Editor's note: This article first appeared on www.PoliceLedIntelligence.com.
There are lots of great compendia of OSINT (open source intelligence) out there for law enforcement, some of which we’ve mentioned in these pages before. One outstanding publication which has been around since 2006 is BigEye News Compilation, a free service from Meta Enterprises, LLC.
Some of my favorite daily OSINT reads include the Daily Open Source Critical Infrastructure Report from DHS, and NightWatch from KGS, Dragon NewsBytes from Team Cymru, plus many things within the DNI Open Source Center at opensource.gov or Arno Reuser’s Open Source Intelligence Resource Discovery Toolkit. BigEye is one of the best out there.
Meta is run by Cecilia Anastos, who’s nothing short of an OSINT rock star. I’m in the process of writing something for Law Officer Magazine on Meta’s training programs as part of a larger piece on Intelligence Led Policing which should run later this year.
I’ve known Ceci for a couple of years now, and while I’m not going to get into her bona fides here in terms of who she works for, suffice it to say that she’s a trusted source of information for government and for private sector organizations, and as she puts it, “a concerned citizen of the United States of America who strives to keep members of DoD, DoJ, DHS and IC informed.”
In each issue of BigEye, Anastos compiles headlines and stories from around the world, organized by subject matter (Cyber, Miscellaneous, PDFs of interest) and geographically.
Her sources are fantastic, and she has tipped me to new websites which are worth monitoring, such as Foreknowledge, InsightCrime and Retraction Watch.
Ceci tells me that she intends BigEye to bring to IC and law enforcement community members news related to issues of national security which the mainstream media doesn’t talk about, or doesn’t think is worth publishing, either because it seems not relevant, or because issues of political correctness prevent exploration in that direction. BigEye also incorporates news from the mainstream media in less well-distributed papers than the New York Times or Wall Street Journal.
Like PLI, BigEye is a labor of love, but the scope of what Ceci is viewing and reporting is far, far broader than PLI could ever be. Ceci is looking at the news of the world and building a compendium of stories which contextualize a range of issues of burning national security and law enforcement interest.
Whether your agency is focusing on counter terror, gangs, organized crime, drugs or even if you’re just trying to find an alternative source of news from around the world, I think Big Eye is one of the finest places to start.
For a free subscription (once your organization and personal credentials are verified), visit the Meta Enterprises website.