NixintelDec 18, 2022

UK's General Hockenhull has spoken about the importance of #OSINT in the war in Ukraine.

He identifies 6 key impacts that OSINT has made:

1) Adding to anticipatory intelligence. Understanding the posture of forces and the fusion of commercial imagery, tech data and social media analysis, provided significant insight into Russian deployments.

2) Shifting public confidence. We had the ability to share information around Russian activity widely [...] at the point of invasion and beyond. >

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3) Countering Russia’s Information Operations and countering Putin’s own narrative around the war. The pre-conflict deployment and highlighting intent has been important, but also open source has been incredibly important in being able to rebut false flag narratives from the Russians, and indeed, at times has provided the ability to even prebuttal.
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4) Open source has also proved to be a force multiplier, and we’ve been able to move to an approach which militaries around the world have sought to do for some time. Through open source every platform and every service person is able to act as a sensor. Citizen involvement has meant that practically every citizen and every
Dec 18, 2022 at 7:00pmWeb
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5) Crowdsourcing and the use of standardised chatbots which has allowed these Ukrainian citizens to report Russian units and locations. The civilian sensor network has been a force multiplier but also, it’s been able to provide a variety of viewpoints around information.
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6) Lifting the fog of war. [As]a career intelligence officer [...] it felt like I was responsible for making a jigsaw from the available information.

[...]

Whilst open source doesn’t provide the lid of the jigsaw box, it gives an almost infinite number of jigsaw pieces. The challenge now is that you can make an almost infinite number of pictures as a consequence of the available pieces.

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7. You can read the whole speech here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/how-open-source-intelligence-has-shaped-the-russia-ukraine-war

How open-source intelligence has shaped the Russia-Ukraine war

General Hockenhull, Commander Strategic Command, discussed the use of open source intelligence at a RUSI Members Webinar.

GOV.UK