OSINT has created a whole new job market. It is not just about being a spy anymore. There are roles for imagery analysts, data scientists, and geopolitical researchers in almost every major industry.
If you are interested in this, the opportunities are booming. Let us talk about GEOINT, or Geospatial Intelligence. This is the field of analyzing imagery and geospatial data to describe, assess, and visually depict physical features and geographically referenced activities on Earth. In the past, this was almost entirely a military field. But now, insurance companies use GEOINT to assess flood risks. Agriculture companies use it to monitor crop yields. Even hedge funds use it. They will count the number of cars in the parking lots of major retailers to predict quarterly earnings before they are officially announced.
I have heard about that. They even look at the shadows of oil tanks to figure out how much oil is inside. If you know the angle of the sun and the length of the shadow cast by the floating lid of an oil tank, you can calculate the volume of oil in that tank. If you do that for every tank in a major port, you have a better idea of global oil reserves than most governments do.
It is brilliant. And if you want to get into this, you need a specific set of skills. It is not just about looking at pictures. You need to understand GIS, which is Geographic Information Systems. You probably need some Python skills to automate data collection. And if you really want to be at the cutting edge, you need to understand how to work with SAR data or hyperspectral imagery.
What about the analytical side? Not everyone is a coder.
True. There is a huge demand for what I call the Multi-INT fusion analyst. This is someone who can take Open Source Intelligence, Geospatial Intelligence, and maybe some Signals Intelligence or Cyber Intelligence, and weave them into a coherent narrative. Corporations need this for due diligence. If they are going to partner with a company in a foreign country, they need to know if that company is actually a front for a sanctioned entity or if they have a history of environmental violations that do not show up in official records.
Sanctions compliance is a massive driver for this right now. Especially with the global push to isolate certain regimes. Banks are terrified of secondary sanctions. They are hiring entire teams of OSINT analysts to track maritime data and see if the ships they are financing are doing ship to ship transfers of oil in the middle of the night to hide the origin of the cargo. We talked about this in episode seven hundred and eighty eight, Dark Ships. The high stakes world of maritime tracking. It is a cat and mouse game, and the analysts are the ones on the front lines.
It really is. And it is not just about catching the bad guys. It is about supply chain resilience. After the disruptions we saw a few years ago, companies realized they did not actually know where their components were coming from. They might know their primary supplier, but they did not know who their supplier's supplier was. Now, they use OSINT to map out the entire global logistics chain. If there is a strike at a port in Germany or a flood in Taiwan, they know within minutes how it is going to affect their production line in Michigan.
So, if someone is listening to this and they think, I want to do this for a living, where do they start? Do they need a degree in international relations or computer science?
It helps, but the beautiful thing about OSINT is that it is a meritocracy. If you can prove you have the skills, people will hire you. Start by building a portfolio. Pick a topic you are interested in, maybe it is tracking illegal fishing in the South China Sea or monitoring deforestation in the Amazon. Use free tools like Google Earth, Sentinel Hub, and flight trackers. Document your process. Show how you verified your findings. If you can produce a high quality report that stands up to scrutiny, that is your resume.
That is great advice. And I think the point about verification is the most important one. In an era where we are starting to see deepfakes and AI generated satellite imagery, the premium is no longer on the ability to collect data. The premium is on the ability to verify it. Anyone can find a shocking photo on the internet. Very few people can tell you for sure if it is real, when it was taken, and why it matters.
We are moving into a world where the truth is harder to find, even though there is more information than ever. The role of the OSINT analyst is to be a truth seeker. It is about using logic, evidence, and technical tools to pierce through the fog of war and the fog of misinformation.
It is also about source hygiene for the rest of us. When we are consuming news on social media, we have to be skeptical. If an account is posting incredibly detailed intelligence but never explains where it came from, that is a red flag. Real OSINT is transparent. It shows you the satellite photo, it gives you the coordinates, it links to the video. If they are just saying, my sources tell me, then they are not doing OSINT, they are doing traditional journalism at best, or intelligence laundering at worst.
Right. You have to look for the receipts. And you have to be aware of the bias. Every analyst has a perspective. Even the most objective sounding accounts are choosing which stories to cover and which to ignore. That is why I always recommend following a diverse range of sources. Do not just stay in your bubble. If you are following the conflict in Ukraine, follow some pro-Western analysts, but also look at what the more credible neutral or even opposing accounts are saying. Not because you agree with them, but because you need to see the whole board.
