This month marks a major milestone for one of the most dynamic disciplines in the Intelligence Community. Open-source intelligence, better known as OSINT, is celebrating 85 years of service to national security.
The story begins in February 1941, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt formally established the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service. At the time, the mission centered on monitoring foreign radio broadcasts. It was a focused effort, but it laid the groundwork for something much bigger.
By December of that same year, the discipline expanded. The Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications at the Library of Congress began exploiting print media from around the world. With that move, the U.S. government signaled that publicly available information had real intelligence value. Those early efforts became the first sustained investment in what would grow into a core intelligence discipline.
Fast forward eight and a half decades and OSINT looks very different, but its foundation remains the same. Instead of shortwave radio and foreign newspapers alone, today’s OSINT professionals navigate a digital landscape filled with online publications, social media platforms, commercial data, satellite imagery, and more. The volume of available information has exploded. So has the speed at which it moves.
Through every technological shift, one constant has endured. Publicly available information, when collected and analyzed with rigor, can answer some of the most pressing intelligence questions facing the nation.
Modern OSINT professionals support a wide range of missions. They help decision makers understand geopolitical developments as they unfold. They provide insight during humanitarian crises. They work to counter disinformation campaigns and strengthen democratic resilience. In a world where narratives can shape outcomes as much as military capabilities, that mission has never been more important.
OSINT is also at the forefront of the Intelligence Community’s use of artificial intelligence. With vast amounts of data to sift through, advanced analytics and machine learning tools are becoming essential. But technology alone is not the answer. The value of OSINT lies in tradecraft. It is the disciplined approach to collecting, validating, contextualizing, and analyzing information that transforms raw data into actionable intelligence.
Eighty five years after its formal establishment, OSINT continues to prove that you do not always need secrets to produce powerful intelligence. Sometimes the answers are hiding in plain sight, waiting for the right professionals to connect the dots.
As the discipline celebrates this milestone, it is also looking ahead. The information environment will only grow more complex. The threats will continue to evolve. And OSINT, built on decades of innovation and adaptability, is poised to meet that challenge head on.
