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PURCELLVILLE, Va. — The open-source intelligence (OSINT) discipline celebrates 85 years this month. In February 1941 the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service (FBMS) was formally established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The OSINT discipline expanded beyond FBMS' broadcast intercepts to include print media exploitation when the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications (IDC) of the Library of Congress was established in December 1941.
Those early efforts were the U.S. Government's first formal and sustained efforts in what has become an enduring intelligence discipline supporting national security, policymaking, and informed decision-making. In the ensuing eight and a half decades, open-source intelligence has evolved alongside changes in media, technology, and global communications. Today, OSINT professionals contribute to the nation's security through a wide range of missions and are at the forefront of the Intelligence Community's use of artificial intelligence.
The Intelligence Community's OSINT professionals carry on the proud work of the earliest pioneers by acquiring, exploiting, and analyzing publicly available information to answer critical intelligence questions on complex and rapidly-evolving national security threats. The OSINT discipline contributes to a wide range of missions, including understanding geopolitical developments, supporting humanitarian response, countering disinformation, and strengthening democratic resilience. Its value lies not only in access to information, but in the rigorous tradecraft applied to collecting and analyzing the information to produce actionable intelligence.
For more information, visit osintfoundation.com.
About the OSINT Foundation
The OSINT Foundation is the professional association for current and emerging U.S. Intelligence Community OSINT professionals. Through thought leadership, standards development, and recognizing excellence, the OSINT Foundation promotes open-source intelligence tradecraft, elevates the discipline, and provides scholarships to current and aspiring OSINT practitioners to further their educational goals.
About the OSINT 85th Anniversary Logo
The logo commemorating the 85th anniversary of the OSINT discipline consists of a stylized American bald eagle design drawn from the exterior frieze on the Sgt. Angel Mendez Federal Building in Staten Island, New York. Over the eagle's right shoulder is a radio tower which honors the formal founding of the open-source discipline in the United States with the establishment of the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service. As the eagle looks left, the design represents the digital future of OSINT.