OSINT Intelligence Gathering

OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) is the systematic collection, processing, and analysis of publicly available information to answer specific intelligence questions. Public sources include: websites, social media, news archives, government records, academic databases, satellite imagery, and freely available tools (Google, Wayback Machine, WHOIS). OSINT differs from data mining (extracting patterns from data) in that it focuses on answering specific questions: "Who founded this company?" "What is this person's background?" "Is this organization legitimate?" OSINT is structured research.