Open data and military actions

(Milan) 1^er August 1990. The owner of the American pizzeria chain Domino’s in Washington reported a record number of late deliveries to CIA headquarters: 21 pizzas in a single night, just hours before Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait.

The following year, in early January, the franchise declared in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that nightly deliveries to the Pentagon increased from 3 to 101 and continue to increase steadily. A few days later, the US-led coalition launched Operation Desert Storm to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

Thus was gradually born the “Pentagon Pizza Index”: an informal theory derived from “open source intelligence” suggesting that peaks in late-night pizza orders near the Pentagon herald imminent U.S. military action.

The theory was further proven true when the account PenPizzaReport, which is dedicated to collecting and analyzing public information on pizzeria activity in the surrounding areas, reported a 400% increase in orders, before Israeli airstrikes on Iran last June.

The head of the Department of Defense (or War), Pete Hegseth, also recently alluded to it by affirming, in a joking tone, that he could deliberately order pizzas at random on certain evenings to “destabilize everyone” who relies on this indicator.

Publicly accessible information

OSINT (open-source intelligence or open source intelligence) involves collecting and analyzing information from public sources such as social networks, forums, archives and others. The objective is to produce actionable intelligence to identify, in particular, trends or potential security threats.

Nick Backovic, Canadian specialist in this field and founder of OSINT Consultants, points out that with the recent rise in importance and popularity of this discipline, ordinary people are now able, from home, to reveal and verify military actions or potential war crimes.

“Some tools that were once reserved for military forces and federal agencies are now available to the public – access to satellite images, for example, is much more democratized today than it was ten years ago, and the Internet has created a culture of real-time geolocation,” says Backovic.

Thanks to this access and technological advances, the expert points out that during major events, we frequently observe the broadcast of images filmed from several angles, cross timestamps (method to confirm the time) and collaborative verifications taking place almost in real time.

Today, even intelligence agencies and government ministries rely – to varying degrees – on information provided by OSINT.

On the other hand, these practices have not always been unanimously accepted, explains Éric Sauvé, a former member of the Canadian Armed Forces specializing in intelligence who also worked as an analyst at the Ministry of Defense.

“For a long time, everything related to open-source (open data), that is to say unclassified, was perceived as information that was not reliable… When I started my career, in the 2000s, if someone had brought OSINT, they would have been perceived as someone not serious,” says Mr. Sauvé.

Double edged

Experts agree that since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022, OSINT is enjoying its heyday by enabling an almost unprecedented level of authentication or invalidation of digital content.

One of the busiest channels for up-to-date, open-source data on developments in the Ukraine war is the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington-based think tank.

George Barros, head of the Russia team and an analyst at ISW, explains that daily ISW data comes from commercial data providers, satellite companies, government publications and social media mining.

“Open data, when collected, organized and leveraged using techniques and workflows, allows us to produce partial military intelligence assessments and forecasts comparable to those found in the classified domain,” says Barros.

He cites as an example the ISW Middle East team, which began planning for the possible consequences of a major offensive in Lebanon in September 2024, several weeks before the Israeli invasion in October. Many researchers have also observed an increase in US military deployments in the Caribbean well before the operation to arrest Nicolás Maduro last January.

However, this open data carries a risk: adversaries can use it to refine their own knowledge of your capabilities or activities.

Backovic warns that OSINT has also created opportunities for foreign adversaries to exploit social media accounts to spread disinformation under the guise of independent analysis.

Additionally, the danger with some individuals who are not attached to a formal organization such as a government agency or private company is that this may give way to a less rigorous data verification process.

This leaves more room for error in a product that can be distributed globally in minutes, Mr. Backovic concludes.