Open Source Intelligence

Intelligence is vital to national security, economic security and U.S. foreign policy. Intelligence is also valuable to businesses and is an integral part of their operations. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, this course examines open source intelligence obtained by searching and analyzing publicly available information through data mining, advanced web searches, and other information gathering strategies. It also explores the manner in which important information is identified, collected, analyzed, synthesized, and interpreted from a wide variety of sources. It then considers how this information is used to identify targets and vulnerabilities of targets, and to assess the capabilities of cybercriminals, terrorists, nations, and hostile elements. This course also covers social media forensics, looking in particular at: the type of data collected by social media sites; the type of evidence sought and its use by law enforcement and intelligence agencies for the purpose of data mining, intelligence gathering and investigating criminal activity; and the manner in which data can be gleaned from social media sites