Front Burner - Open source intelligence cowboys ‘monitoring’ Iran

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

As the world watches for updates in the war on Iran, cutting through the fog of war and getting a real sense of the extent of damage and military activity in the region isn’t easy. For some, the answer is open source intelligence: pouring over satellite images, flight radars, news updates, social media posts, and just about any kind of data someone can get their hands on.And while OSINT investigations have worked their way into common practice for newsrooms all over the world, it’s also increasingly popular among amateurs or “OSINT cowboys” with sophisticated AI-coded dashboards streaming constant real life info so that they can monitor the situation as closely as possible and even place bets on platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket. But how accurate are these OSINT reports? And what happens when watching for war updates becomes gamified?Tyler McBrien, the managing editor at Lawfare, joins us to talk about the piece he wrote on this topic for The Baffler.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always overdelivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo.ca.

This is a CBC podcast. Hi everyone, I'm Jamie Plessall. As the world watches for updates in the war on Iran, cutting through the fog of war and getting a real sense of the extent of damage and military activity in the region isn't easy. For some, the answer is open source intelligence, pouring over satellite images, flight radars, news updates, social media posts, and just about any kind of data someone can get their hands on.

And while OSEN investigations have worked their way into common practice for newsrooms all over the world, it's also increasingly popular among hobbyists and amateurs, Ocent Cowboys, as some call them. They have these sophisticated AI-coded dashboards streaming constant real-life info so that they can monitor the situation as closely as possible and even place bets on platforms like Kalshi and Polly Market. But how accurate are these Ocent reports? and what happens when watching for war updates becomes gamified. Tyler McBrion is the managing editor at Lawfare, and he wrote this great piece recently for The Baffler about the current state of open source intelligence.

And he joins me today to talk about what happens when situation monitors are being monitored. Tyler, hey, it's great to have you on the show. Jamie, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here. So before we get into what the open source intelligence scene looks like right now, I just want to establish how it became such a widespread and often crucial practice in journalism and information sharing. Bellingat, one of the pioneers of Ossin, credits the Green Revolution in Iran in 2009 as the starting point of this form of citizen journalism.

The protest began when the government officially declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the winner by a two-to-one margin over Musavi, who many here believed had been leading the race. Tensions grew as demonstrators armed them. cells with sticks and rocks. Now they're vowing to keep protesting until the results are reversed. And what was it about that moment in history and the tech from the last 15 plus years that you think sent us down this trajectory? Yeah, I mean, as you mentioned, Jamie Bellingat, one of the pioneers, places their starting point essentially at the Green Revolution, but other oscent historians could go as you could go as far back as World War II. And

in terms of the CIA or the forerunner to the CIA looked pouring over German newspapers. You can think about really any time a government or a citizen has looked into what's out there in the open and the public to draw some insights or actionable intelligence, they're kind of doing OSENT. It could have been analog OSENT, but now it's very much digital OScent. 2009, I think it's a good place to start

because that's really an inflection point for so many technologies that are ubiquitous today. smartphones, social media, smartphones with cameras specifically. Our camera and videotape confiscated by police, we filmed the protests on our cell phones. And these technological leaps have really enabled the field of OSIN to explode in utility, in sophistication.

The idea being that the amount of information that's out there in the public just increased exponentially as people, users started uploading videos, photos onto social media websites that anyone with an internet connection could access and then potentially download, collect, analyze, and draw pretty stunning insights from 2009 was a really important year because it was a situation as the Green Revolution. It was a situation of a very difficult to access situation for journalists, both on the in Iran getting their information out. And then foreign journalists trying to get information from on the ground, they were blocked from access. There's a lot of censorship. And this is really where

good OSINT shines in terms of accessing information that is out there, but perhaps, you know, really difficult to get your hands on. Can you give me some of your favorite examples of just, you know, regular people using OSENT to kind of uncover things or help others in times of crisis? It could be from 2009 or just any other time. So in 2024, a hurricane called Hurricane Beryl bared down on the Houston region of Texas. And in Texas, the state, I believe, has essentially one electricity provider.

The death toll rising after Hurricane Beryl swept into Texas as a category one hurricane. Trees crashing into homes across Houston, nearly three million customers without power at one point. Potential legal troubles loom. for Centerpoint Energy. It took nearly two weeks for Centerpoint to restore power to everyone after that Category 1 hurricane hit the Texas coast and the Houston area. And this electricity provider was not providing information on where the blackouts were happening as due to the hurricane.

So one very enterprising good citizen who goes by the handle Barbecue Brian on Twitter. He was known for just making really great barbecue videos, you know, being a good Texan. He thought there may be some other way to get at this information. So he opened up his app for a very popular fast food chain called Whataburger in Texas. And he did that because Whataburger has a live updated map of restaurants in the region and has like, I think it was like a three color code. Red means it's out of power and therefore closed. Or actually just I think it just means closed. Yellow means like, you know, half operations and green means fully online. So he felt like that was like almost a perfect proxy to map the extent of the outages. And this comes from other things.

