National OSINT Day Proclamation

National OSINT Day Proclamation

The OSINT Foundation, the professional association of U.S. Intelligence Community open-source intelligence (OSINT) practitioners, celebrates the fourth National OSINT Day, February 26, 2026. This is also the 85th anniversary of the formal establishment of the OSINT discipline in the United States.

National OSINT Day recognizes the contributions made to the national security of the United States by OSINT practitioners and the OSINT discipline. The date commemorates the formal establishment of the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service (FBMS) by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on February 26, 1941. FBMS became the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service in July 1942, and subsequently the Foreign Broadcast Information Service in November 1946. In addition to broadcast media, early OSINT practitioners also exploited print media in support of the war effort via the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications (IDC) of the Library of Congress, which was proposed by Major General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) on December 22, 1941.  The IDC, in partnership with the OSS, was instrumental not only in exploiting hardcopy publicly available information, but also helped restore looted works to affected nations, and greatly expanded the international holdings of the Library of Congress and academic libraries across the nation.

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 remarked, “On National OSINT Day, 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 while continually respecting privacy, civil liberties, and human rights obligations.”