OSINT as an Integral Part of the National Security Apparatus

The roles of law enforcement agencies include maintaining law and order, protecting citizens and preventing, detecting and investigating crime. OSINT can provide critical capability for LEAs and security services to complement and enhance their intelligence capability, as the ability to rapidly gather and accurately process and analyze open source data can be a significant help during investigations and used for national level strategic planning to combat crime. Thus, purposeful and legal monitoring, analyzing and visualizing data from open data sources should be considered as mandatory requirement of any national security strategy. This chapter showcases the breadth of current and potential uses of OSINT based on UK's CONTEST strategy which provides the underlying basis of measures to prevent, pursue, protect and prepare against terror. It further proposes that to achieve efficient and innovative solutions, LEAs may be well advised to consider collaborations with private and public partners including academia using the successful implementation of the CENTRIC OSINT Hub is an example of how academia and LEAs can collaborate within the OSINT sphere in order to bring research into reality for the security and protection of citizens.