Criminal justice practitioners from North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia attend OSCE-supported workshops on the use of open source intelligence in criminal investigations

The rapid growth of technology and social media has redefined how people communicate. It has also significantly changed the way organized crime groups operate. It is essential that criminal and financial investigators are familiar with and trained in recent best practices in collecting information from open source. To support training needs of criminal justice practitioners, OSCE supported 5-day online workshop (from June to December 2021) on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) for criminal investigators from South-Eastern European countries.

Following the workshops held in Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina, participants from various law enforcement agencies such as Financial Investigation Units and Police Directorates in North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia had the opportunity to enhance their knowledge on OSINT. Specifically, they learned how to collect, analyze and use information for criminal investigations from various publicly available sources such as open government documents, social media, journals, databases, pictures, videos and other data on the internet.

In the age of data abundance, with increasing amounts of false information, the main challenge for criminal investigators is to filter the data, consolidate information, and present it in an accessible manner. The OSCE-supported workshops equipped investigators with techniques, tools and resources that can be put into practice.

The five workshops were organized within the framework of OSCE’s extra-budgetary Asset Recovery in South-Eastern Europe project, financially supported by the United States, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom.