Open Source Intelligence and Social Network Analysis (OSINT and SNA)

Catalog description

The comprehensive nature of data available online - social media, blogs, news articles - facilitates its solicitation by corporations, government, law enforcement agencies for constructing human subject profiles, evaluation public opinion, tracking customer loyalty and conducting near real rime decision making. Notwithstanding the ethical and privacy concerns of these practices, it is important to understand how Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) gathering and analysis in the age of Internet has formed a legitimate practice that has had and will continue to have significant impact on governance society. In this course, students will learn about various facets of open source intelligence and how it is collected and analyzed. In addition, we will be focusing on Dark web - a challenging frontier for OSINT with significant potential for actionable intelligence. From a methodological perspective, we will also be covering how modeling OSINT data using social network analysis methods can provide critical insights that can help analysts connect the dots between seemingly heterogeneous information.