The long history of OSINT

Block, L. (2023)

Article / Letter to editor

This article presents the findings of exploratory research into the origins of OSINT for which it discusses three case studies from, respectively, the United States, Germany and the Netherlands. Many authors writing on open source intelligence assume that the first OSINT practices emerged at the eve of the Second World War with the establishment of the BBC Monitoring Services and the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service. Building on existing studies, which are supplemented with original archive research, this article demonstrates that OSINT has a much longer and richer history. Methodical efforts to collect and exploit information from publicly available sources to fulfil intelligence requirements are documented as early as halfway the 19^th century in the United States and early 20^th century in Europe.

• OSINT
• Intelligence
• History

• All authors: Block, L.
• Date: 2023-06-14
• Journal: Journal of Intelligence History
• Pages: 1 - 15
• Advanced Publication: Yes
• DOI: doi:10.1080/16161262.2023.2224091