Starting on 3^rd April, 2018, SENTER project (Reference No. HOME/2014/ISFP/AG/7170) will invite European law enforcement experts who are responsible for performing OSINT research and SOCMINT tasks for academic distance learning course in Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) techniques and principles. The distance learning will be supported by online lectures and a 1.5-day presence event, which will be held in Vilnius, Lithuania.

After this course, law enforcement officers, crime investigators and online investigators will be able to extract powerful freely online available data and can make use of advanced technologies to assist with investigations. The newly acquired professional skills and knowledge will have an immediate impact on their daily investigative work.

The course will be divided into 3 different parts: 

After a thorough introduction to OSINT and the Intelligence process, the participants will learn about the underlying Internet technologies to receive a deeper understanding regarding Internet investigations and researches.

The second part of the training course will be fully devoted to effective understanding, finding and collecting information. It will cover web search engines, web archives, translations, blogs and groups, network and website related information, most commonly used social media categories and platforms, and much more specialized techniques like Darknet investigations, geolocation and how to build up and enrich digital identities.

The third part will deal with the analysis and analysis process of collected data and information by using different open source tools and general analysis methods and principles to produce actionable Intelligence. It will show how data and information can be verified, culled, cumulated, and correlated with each other to be able to give meaningful statements and answers to the asked questions. Each topic will contain examples and leads to appropriate sources and tools, so that the reading guide will also assist in daily work after finished the course. Control tasks and controlled exercises with feedback by a tutor will ensure a streamlined learning progress.

Teaching Method:

This distance-learning training course will take 2 months with a workload of 150 hours and is based on the blended-learning method. A modern and moderated collaboration and learning platform will take care of the exchange between the tutors and the participants, the submission of the exercises and additional course materials.