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Intelligence – A good collection of great OSINT Resources

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Re: Intelligence – A good collection of great OSINT Resources

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If Putin is going to come after every Westerner that both hates his guts and that has contributed in one form or another to the Ukrainian side of this war then he has his work cut out for him. I'd say OP is too low value a target from cost/benefit analysis point of view and the backlash of committing acts of war on Western territory could well be much, much worse than anything that Putin is willing to deal with at th…

On the other hand cost/benefit can change, especially with new technology - machine learning, ai, quantum computing, etc… That may be why the military is so interested in encouraging it, to distribute (thin out) the risk.

Re: Intelligence – A good collection of great OSINT Resources

#32
post #16

Something I've always wondered: when you sign up for a proprietary "intelligence management" platform like Palantir Gotham, do they give you access to a bunch of OSINT datasets they scrape and manage themselves, to combine with your proprietary intelligence dataset for enhanced understanding? Sort of like how BigQuery has "BigQuery public datasets"? If not, seems like a missed opportunity for value-add / lock-in. And…

A public (historical) WHOIS dataset is a nightmare due to GDPR et al., though, isn't it? You couldn't opt-out of WHOIS (some TLDs just didn't allow for WHOIS privacy / proxy registrations) in the past, and it's IMO quite a hard sell that the public interest in the historic WHOIS data of some personal website should have any weight at all in this case.

That's an interesting way to put it. There is some interest, no doubt, and there is some potential abusing that information.

Since the information was committed knowingly and willingly to the public domain, though I do not know much about it to begin with, I don't see how GDPR applies at all.

Re: Intelligence – A good collection of great OSINT Resources

#33
For better or worse, I'm surprised this hasn't happened yet:

Track organizational structures and responsibility over time (especially public ones like government and public corporation executives).

Then enable searches of events / transgressions and claimed fallguys so more responsibility can be traced/blame for these important figures who usually get off scot free.

It would be useful to know "hey who likely was in charge of the divisions that suppressed early global warming research in oil companies" with a relatively simple search.

Re: Intelligence – A good collection of great OSINT Resources

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A public (historical) WHOIS dataset is a nightmare due to GDPR et al., though, isn't it? You couldn't opt-out of WHOIS (some TLDs just didn't allow for WHOIS privacy / proxy registrations) in the past, and it's IMO quite a hard sell that the public interest in the historic WHOIS data of some personal website should have any weight at all in this case.

That's an interesting way to put it. There is some interest, no doubt, and there is some potential abusing that information. Since the information was committed knowingly and willingly to the public domain, though I do not know much about it to begin with, I don't see how GDPR applies at all.

The GDPR allows you to force companies to delete data that was knowingly and willingly commited, though, via article 21 and 17c GDPR [1], except if there are "overriding legitimate grounds for the processing" of the data. I doubt there are, at least for low-profile, personal websites and historical WHOIS data.

You could IMO also make an argument that the collection and scraping of WHOIS data without consent was unlawful processing as a whole, as the data was not provided to the domain NIC with explicit consent for third-parties to collect and save them forever, which would even make any overriding legitimate grounds for processing moot.

17a may also apply: The reason for WHOIS is to find out who owns a domain now, right? There is no version history. Historical WHOIS data does not serve this purpose anymore.

It's quite the can of worms.

[1] https://gdpr-text.com/de/read/article-17/

Re: Intelligence – A good collection of great OSINT Resources

#36

Since other people are asking about related tools... Do you know about a tool for managing personas (vulgo sockpuppets)? E.g. a little database where you store facts about fake identities: Name, age, location, hobbies, favorite topics, and so on. Maybe if you click on an identity, it will connect you with a preconfigured proxy or VPN and allow you to post as them on websites. I don't really have a use case for myself…

Firefox Multi-Account Containers with Mozilla VPN would be a start.

Re: Intelligence – A good collection of great OSINT Resources

#37
post #16

Something I've always wondered: when you sign up for a proprietary "intelligence management" platform like Palantir Gotham, do they give you access to a bunch of OSINT datasets they scrape and manage themselves, to combine with your proprietary intelligence dataset for enhanced understanding? Sort of like how BigQuery has "BigQuery public datasets"? If not, seems like a missed opportunity for value-add / lock-in. And…

> when you sign up for a proprietary "intelligence management" platform like Palantir Gotham, do they give you access to a bunch of OSINT datasets they scrape and manage themselves, to combine with your proprietary intelligence dataset for enhanced understanding?

I don’t know about OSINT, but in the consumer data landscape (Acxiom, Datalogix, etc) this is the standard MO

Re: Intelligence – A good collection of great OSINT Resources

#39

at the start of Russian invasion I helped geolocate one video, claiming that Russians entered Kherson. I found it after about one hour and posted on twitter tagging everyone I know. I got no feedback so got discouraged. But few months later, I noticed that France24 used my tweet to prove Russians entered Kherson and a lot of newspapers followed their lead. Pretty cool I was able to help in a minimally viable way to u…

This is a great story. Don't get discouraged!

Re: Intelligence – A good collection of great OSINT Resources

#40
post #16

Something I've always wondered: when you sign up for a proprietary "intelligence management" platform like Palantir Gotham, do they give you access to a bunch of OSINT datasets they scrape and manage themselves, to combine with your proprietary intelligence dataset for enhanced understanding? Sort of like how BigQuery has "BigQuery public datasets"? If not, seems like a missed opportunity for value-add / lock-in. And…

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