“Decades ago, Philip Meyer made the prophetic statement: ‘When information was scarce, most of our efforts were devoted to hunting and gathering. Now that information is abundant, processing is more important.’

“In the last decade, open-source intelligence (OSINT) has emerged as a journalistic science, as the vast resource of data collected from social networks and internet-connected devices is mined for information beyond just databases.’ (Using open-source intelligence in journalism, Phil Rees)

OSINT refers to gaining publicly available information without resorting to hacking or unethical practices. This information can be drawn from a wide variety of sources, including websites, social media, news articles, blogs, public records, government documents, and more. OSINT involves searching, collecting, analyzing, and verifying information to extract meaningful insights and intelligence.

SOS Malta will be hosting a series of workshops on Open Source Intelligence to give journalists and researchers the opportunity to better utilise OSINT in their investigations.

The training will take place on 5th, 6th and 8th June, 2023 from 5:30-8:30pm and will be given by Jan Gunnar Furuly, Norwegian investigative journalist and OSINT researcher.

Participants will learn techniques to analyze videos and images from anywhere on the globe, and to gauge the originality of the content: who made it, where was it recorded or photographed, when and why?

Over three evenings, they will explore a lot of online tools that will help them gain mastery as OSINT/GEOVERIFICATION researchers at their media house. More specifically, they will learn:

• how to verify which street address a video or an image was shot from.
• Using anything from weather data, information on fires worldwide and shadow calculations, they will also learn to gauge when the material was shot.
• How to know if content has been published before in another context.
• How to use facial recognition engines and reverse image searches to find out the identity of people from videos or photos.

This event is organised by SOS Malta as part of the bilateral initiatives under the ACF NGO Malta programme.