That brings us to the future of the field. We are seeing the integration of Large Language Models and AI into PAI, which is Publicly Available Information analytics. Imagine an AI that can monitor every local news broadcast, every social media post, and every satellite update in a dozen different languages, and then summarize the key developments for you in real time.
It is already happening. Companies like Primer and Babel Street are building exactly that. It is going to make the triage process much faster, but it also creates new risks. If the AI is trained on biased data, it is going to produce biased intelligence. And we still need the human in the loop to ask the second order questions. An AI can tell you that a bridge was destroyed. A human analyst can tell you that the destruction of that bridge means the enemy is planning to retreat, but they are trying to delay your advance so they can evacuate their heavy equipment.
It is that layer of strategic thinking that is so hard to automate. I also wonder about the ethical implications of all this. We are living in a world of total transparency, but that transparency is not evenly distributed. Governments can see everything we do, and now, to some extent, we can see what they are doing. But what does that mean for privacy? What does it mean for the safety of people on the ground?
That is a huge concern. We saw this in the early days of the Ukraine war. People were posting videos of troop movements, which was great for intelligence, but it also put those civilians at risk. If a soldier sees you filming them, you could be targeted. We actually talked about this in episode seven hundred and seventy nine, The Cost of a Click. The line between being a bystander and being an unintentional intelligence asset has completely blurred. Everyone with a smartphone is now a sensor in a global intelligence network.
It is a heavy responsibility. And as the tools get better, the stakes only get higher. I think the final thought for me is that OSINT is a tool for empowerment. It allows us to hold the powerful accountable. Whether it is a government lying about a drone strike or a corporation hiding an environmental disaster, the data is out there. We just need the skills and the persistence to find it.
I agree. It is a new frontier of citizenship. In the twenty first century, being an informed citizen means being a bit of an OSINT analyst. You do not have to be a professional, but you should understand the basics of how information is verified and how to spot a narrative that is being pushed on you.
Well, this has been a fascinating deep dive. I think we have covered the whole spectrum, from the hobbyists on X to the multi billion dollar satellite constellations. It is a field that is only going to get more important as we move deeper into this decade.
Definitely. And for anyone who wants to dive deeper, we have a ton of related episodes in our archive. Check out episode nine hundred and forty four on the architecture of information, or episode seven hundred and six on building your own intelligence dashboard. There is a wealth of information at myweirdprompts.com.
And hey, if you are enjoying the show, we would really appreciate a quick review on your podcast app or a rating on Spotify. It genuinely helps other people find the show and helps us keep doing this. We have been at this for over nine hundred episodes now, and the community support is what keeps us going.
Yeah, it really does. Thanks for sticking with us today. This was a topic we really wanted to get into, and I hope you found it as interesting as we did. We will be back next time with another prompt, hopefully one from Daniel if he has finished his latest project.
Until then, stay curious and keep questioning what you see on your feed. This has been My Weird Prompts. I am Corn Poppleberry.
And I am Herman Poppleberry. Thanks for listening.
We will catch you in the next one. Take care, everyone.
Goodbye.
So, Herman, before we totally wrap up, I was thinking about the career side again. If you were starting today, with all the AI developments we are seeing in twenty twenty six, would you focus on the technical side or the geopolitical side?
That is a tough one. Honestly, I think the sweet spot is being a translator between the two. If you understand the technology well enough to know what is possible, but you also understand the geopolitics well enough to know what is important, you are gold. That is where the real value is.
That makes sense. It is about being the bridge. Anyway, we should probably get some lunch. I think Daniel said he was making something today.
Oh, I hope it is that shakshuka he does. That is the best part of living in Jerusalem.
Agreed. Alright, thanks again everyone. See you soon.
See ya.
This has been My Weird Prompts. You can find us on Spotify and at our website, myweirdprompts.com.
See you next time.
Bye.
Bye.
Seriously though, the satellite thing is wild. Two hundred Doves.
It is a lot of birds in the sky, Corn. A lot of birds.
Alright, for real this time, signing off.
Signing off.
One more thing, actually. I was thinking about episode seven hundred and eighty eight again. The maritime tracking. Remember when we talked about the dark ships in the South China Sea?
Yeah, the ones that spoof their AIS signals to look like they are in a completely different ocean.
It just goes to show that even with all this tech, there is still so much room for deception.
That is why we need the analysts. The tech gives you the data, but the humans find the truth.
Well said. Okay, now I am actually hungry. Let's go.
Let's go.
My Weird Prompts. Episode nine hundred and thirty five. Done.
Done and dusted.
See you later.
Bye.
