OSINT Two Tools To Try

To have access to more structured, authorative, controlled data a local newspaper may come in useful. Especially in conjunction with social media that are usefull as a kind of first hand witness account. Use social media to monitor and find out if something has happened, then use newspapers to get more overview, reliability and explanation as to the ‘what’ has happened and why.

There is a number of resources to find newspapers worldwide. First of all commercial resources such as Factiva and Lexis-Nexis are extremely useful and time efficient. But when you are on a budget or just need one or two local newspapers from an unfamiliar country, may be the following two resources will help.

First is a bibliography of historical newspaper resources: Guide to newspapers and newspaper indexes. – Harvard Library. – Categorised selection of about 60 resources on newspapers, periodicals and magazines. Most university libraries have guides like this. Just use one that fits your information requirements.
https://guides.library.harvard.edu/news/bibliography

For finding links to current newspapers, press, radio and TV station try ABYZ News Links. – Geographically organised listing of links to broadcasts, newspapers, press and some magazines. Mainly English language.
http://www.abyznewslinks.com/

That’s it for this week. Interested in more tools and sources for OSINT? Have a look at the Internet Resource Discovery Toolkit at http://rr.reuser.biz.

In the OSINT structured research process for online databases and search engines, there is a step called Citation Pearl Growing. That step is also one of the major search strategies, next to Building Blocks and Successive Factions.

Ususally, the OSINTian starts with a very systematic approach using a Building Block strategy. Then to continue with Successive Factions in order to, for instance, bring down millions of hits to a few hundred with increased relevance. That step will probably return a list of preferred authors, editors, speakers, as well as alternative keywords, semantical variations, expressions, names of relevant journals, conferences etc.

In comes the third strategy, citation pearl growing. In this strategy, the OSINTian does not search using keywords, but uses author names to look up publications that have cited that author, thus finding newer publication about hopefully the same subject. This new set was probably cited as well, leading again to newer publications, And new experts, journal names, conferences etc.

Commercial tools to apply this techniques are plentyfull. Try the Science Citation Index, Scopus or web of science. Free solutions are:

Google Scholar. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22ahp+reuser%22&btnG=
Note the button ‘cited by …’ under each result. It indicates how many times this particular publication was cited. Note the paper written by me on the OSINT intelligence cycle and the ‘cited by 5’ button in the description. If you click on the ‘cited by 5’ button, you get a new list with 5 publications, hopefully about the same subject. The new list has a ‘cited by’ button as well to repeat the process

Semantic Scholar. This AI powered search and discovery tool from Seattle USA gives access to about 200 million academic papers. https://www.semanticscholar.org/search?q=open%20source%20intelligence&sort=relevance
The TLDR button (Too Long Didn’t Read) presents an automatically generated summary. The first button on the bottom row indicates the number of citations. Click on it will return a new list, all citing the current paper.

That’s it for this week. Interested in more tools and sources for OSINT? Have a look at the Internet Resource Discovery Toolkit at http://rr.reuser.biz.

Amongst the more special types of Internet search engines are so called Federated search engines. These are search engines that are not based on a robot or a crawler, but search Internet sources in real time, presenting real time search results.

Traditional crawler based Internet search engines are batch operated machines. They typically make a searchable index of downloaded web pages that users can search. The index obviously is dated and can be quite old, multiple days or even longer. The number of sources used is very low, just a few hundred. Federated search engines are very useful if used with a personalised set of sources.

One example of a federated search engine is BizNar, created by Deep Web Technologies. It allows searching in real time of up to a hundred large business sources. Results are presented in a traditional relevance rank order, but also in a visual graph and by topic. BizNar offers e-mail alerts, and storage of selected search results in subfolders. Full Boolean is supported. https://biznar.com/biznar/desktop/en/results.html

An alternative from the same company is MedNar, aimed at medical information. Also full Boolean support, e-mail alerts and results in a traditional relevance ranking list and by Topic. MedNar however, also offers patents and related MeSH from the National Library of Medicine to further refine your searches. https://mednar.com/mednar/desktop/en/results.html

That’s it for this week. Interested in more tools and sources for OSINT? Have a look at the Internet Resource Discovery Toolkit at http://rr.reuser.biz.

There is plenty of news sources out there for you to try, depending on what kind of news you are interested in. If that is international relations, conflict studies, country information etc., the following two tools are very much worth a try.

The first one is News Now at https://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/, London UK. A categorised listing of the latest news from thousands of sources, updated continuously up to a few minutes ago with tens of thousands of stories per day. News is arranged by country name and also main topics. Items are ordered by date, newest on top.

You can also choose for just Top news or Popular news, something I never do (I still cannot imagine an algorithm deciding for me what I consider top news). Very interesting are the little “i” icons next to each source with information and editor’s note about the source. Highly recommended!

The second one I’d like to share is a fantastic tool created by the Joint Research Center of the EU: European Media Monitor NewsBrief at https://emm.newsbrief.eu. A categorised listing of tens of thousands new messages from up to 50.000 sources, updated every ten minutes with a popularity graph on top.

News is arranged by EU policy area, themes (such as crime, natural disasters, conflicts, security, ecology etc) and countries. The news is in all languages and for each language are translations available. EMM offers also en RSS feed, subscription service and there is an Android app as well.

Each message has an entity extraction service which is a great help in determining relevancy. The link ‘more articles’ will lead to a list of more articles about this particular subject. EMM is a fantastic news aggregator and highly recommended!

That’s it for this week. Interested in more tools and sources for OSINT? Have a look at the Internet Resource Discovery Toolkit at http://rr.reuser.biz.

How to get access to the global open information landscape. OSINT is about open sources. Open sources are all objects that we can derive useful information from, regardless format, shape, and time. OSINTians thus also have access to information that is not on the Internet. As a matter of fact, the by far majority of publicly available information is not on the Internet but available elsewhere.

A means to get access to ”offline” information is by using national bibliographies. Since the invention of book printing, almost every country in the world maintains a regular list of everything being published in that country: journals, papers, maps, records, books, serials, just every piece of publicly available information. Such lists are called a national bibliography. It gives access to (almost) everything.

A famous one is the British National Bibliography. The online version can be found at https://bl.natbib-lod.org/advanced-search with excellent search facilities: by title, author, subject, classification code (Dewey). Boolean supported. Another one is the Bibliographie Nationale Francaise at https://bibliographienationale.bnf.fr/search/advancedSearch.show. Ful Boolean supported, Dewey and search by year, language, titlewords, authors, publishers etc.

How to find out which countries have a national bibliography? Or just to find out which national bibliographies are available? Simple. Use a bibliography of bibliographies. Such as the Besterman, Walfords, or better even: Eugene Paul Sheehy’s Guide to Reference books, my persona favourite. Ask your OSINTian or librarian for more information, or use the OSINT Repertorium at http://rr.reuser.biz