OSINT – Celebrating The Discipline’s 85 Years Defending The Nation!

The OSINT Foundation celebrates the contributions made to the national security of the United States by the open-source intelligence (OSINT) discipline throughout its 85-year history. This month, we commemorate the formal establishment of the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service (FBMS) by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on February 26, 1941. The OSINT discipline expanded beyond FBMS’ broadcast intercepts to include print media exploitation when the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications (IDC) of the Library of Congress was established in December 1941. Those early efforts were the first formal and sustained efforts for what has become an enduring intelligence discipline supporting national security, policymaking, and informed decision-making.

Over the past eight and a half decades, open-source intelligence has evolved alongside changes in media, technology, and global communications. Today, OSINT contributes to a wide range of missions, including understanding geopolitical developments, supporting humanitarian response, countering disinformation, and strengthening democratic resilience. Its value lies not only in access to information, but in the rigorous tradecraft applied to collecting and analyzing the information to produce actionable intelligence. Today’s OSINT practitioners carry on the proud work of the earliest pioneers by acquiring, exploiting, and analyzing publicly available information to answer critical intelligence questions on complex and rapidly-evolving national security threats.

Barbara Alexander, President of the OSINT Foundation commented, “This month we celebrate 85 years of continuous contributions by the OSINT professionals who have applied the highest standards of tradecraft excellence to ensure quality, accuracy, timeliness, and relevance of information collected and OSINT produced, thereby providing unbiased, objective information in defense of our great nation, while continually respecting constitutional guarantees, and human rights obligations.”

About the OSINT 85th Anniversary Logo:

The logo commemorating the 85th anniversary of the OSINT discipline consists of a stylized American bald eagle design drawn from the exterior frieze on the Sgt. Angel Mendez Federal Building in Staten Island, New York. Over the eagle’s right shoulder is a radio tower which honors the formal founding of the open-source discipline in the United States with the establishment of the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service. As the eagle looks left, the design represents the digital future of OSINT.