Since the outbreak of warfare in Ukraine, intelligence reporting from publicly available information, open-source intelligence (OSINT), has made a groundbreaking contribution in piercing the fog of war. Nevertheless, the rapidly growing OSINT community has ignored the ethics—the “should we’s” rather than the “what’s”—of publicly releasing wartime intelligence. Failure to grapple with these questions will cripple our understanding of Russia’s war on Ukraine, and may instead mislead the public. And it threatens unintended harm to civilians and investigators alike.
Thanks to the growth of telecommunication in the 21st century, OSINT has quickly become an efficient tool to track terrorist communication, facilitate criminal investigations, and better understand military conflicts. In time, with the ever-growing abundance of data on the Internet, this intelligence helped journalism groups such as Bellingcat and others who don’t have access to classified information to uncover plots, counter disinformation and even mitigate security risks otherwise hidden from the public. The Economist noted that the “decentralized and egalitarian nature of OSINT erodes the power of traditional arbiters of truth and falsehood.”
Open-source intelligence during the Russian war on Ukraine has surely proven this point. The open source community successfully tracked the Russian military buildup that preceded the invasion, identified war criminals, and even documented equipment losses in the conflict....
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