Finally my paper on the long history of OSINT has been published in the Journal of Intelligence History.
It presents the findings of my research into the origins of OSINT and challenges the often made assumption that OSINT practices first emerged at the eve of the Second World War with the establishment of i.a. the BBC Monitoring Services.
I demonstrate that that OSINT – defined as the methodical collection and exploitation of information from publicly available sources to fulfil an intelligence requirement – has a much longer and richer history, at least going back to halfway the 19th century.
The article was published open access so here it is: