Open-source intelligence (OSINT) has often been treated as a black sheep relative to classified and exquisite collection counterparts – useful, but somehow less rigorous. Melisa Stivaletti, a guest on ShadowDragon’s recent podcast, makes clear that this view is outdated. From her first encounter with social-media feeds during the Arab Spring – while deployed as a Department of the Army civilian in Afghanistan – to her current role directing OSINT strategy at Guidehouse and chairing AFCEA’s Emerging Professionals in the Intelligence Community (EPIC), Stivaletti illustrates how open source data has become indispensable to national security.
“Without understanding what’s emerging in the open-source domain, we miss a huge amount of intelligence.” — Melisa Stivaletti
The Strategic Signal: Open-Source Intelligence is No Longer a Secondary Asset
The United States has begun to institutionalize open-source intelligence in a way not seen before. In the past three years, the Department of Defense, the Army, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have each released unclassified OSINT strategies. Publishing them openly was more than transparency theater; it invited industry and academia into the conversation, recognizing that most cutting-edge collection and analytic tools are dual-use—driven as much by commercial demand as by government funding.
Congress has taken notice as well. The creation of a dedicated OSINT subcommittee under the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence gives the discipline its first lasting foothold on Capitol Hill. Melisa reminds us that open-source efforts still receive less than one percent of the National Intelligence Program budget while reportedly contributing upward of thirty percent of the President’s Daily Brief. The mismatch between value and investment is stark.
Publicly available information, or PAI, is the foundation of all open-source intelligence products. PAI includes commercially available information (CAI) as well, meaning that it is information that is collected and bought by data brokers or commercial vendors. CAI includes geospatial imagery, net flow data from internet service providers (ISPs), or advertising IDs for location data. PAI has exploded not just in the United States, but among all nation-states for intelligence collection and industry leaders for business intelligence. PAI offers a unique way for nations to share information where traditional intelligence-sharing agreements do not exist. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East are on display as successful sharing of PAI to target adversaries and feed information or influence operations in the information environment. Europe has made incredible progress in institutionalizing OSINT as a stand-alone intelligence discipline in response to Russia’s aggressive actions not just in Ukraine, but across the continent. Crowd-sourcing intelligence to document war crimes, monitor enemy troop movements, and expose or amplify atrocities or blunders is now ubiquitous across social media, chat forums, and reports produced by NGOs – this is all a form of utilizing PAI to produce OSINT. Europe, and NATO in particular, has been instrumental in establishing working groups and exercises to coalesce open-source intelligence capabilities and skills across governments and the private sector.
“For the price of a couple F-35s, we could fund an entire OSINT agency.” —Podcast co-host David Cook (ShadowDragon)
Technology, Talent, and Tradecraft in Open-Source Intelligence
The flood of public data is now so vast that even armies of analysts cannot read it all. Generative AI offers a reprieve—rapid summarization, pattern detection, language translation—but only if paired with disciplined sourcing. Stivaletti insists that every AI-generated sentence destined for intelligence reporting must be footnoted; provenance is non-negotiable. In her view, the winner of the next intelligence race will be “the collector who knows how to use AI,” not AI alone.
Equally pressing is professionalization. Tactical OSINT that supports special operations forces differs profoundly from the deep-dive work that informs policy. Analysts must blend data-science fluency with investigative tenacity, cyber-security awareness, and regional expertise. That complexity means the field of open-source intelligence is no longer a haven for hobbyists with fast Google dorking ability; it is a full-spectrum discipline whose practitioners deserve the same respect accorded to SIGINT, GEOINT or HUMINT officers.
“Just because you have an internet connection doesn’t make you an intelligence officer.” — Melisa Stivaletti
Recommendations
- Fund OSINT proportional to its impact
Allocate dedicated, protected budget lines commensurate with the discipline’s contribution to senior-level decision making. - Codify public-private collaboration
Expand contracting mechanisms and joint R&D programs that let government tap commercial innovation cycles without lengthy procurement delays. - Adopt AI with transparent sourcing
Require that all generative-AI outputs used for intelligence include machine-readable citations and source characterizations (e.g., state media, adversary propaganda, academic research). - Invest in workforce development
Create formal OSINT certification paths, emphasize prompt-engineering skills, and recruit talent beyond the traditional cleared workforce through rotational fellowships and remote roles. - Guard against over-classification
Preserve OSINT’s value in intelligence diplomacy—especially with allies—by resisting bureaucratic impulses to reclassify what is already public, thereby maintaining the agility that makes open data powerful.
Stivaletti’s core message is straightforward: Open-source intelligence is no longer a supplementary “nice to have.” It is the primary lens through which much of the modern world is first observed – OSINT is the ‘INT of first resort.’ Ignoring or underfunding it risks strategic blindness at precisely the moment when adversaries, allies, and ordinary citizens generate terabytes of insight every hour. The path forward is clear – resource the mission, train the people, build the partnerships, and let transparency work as an advantage rather than a vulnerability.
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