The Impact of OSINT on Christmas

Proper intelligence is vital to prepare military and law enforcement operations or to provide information to political and business leadership prior to decision making. However, these are not the only people relying on good intelligence to get the job done. I had the honor of interviewing a very special person on his views of intelligence and how his organization utilizes it for one of the most challenging tasks known to mankind.

Sir, it is such an honor to have you here. Tell us a little about yourself. What exactly is your job and how does it involve intelligence work?

I go by many names, but please just call me Santa. I am in charge of a large organization tasked with bringing joy and fun to children worldwide on Christmas Eve. While I’m pretty sure you all know what I do during the Christmas night, not many people know what happens prior to this.

My organization and I have roughly 24 hours to deliver presents to children who deserve them. In order to accomplish this, a lot of planning is necessary and this planning is based on the information I receive from an intelligence agency within my organization. In Santa’s Secret Service, or S3, we mainly conduct GEOINT along with OSINT to make sure everything runs smooth on that one special night. Oh, and don’t confuse us with the Amazon web service.

Santa, while most of my readers are acquainted with terms such as GEOINT and OSINT, could you please explain what they are and possibly provide a use case from your organization.

Sure. I only have a limited timeframe to make sure I deliver everything to the right address. The route I take has to be carefully planned. The number of children on this world is steadily growing, more deliveries leave less room for mistkes. Even though my sleigh travels at an incredible speed…

How fast and how does that work?

I’m afraid that is classified. In order to properly plan the route, I rely on precise satellite imagery and maps. Imagery and maps from search engine providers are not up to date and commercial satellite imagery is not detailed enough. Keep in mind, my team has to figure out the best way into a chimney. We need a resolution of less than 0.3m to do so. Before Christmas, my sleigh is outfitted with an ultra high resolution imaging system and flies several sorties. While the actual collection of the imagery does not take that long, creating maps and the final route based on this is a bit more time-consuming. The whole process I just described is referred to as geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT.

Wow, that alone is probably a large amount of data collected each year. How do you process such massive amounts of data?

We have our own server infrastructure at S3. Located in vicinity of the North Pole, our energy consumption is lower than usual, because we have a natural cooling system.

 What happens after you have mapped the world?

I forgot to mention one thing. In order to plan the route, we need to know who will receive a delivery. Luckily, I have information on the address of each child from a classified source. But, does this child even deserve anything? We have to figure out who was naughty and nice. A lot of this is done through open source intelligence, or OSINT.

While we could use classic signals intelligence (SIGINT) to tap into communications and try to answer the question who is naughty or nice, we have found that OSINT provides the best “bang for the buck”. S3 has a very large team of OSINTers, who mainly monitor social media activities.

What exactly is your team looking into?

My OSINTers start off looking into profiles of the children, but not only to see how they behave. Depending on the region they live in, the platforms they use will differ. From Ask.fm to Weibo, there are many differnt sources to look at. We have seen TikTok blow up over the past months, but we also still obtain a lot of information from “older” platforms such as Facebook and Pinterest. These platforms also provide leads on the interests of our targeted subjects, which enables my organization to match them with the perfect present. We not only look at the children, but also monitor profiles of their family and friends, since relevant information is hidden here as well. As you can see, this is all a very deep intrusion into personal privacy. Therefore, we have very strict rules on how to handle this data, a massive auditing and compliance system and constant trainings for my team. If you thought GDPR was challenging, you wouldn’t want to know how much effort we put into protecting the privacy of our subjects!

Many children nowadays are active in closed communications, such as messengers, or they have restricted public access to their acounts by changing their privacy settings. How do you cope with this?

There are two different approaches we can take here. The first one is what you would call virtual HUMINT, or VUMINT. We try to place someone within a closed chat group using a false persona. For example, a group of friends has a WhatsApp channel with 20 participants. Using OSINT, we create a sock puppet credible enough to be invited into this group. In cases in which this works, we then can then instantly monitor 20 people. Of course, such actions are subject to much stricter rules and regulations that normal OSINT and are not performed often.

The second approach would be a classic computer network operation, or “hacking” an account. This is very rarely done and the methods and techniques are highly classified.

What about children who don’t have access to modern communications?

In this case, we rely on classic human intelligence, or HUMINT. Throughout the world, we have a network of sources directly providing us information. A lot of this is hearsay, so we try to confirm information with other sources before processing it. This actually also applies to data won through OSINT.

However, I would like to point out that at the end of the day we will never gather everything on everyone. Have you ever wondered why a spoiled and misbehaved child you knew received a nice present anyway? No matter how much effort we put into intelligence collection, there will always be a delta between what information is out there and which information we have obtained. I think that is the nature of intelligence work in general.

Circling back to OSINT, how does S3 ensure that they are up to date on new tools and techniques?

We do OSINT to enable OSINT. Of course, we follow #OSINT on Twitter and we also have someone monitoring osint.team as well as various blogs such as osintcurio.us and your blog.

Wow, I’m honored to have made it on S3’s reading list. I know you are quite busy, so we can wrap it up here. Is there anything else you would like to add?

Merry Christmas, happy OSINTing and I wish you all the best in 2020!

MW-OSINT / 22.12.2019