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Hey everyone—
Welcome to The Under Report, your weekly intelligence brief about the stories that move the world without making headlines.

I started this weekly newsletter to make geopolitics clear and accessible to everyone. We can understand the world without bombastic headlines, partisan moralization, or fear mongering. I'm so glad to have you all along for the ride and I can't wait to grow more.

Share The Under Report if you know someone who would appreciate a weekly intel update. Also, make sure to check out our sponsors to keep the Under Report rolling.

— Eric

P.S. Check out my book You Are Not Here: Travels Through Countries That Don't Exist and explore the world’s unrecognized countries.

For most of the 20th century, intelligence collection was a closed craft. Maintaining an asymmetry of information meant ensuring that data was compartmentalized, tradecraft was gate kept, and only decision makers at the highest levels could see the whole picture. This model, like James Bond, gets old, but never dies. It is rapidly being replaced by low cost, high impact open source information collectives.

Now, publicly available information dwarfs privately held data. Psychometric information can predict that you're looking for hair loss supplements and marathon gear well before a spook can find out where you work. Specialized communities formed on encrypted apps like Telegram and Signal can operate like on-demand subject matter experts. Meanwhile prediction markets are keeping a constant eye on the horizon for globe changing events.

Now, everyone is in their own intelligence community. Here are a couple examples of when open source intelligence broke down information barriers globally.

While U.S. Navy SEALs raided Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, an IT consultant from the area tweeted about a mysterious helicopter hovering over the building at 1 AM. He unwittingly revealed one of the most important and secretive military operations of the last decade. Moreover, he broke the story for the world.

There's a key takeaway here: open channels can unintentionally reveal actions taken in secret by governments and militaries. But they need to be contextualized to make sense. After all, it could have been just a random helicopter in Pakistan. With the right open source information, this operation could have been foiled. The bin Laden raid was meant to be invisible until the White House chose to go public. Instead, it unfolded in real time for anyone watching Twitter. 

Open source information is like high fructose corn syrup, it’s in everything.

Case in point, In 2018 the fitness app Strava published a “heatmap” showing where users had been jogging. This feature was built as a cool way to discover new jogging routes. However, In conflict zones, those glowing routes gave away the outlines of military bases. This included a covert U.S. facility in Somalia.

Finding a US blacksite in Somalia would require an enormous amount of time and energy on behalf of an intelligence agency. Discovering the exact map, dimensions, and relative population of the base would be a master stroke of espionage. Or, someone could have looked on their Strava heatmap and deduced the presence of an American base. For the record Strava now encourages service members to turn off their location settings.

This required no advanced tradecraft, just a corporate product release and an OSINT analyst with good pattern recognition. This highlighted a truth military planners now wrestle with: consumer tech is often the leakiest link in operational security. Now, the more technology enters the battlespace, the more digital observation and attack surface that exists.

However, new platforms are proactively trying to forecast critical geopolitical moves. The crazy part is, they're working.

Platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket allow users to bet on markets, geopolitics, and even the weather. This puts a high price point on correctly predicting the outcome of everything from election results to whether a military coup will happen by a certain date. While not designed as intelligence tools, they aggregate sentiment and insider whispers into tradable probabilities. This gives everyone the ability to look around corners and find black swans on the horizon.

In some cases, prediction markets have spotted trends before traditional intelligence assessments made them public. They serve as crowd-sourced forecasting engines and in the right hands, they’re a form of signals intelligence which can reveal everything from political movements to supply shortages. While traditional intelligence networks are slow and compartmentalized, crowdsourced networks are always listening. 

But this is a broad dragnet, who is running down the specific information and sharing it in an actionable way?

The Russia–Ukraine war has shown how Telegram channels, from pro-Russian military bloggers to Ukrainian spotter groups can be treasure troves for actionable information. Data on troop movements, equipment losses, and even intercepted communications often surface in chat groups before official statements. Moreover, encrypted identities can keep people safe while allowing them to benefit from shared information.

For intelligence analysts, the trick isn’t just finding these groups, it's verifying their information. However, modern tools like LiveMapUA, FlightRadar24, and even Google Earth can confirm information shared in Telegram groups. A growing suite of open source intelligence tools allow individuals to locate where photos were taken, build social media networks, and even determine where cellphone calls are coming from.

These are capabilities that intelligence teams in secure facilities would have loved to possess only a couple years ago. Now large scale collection operations can be conducted from a cellphone. Regional subject matter expertise and reporting is a click away. Info sec can be carried out through encrypted identities rather than siloing data in secure facilities. The future is open source.

There will always be a place for traditional intelligence gathering and legacy systems, but it seems that the OSINT community might be teaching some important lessons about both operational security and modern tradecraft.

Eric Czuleger is a journalist and travel writer who has lived and worked in over 47 countries. He holds a masters degree from the University of Oxford and he is completing a National Security degree from the RAND school of public policy. He's the author of You Are Not Here: Travels Through Countries That Don’t Exist, and host of the “The_Under_Report” TikTok channel.

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