Trusted open source intelligence for the modern intelligence agency

Vast lakes of OSINT data contain the information necessary to empower your agents to make informed decisions, but if you’re limited by language or script you’re only accessing a fraction of the global picture. Modern intelligence requires multilingual data analysis performed in the native script, preventing translational errors improving accuracy.

The Value of Social Data

Unstructured text data found on social media provides a unique insight into individuals’ opinions, politics, and sentiment. On a macro scale, that information can be combined with existing knowledge and historical data to understand trends and changes in the public discourse, which can then be evaluated for risk and key indicators of major events by both humans and machines.

Simply harvesting social data is not enough however. The Basis Technology team has experience building trusted sources systems that can flexibly ingest and process open-source information, and rank it by reputation, expertise, and degree of bias. Social network data coupled with intelligent handling allows users to gain situational awareness and make informed and intelligent predictions.

Anticipatory Intelligence

In today’s interconnected geopolitical and economic world, retroactively responding to events, even in real-time, is no longer a rapid enough response. A modern intelligence agency needs to be aware of shifting trends as they happen in order to predict an event before it occurs, and prepare a plan to respond. The key to successful anticipatory intelligence is the exploitation of unstructured, multilingual streams of social network data.

Anticipatory intelligence serves to reduce risk and uncertainty by recognizing, and tracking anticipating trends, threats and opportunities in order to forecast major global events, providing decision makers with key pieces of information such as:

• When: predicted date of event
• Where location of event, down to the city-level
• Who: population segment
• Why: reason for unrest
• Probability: confidence level of the prediction
• Forecast date: date the warning was produced

Combating Disinformation

While there are vast quantities of valuable information available on the internet today, with them comes a proliferation of deliberately misleading information meant to confuse and obscure the truth. Data mining can only provide valuable intelligence if the sources can be trusted to be accurate and reliable.

Text analytics tools can allow you to flag potentially false information by ranking open-source information sources by reputation, expertise, and degree of bias. These flags can then be be reviewed by a human eye to determine if the information is worth evaluating or should be thrown out.