Analyzing Open Source Intelligence and Organized Crime Research Proposal

Open Source Intelligence and Organized Crime

In the words of Bell and Congram (2014), TOC-Transnational Organized Crime can be defined as a crime carried out by an enduring organization or structure created and primarily involved in pursuing profits through several illegal businesses. It shares certain traits with formal organizations: using rules and codes to coordinate activities, division of labour, and allocating tasks with the aim of actualizing some given goals. While it is appropriate to see TOC as being composed of several activities, it can be seen that some specified organized criminal activities fall into the same category. They include activities such as drug trafficking, money laundering, people smuggling, human/sex trafficking, endangered species trafficking, arms trafficking, and most significantly since the last decade, terrorism.

Structure of TOC Groups

According to Bell and Congram (2014), the domestic and transnational groups that perpetrate crimes have succeeded in modifying their structures into flexible, lively though loosely structured networks, with high fluidity which have the ability to get access to important influences, created with the aim of confusing the authorities and protecting their organization. Five distinct TOC organizational structures exist: criminal network, core group, clustered hierarchy, regional hierarchy, and standard hierarchy. However, some TOC groups do not fit into the confines of these five listed structures; nevertheless, the major frameworks (accessed through technologies) provide the needed basis to understand these structures. According to some arguments, the last three structures are believed nearest to conventional beliefs about organized crime, while the first two structures are nearest to organizations that emerge from the recent world environment.

Open Source Intelligence

Intelligence can be defined as the product of data collection, processing, analysis, integration, evaluation, and proper interpretation about foreign nations or localities, equally the data and information concerning the enemy gathered by observing, investigating, analysing and understanding. Knowing something is not enough for one to be adjudged intelligent. Intelligence has to do with a creatable product; if it lacks packaging, analysis, and filtering, then it lacks value to the policy maker (Burke, 2007).

OSINT-Open Source Intelligence is the vital information extracted from systematically collecting, processing and analysing the information that is publicly available as a way of responding to the requirements for intelligence. Open Source can be defined as any individual or group of individuals that make the needed information available without expecting any sort of privacy, while information that are publicly available includes every information made freely available following a request from any individual; legally heard or seen by an observer; or provided at a public meeting (Hayes, 2010).

According to Burke (2007), OSINT can be useful to a significant extent, and has remained the only possible means of entering unknown stealthy networks. The entire process starts with OCD-open source data, the organic information from the main source, and needs to be assembled at this point through the process of editing with the aim of filtration and validation. The outcome from this is OSIF-open source information which can be circulated in the form of books, newspaper…