Academia, Civil society

Introduction to OSINT for humanitarian practitioners

Professionalisation of OSINT is not only a challenge for intelligence and defence, but also for civil society organisations working in sensitive fields, such as migration.
The information overload impacts their ability to efficiently collect and analyse information.
An extensive knowledge of information security practices is key in the humanitarian field, where often organisations and their members can find themselves threatened online and offline.
A lot of civil society organisations are also actively involved in lobbying activities against the use of potentially invasive surveillance technologies, which may negatively impact human rights. To be able to efficiently advocate they must have a good understanding of how different AI-based technology work and what are adequate safeguards which must be put into place.
The following training requirements and limitations have been identified:
- Use easily available, preferably open-source technologies due to financial limitations among smaller humanitarian organisations
- Use applied examples directly related to the problems practitioners encounter in their field work
- Slow pace of training, especially for highly technical content
- Accompany technical knowledge by legal explanation on ethical and legal use
- Adapt training language, especially for highly technical concepts to the audience (e.g. using analogies and examples).
The CRiTERIA training program aimed at providing an Introduction to OSINT for Humanitarian professionals and was composed of the following modules:
- Introduction to OSINT
  - What is intelligence?
  - The intelligence cycle
  - Difference OSINF – OSINT
  - Building an information collection plan
  - Validating information
  - Basics of InfoSec
  - Tools for information collection
- Introduction to technologies
  - LLMs and Generative AI
  - Data collection/scrapping
  - Text analysis
  - Evaluation of machine learning models
- Introduction to visual media analysis methods
  - How it works?
  - Tools
- Introduction to Automated Speech Recognition (ASR)
- News media profiling and fact-checking
- Social acceptance and human rights impact assessment