You do know what OSINT stands for, don’t you? To make sure, OSINT is neither an intelligence agency, nor an investigative think tank. OSINT stands for Open Source Intelligence. If you look it up on Wikipedia, you won’t find the exact definition of what OSINT entails—just like the elusive Rules-Based International Order, which in itself should sound a loud alarm. The broad general consensus is that OSINT involves the collection and analysis of publicly available information.

What does this mean in practice? Well, let’s suppose the least discerning person you know looks at a live webcam in, say, Moscow’s Red Square and notices an object that, to them, looks like a dirty toilet bowl. That person then writes a social media post saying, “I am seeing a dirty toilet bowl on Red Square. Russians take a shit in the middle of Red Square.” Is this OSINT? You bet it is! Now, a Ukrainian psycho-operative reads this post and plants his own post in an official Ukrainian media channel, “OSINT researchers confirm what we have suspected all along—Russians shit in the middle of Red Square.” Then MSNBC or some other mainstream media outlet writes a story about “barbaric Russians who relieve themselves in the open in the middle of Red Square, as confirmed by OSINT.” Sounds convincing, doesn’t it?

Believe it or not, this is how things really work when you need them to, because there is nothing to prevent the reverse engineering of this situation, where the initial OSINT is simply cooked up and planted by psyops professionals.

In fact, if you read Ukrainian media, you will notice that OSINT plays a very important role in their propaganda machinery. In most, if not all, cases when they cite OSINT, prepare to be misled or deceived.

This is not to say that there is no value in open-source information. There certainly is. But any open-source information cited by any source should be looked at with a grain of salt, especially if it is labeled with the legitimately sounding abbreviation OSINT.