OPENMIND

Generate Valuable Intelligence from Open Source Information

The OSINT Challenge

Introducing OpenMIND

Open source intelligence (OSINT) is intelligence derived from publicly available data sources such as the media, government, professional and academic sources, geospatial data and of course the Internet. OSINT today is commonly used as a critical information source by intelligence and law enforcement organizations.

The Internet provides an endless source of diverse data—from factual information such as flight schedules and government websites to personal information uploaded by users in social networks, blogs, forums and talkbacks. In fact, some crucial information about entities, connections between entities and the public’s state of mind can only be found online.

Moreover, enabled by social media, the Internet has become an arena in which criminal activity is conducted around the clock. Terrorists, pedophiles, human traffickers and other offenders use the Internet for their illegal activities.

Unfortunately, gathering intelligence from the Internet is a difficult task. The Internet’s exponentially expanding volumes of information make it difficult to find relevant information; data is frequently scattered across multiple locations, formats and languages; and because information is constantly updated, it is difficult to keep track of changes.

Using search engines to collect OSINT presents several challenges. For one, search engines return long lists of results. Secondly, most Deep Web data—data that requires user actions such as subscribing to a site or generating a query—cannot be reached by search engines. Moreover, there is the risk of exposing a search term or the analyst’s identity, which can cause a security breach.

Because of these and other challenges, it is extremely difficult and tedious to collect and process data. However, OSINT can find unique information, adding tremendous value to online investigation and research efforts.

OpenMIND™, 3i-MIND’s innovative OSINT solution, was developed specifically for intelligence and law enforcement agencies. It enables agencies to not only collect data efficiently, effectively and legally, but to automatically process and analyze that data, thereby ensuring its relevance and importance. OpenMIND automatically finds suspicious patterns and behaviors and reduces ongoing dependency on expert analysts in order to achieve high-quality results.

3i-MIND’s OpenMIND provides end-to-end open source intelligence collection, analysis and management. It enables intelligence organizations to collect, process and analyze open source data easily, quickly and effectively.

OpenMIND is easy to use and offers a wide set of automated capabilities that helps analysts tackle ongoing research and investigations and generate new leads. The platform’s powerful, comprehensive search and gather capabilities along with its robust security measures maintain the complete security of organizational content and anonymity of searches and queries.

OpenMIND helps analysts to find insights they were not even looking for, about entities they had not previously queried. It also helps to pinpoint specific websites not regularly monitored that may be relevant to research being performed. Thus, even analysts who are not OSINT experts can use OpenMIND to generate valuable intelligence.

Reach Relevant Information - Targeted Acquisition OpenMIND broadens analysts’ access to information. By removing obstacles such as the Deep Web and language barriers and through use of strong collection capabilities, OpenMIND helps analysts to reach relevant information that is otherwise inaccessible. Additionally, OpenMIND filters out irrelevant information to reduce noise and help analysts focus on important information.

Social Media Support Social media, including social networks, forums, blogs and chat rooms, is a valuable source for locating unique intelligence not found elsewhere. OpenMIND lawfully collects, processes and presents data from social media, surfacing valuable insights and generating relevant reports.

Reduce Noise - Semantic Analysis Internet data in the form of text is unstructured and difficult to analyze. OpenMIND offers a powerful semantic processing engine that analyzes text according to its semantic meaning and context. This semantic engine supports a wide set of capabilities, including extraction of relations between entities, disambiguation (to distinguish, for example, between C4 the explosive and C4 the car), semantic searches (e.g., search for “Apache” or “Blackhawk” instead of “helicopter”) and others that enable the system to “understand” text and find relevant information within data.

Surface Insights - Analysis Tools OpenMIND offers a set of powerful analysis tools, including visual link analysis, text analysis, timelines, statistics, alerts and reports. Users can define suspect profiles such that matches will automatically surface. OpenMIND turns collected data into intelligence.

Efficient and Effective Work - Specialized OSINT Methodology All OpenMIND system workflows were designed to support efficient and effective OSINT collection and analysis. Source management, priority intelligence requirement (PIR) management, rule-based alerts, statistics, etc. are all useful tools that are available to guide analysts in their daily work. Workflows are also flexible to ensure that OpenMIND supports an organization’s existing workflows and regulations.

Find the “Unknown Unknown” OpenMIND proactively finds insights, even if a user has no clues or leads about their topic. The system automatically performs legal searches for forums, websites, social networks, etc. associated with a researched topic. It then identifies active site users, generates alerts and finds patterns and abnormalities to reach keen insights.

Detection of Trends and Abnormalities in Websites OpenMIND monitors website activities to find patterns and OpenMIND users can choose to be alerted to changes in those patterns when statistical analysis of regularly monitored websites is employed. Forum leaders can be identified; blog posts extracted; peaks recognized; and traffic spikes detected. A user can be notified of any suspicious activity.

The OpenMIND Difference

Why OpenMIND

• Focus—OpenMIND will become your organization’s primary Internet, containing only relevant data and eliminating all online “noise”

• Methodology—An OSINT solution developed specifically for intelligence and law enforcement agencies

• Leadless Investigation—Insights are surfaced, helping analysts find things they didn’t know they were looking for

• Easy to use—Even novice researchers benefit from OpenMIND, allowing experts to focus on higher-level tasks

• Intelligence—Data is interpreted and presented in new ways in order to generate valuable intelligence

3i-MIND Technologies GmbH, Fortunagasse 28, 8001 Zurich, Switzerland, sales@3i-mind.com

© 2011 3i-MIND GmbH all rights reserved. The information and materials published herein, are provided “as is” and are subject to change without prior notice. You may not publish, reproduce, disclose or transmit these materials, in any form or by any means, or store these on any retrieval system of any nature without prior permission of 3i-MIND GmbH. www.3i-mind.com

About 3i-MIND3i-MIND is the pioneer in a new category of technology that leverages data, operational know-how, and human intuition to dramatically advance the value of intelligence and insights. Our customers include the world’s most demanding government and security organizations, urban authorities, law enforcement organizations. We apply ground-breaking technologies, machine learning, modeling, and decision-support systems across our proprietary 3i-MIND Framework – making it simple to acquire real-time and comprehensive knowledge, even in the most complex of environments.