OSINT with ShadowDragon & Digital Tools For Modern Investigations
Former Green Beret and national-security advocate Doug Livermore joins the ShadowDragon team to unpack how publicly available information (PAI) and commercial open-source intelligence (OSINT) are transforming modern conflict—and why agile private-sector partners now shape outcomes as much as governments do.
Key points & take-aways
Breaking the “intel vs. ops” firewall
* U.S. commanders once distrusted anything that didn’t come from classified HUMINT or SIGINT; today, PAI often drives the find-fix-finish cycle faster than traditional sources.
Field lessons from five theaters
* Iraq, Afghanistan, Mali, the DRC, and the Central African Republic showed that PAI is frequently the only data commanders can legally share with immature or non-NATO partner forces.
* Cheap commercial tools—Google Maps, social media scraping, Internet-of-Things exhaust—now reveal patterns of life, financial flows, and physical locations in minutes.
Cultural turning points
* The Arab Spring (2010) and ISIS propaganda boom (2014-15) proved that open networks can topple regimes and expose targets.
* Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war brought OSINT to prime time, with private analysts mapping tank battalions and documenting war crimes in real time.
Afghanistan 2021: Private networks move faster than states
* Livermore’s nonprofits No One Left Behind and SOAA used PAI, commercial satellites, and encrypted chat to steer evacuees past Taliban checkpoints when official channels bogged down.
* U.S. intelligence officers quietly pulled data from these civilian ops centers—a preview of future public-private crisis response.
Information warfare & influence ops
* Open digital terrain lets both democracies and adversaries micro-target audiences, erode civil trust, or rally global support; mastering sentiment analysis is now a core skill for operators.
Policy & the road ahead
* Expect formalized private-public frameworks that let nonprofits and tech firms plug straight into combatant-command fusion cells.
* Civil-liberties safeguards must keep pace, distinguishing U.S. person data from foreign-adversary exploitation.
Special Guest: Doug Livermore.