The OSINT Output Hosted by Tim and Chris

By Jay Heisler, Freelance Canadian Journalist

Bio: Greg Quinn OBE (LinkedIn profile) is a former British Diplomat who has served in Estonia, Ghana, Belarus, Iraq, Washington DC (seconded to State Department), Kazakhstan, Guyana (as High Commissioner), Suriname (as Ambassador), The Bahamas (as High Commissioner), Canada (as Consul General Toronto and Calgary), and Antigua and Barbuda (as resident British Commissioner) in addition to stints in London. He now runs his own government relations, business development and crisis management consultancy: Aodhan Consultancy Ltd.

Q: What is the role for OSINT in diplomacy today?

A: If you look back at how people looked at diplomacy in the past, it’s completely different than how they look at it today. 30 years ago we did everything the old fashioned way. You talked to people. Now, you can’t survive without what’s being said on Twitter/X or on Facebook. What’s being commented on your social media. For a long period of time there was a little bit of having to hold your nose about social media because it wasn’t real diplomacy in some ways. We’ve all had to learn the world is a different place now, people get their information from different places. And a lot of that is OSINT. I am a big fan of FlightRadar24. I could spend all day on that looking where planes are. It’s just really interesting to ask, “why are they all going there.” And of course we just had an example of that last week with Venezuela, just before all this stuff broke about the role of the US and UK in that tanker seizure. People started to pick up going, hang on, why are all those US transport planes heading to the UK? Maybe not the traditional sources of intelligence, but it’s as important if not more important than some of the information we used to get before.

Q: What is the UK attitude toward OSINT?

A: If we’re thinking about the Western nations, all of us have figured out that all this open source stuff provides a hell of a lot of information both for us, but also potentially for our enemies. We need to think about the broader impact of that material. We need to understand what other people will be seeing. It’s not just about what we can understand from OSINT, it’s about what others can understand about us, so the whole disinformation part is relevant in all of this. People know far more about what we are all doing than what they ever did before. When I was starting in diplomacy, the question was always “how would this look if it appeared on the front page of newspapers.” Now we’re thinking about, “how would it look if it turns up on social media.” Traditionally in the old days, OSINT was the newspapers. Now we have to figure out how it would look if it appeared in any number of different places.

Q: What are the differences in risks conducting OSINT in the UK, between the government and private sector?

A: At the end of the day, everything the government does is to protect the population and to ensure the economic wellbeing of that country. If you get that wrong, and put the wrong piece of information out, the potential damage to the country, I would say is far greater than if you’re a private company. Because if you put the wrong piece of information out as a private sector organization you’re going to damage yourself, but if you think of the damage that was done to the UK economy when Liz Truss was PM and the Chancellor released without any justification whatsoever, this plan to cut taxes. That has caused untold long-term damage to the UK economy. The wrong piece of information released by government could cause untold damage to the economy. With a private sector organization, it causes damage to that company but not in that broader sense.