Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law 

Marten Zwanenburg

Chinese Journal of International Law, Volume 23, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 403–442, https://doi.org/10.1093/chinesejil/jmae027

I. Introduction

1. It has long been recognised that intelligence is crucial to planning and conducting military operations. As one commentator states:

Intelligence is the primary mechanism that military organizations use to generate understanding and its main purpose is to provide information to decision-makers such as commanders that may help illuminate their decision options.1

2. Within the intelligence field, various intelligence disciplines have developed, such as human intelligence (HUMINT), signals intelligence (SIGINT) and imagery intelligence (IMINT). Another intelligence discipline is open source intelligence (OSINT).2 Although there is much debate on what exactly OSINT is and there is not one authoritative definition, there is agreement that OSINT is based on publicly available information.

3. With the advent of the Internet and the rise of social media, the amount of publicly available information has increased enormously. It has been claimed that open source information makes up about 80 percent of the material available to the intelligence analyst who is dealing with developments abroad.3 This, together with the development of new technology and techniques, has revolutionised OSINT.4

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Full text:  https://doi.org/10.1093/chinesejil/jmae027