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This week in open-source intelligence (OSINT) news: The Army sets bold goals for its OSINT strategy for 2040 and beyond, China learns to love (and manipulate!) social media and a new intelligence partnership promises to deliver new open source-based research on the war in Ukraine and other conflicts.
This is the OSINT news of the week:
Army’s bold OSINT goals involve technology, training, processes and instant information dissemination
It’s been a little more than a year since the Army first unveiled its open source intelligence doctrine, but its leadership is already looking into the next decade and beyond, to ensure that all strategy pillars – people, readiness, modernization and partnerships – are optimized to their fullest potential. Dennis Eger, senior OSINT advisor for the Army, calls the continued focus on OSINT “bold”, and highlights the importance of learning to use the newest technologies, like generative AI, to maximize the Army’s capabilities to collect, process and analyze intelligence data.
Beyond the focus on technology, the Army is placing great importance on personnel training and processes, as well as building OSINT collection teams into many of its major formations – as the demand for OSINT data is growing across the service. Eger describes the future where feedback from OSINT analysts is instantly delivered to all relevant personnel and commanders, helping them make quick decisions and build a more complete picture of the situation.
“The Army wants to swiftly bring in new OSINT capabilities, as the technology in the open source space evolves quickly.”
Federal News Network
Researchers offer insights Into Chinese use of generative AI and social bots
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was initially concerned about the rise of social media, considering it a threat to the regime; but it has since come to embrace it as a way to influence domestic and foreign public opinion in the CCP's favor. This month, the RAND Corporation, a public policy research nonprofit, published a report exploring the CCP's foreign social media manipulation tactics, including the use of generative AI and social bots.
The authors use extensive Chinese-language open-source primary materials to conclude that the Chinese military had been developing its social media manipulation tactics since at least the mid-2010s and that the CCP continues to leverage latest technologies to advance its capabilities and scale operations. The report also provides recommendations to the U.S. and other global democracies on how to prepare for AI-driven social media manipulation – such as adopting risk-reduction measures, including promoting media literacy, increasing public reporting, and improving diplomatic coordination.
“Even as Beijing blocks foreign social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter (now X), from operating in China, it actively seeks to leverage these and other platforms for both overt propaganda and covert influence operations abroad. While Chinese social media manipulation has so far produced relatively limited results, we argue the advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI) could dramatically improve China’s capabilities moving forward, posing a greater threat to global democracies.”
Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga, Kieran Green, William Marcellino, Sale Lilly, Jackson Smith
Cybercriminals steal healthcare data. Again.
The Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI) covers a wide range of disciplines – from military strategy and defense to cybersecurity and financial crime. RUSI has recently announced that it has partnered with the newly formed Open Source Center (OSC) to deliver novel, open-source based research on the war in Ukraine and other conflicts.
The joint team’s latest research combines outputs from a variety of OSINT platforms to build an understanding of Russia's artillery supply chain – from the raw materials mined in the Ural mountains to the machines that shape them into barrels and artillery rounds, and the chemical factories that manufacture explosives. The report helps highlight how the Russian artillery supply chain is vulnerable to disruption.
“The findings within this paper will empower Ukraine’s Western partners to coordinate sanctions, diplomatic pressure and civil society efforts to exploit the vulnerabilities of Russia’s artillery supply chain and reduce its access to ammunition and barrels.”
Ore to Ordnance: Disrupting Russia’s Artillery Supply Chains
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