National OSINT Day Proclamation

The membership of the OSINT Foundation, the professional association of U.S. Intelligence Community open-source intelligence (OSINT) practitioners, has voted in favor of establishing an annual day of recognition for the OSINT discipline. In recognition of the contributions made to the national security of the United States by OSINT practitioners and the OSINT discipline, the Foundation has designated February 26^th as National OSINT Day. To properly contextualize the long history of the discipline, the date was chosen in commemoration of the formal establishment of the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service (FBMS) on February 26, 1941.

FBMS was established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as part of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) which became the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service in July 1942, and subsequently the Foreign Broadcast Information Service in November of 1946.[1] In addition to broadcast media, early OSINT practitioners also exploited print media in support of the war effort via the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications (IDC) of the Library of Congress, which was proposed by Major General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) on December 22, 1941.[2]  The IDC, in partnership with the OSS was instrumental not only in exploiting hardcopy publicly available information, but also helped to restore looted works to affected nations, and greatly expanded the international holdings of the Library of Congress and academic libraries across the nation.

Barbara Alexander, President of the OSINT Foundation stated, “In recognition of 83 years of continuous vigilance in defense of the nation, we are honored to proclaim February 26, 2024, as National OSINT Day.”

[1] U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (n.d.). Records of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service. Retrieved January 9, 2023, from https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/262.html

[2] Peiss, K. (2020). Information hunters: When librarians, soldiers, and spies banded together in World War II Europe. Oxford University Press, page 39.