There's this thing called the Waffle House Index that the U.S. agency FEMA reportedly has used in the past to figure out where power outages are based on similarly Waffle House, another fast food chain tracking their outages. So there are these really creative, almost fun, sometimes ways that, you know, everyday people can get at this information that's out there. Are there examples where people are kind of using O-SIT and they're like extrapolating too much? Or they've come to like a conclusion that isn't actually a conclusion? Like I'm thinking of the Pentagon Pizza Tracker example. Yeah, this is a great example and this is what was really the source of a lot of derision.

And one of the reasons I wanted to write the article in the baffler that I did, which is this sort of critique of Ocent, which is a lot of mystique around it, because of his creativity and a lot of it is well earned. But the thing with Ocent is that a lot of it is way more technical than people realize. The people who do Osset really well, they make it look easy, essentially, in terms of their methodology. But there are these, now these hobbyists who have flooded the space, one of them being the Pentagon Pizza Tracker. The idea behind the Pentagon pizza tracker is that you can monitor when there is U.S. military planning happening at the Pentagon based on the restaurants around the Pentagon itself having an uptick in traffic, one of the restaurants being in pizza places.

And so there's this very, very popular account on X slash Twitter called Pentagon Pizza Tracker, and they go viral every time. There's a U.S. military attack, and then someone finds a tweet from them maybe a few hours earlier that shows a spike in traffic around the Pentagon in pizza restaurants. Of course, the ones that don't go viral are all of the false positives. upticks in traffic when there's no strike. And it ignores a lot of other countervailing arguments such as the Pentagon has its own pizza restaurant inside the food court at the Department of Defense. And so it's fun and it's kind of kitschy, but people elevate it as these amazing, like,

tea leaves that you can read when really it's just measuring an uptick and traffic at this one pizza place near Arlington, Virginia. OSIN has become a pretty like formalized part of the news and research ecosystem, whether it's through organizations that we've been talking about like Bellingott that has done some tremendous work or the adoption of visual verification teams in a lot of traditional newsrooms. The BBC has really done incredible work here. We have a visual verification unit at the CBC that does amazing work.

But in your piece, you write about just the sheer number. of people now doing this from home kind of on their own just because Ocent Cowboys, as people call them. And just can you describe for me these dashboards that they're using, which are sort of like war room simulators, but with real-time info? Yeah. So this is fairly new development in the grand scheme of Ocent, which is itself a very young field. The past six months, I want to say, has seen this explosion of vibe-coded dashboards. vibe-coded, meaning now large language models and AI have gotten to the point where they're very good at coding things based on just a description. So what's happening now is these

armchair investigators, these Ocent Cowboys, who may have just been doing a thread on X or writing on their substack, now are building dashboards that are meant to look something like a Bloomberg terminal or a like a Palantier dashboard or some people call it a situation room or it's essentially the promise, which I argue is a false promise, is that it gives the tools that are previously, you know, relegated to intelligence agencies, these very powerful surveillance tools into the hands of everyday people who can then use them to speak to power, etc. In reality, these are crazy-looking, although very nicely designed, thanks to AI, dashboards that on the same screen have market ticker symbols, they have maps, they have BBC, you know,

news feeds of newswires. They have Twitter feeds. They have in some cases pizza restaurant traffic near the Pentagon. And it's all in the same place. But it's kind of crazy to think that, you know, anyone can just look at it and gain insight. It's just so much noise to the nth degree. Then these things are now being flooded on social media and it drowns out the actual OSINT accounts that have been doing this for a while. There are some really good ones. They, they publish their methodology. A lot of them carve out their own beat, so, you know, they're ones that are specifically dedicated to flight tracking. And that's all the OScent they do. And those are, you know, I generally more trustworthy because it's almost like a beat reporter. You know, they have, they know the context, they know the technical know how to draw insights from this vast amount of noise.

But are these OSIN cowboys, as people call them, are you seeing them be effective or helpful at all? Like, with all of these fancy tools? Yeah. So I don't want to paint a picture that it's all next. I think the term cowboy captures it so well because, you know, cowboys can be very cavalier and cause a lot of damage, but they also can be unorthodox and arrive at some, you know, great outcome. So for this piece that I wrote in The Baffler, I spoke with a few Pentagon reporters on background who told me that, well, a lot of these Oscent Cowboys may be getting the details wrong. So it was actually 10 bombers, not 20 that are heading to Iran. What they're doing, though, is slagging big. movements or flagging situations that a journalist with the background knowledge should look into more. And it's funny, one reporter I spoke to said that it gets the point where he'll get texts from

his editors with a tweet from an OScent person saying, you know, look into this, which can can often lead to a story and alert the reporter to a situation that they may have not been aware of. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over-delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights.

And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at Lovescarbro.com. At Desjardin, we speak business. We speak equipment modernization. We're fluent in data digitization and expansion into foreign markets. And we can talk all day about streamlining manufacturing processes. Because at Desjardin business, we speak the same language you do. Business.

So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us. And contact Desjardin today. We'd love to talk, business. What's the appeal, you think, for regular people that aren't working in journalism or national security to be, like, constantly monitoring these situations so closely. You know, rather than escaping the constant sense of doom, they're effectively diving even deeper into it and surrounding themselves in it. This is one of the biggest questions I had. I was scratching my... I was seeing these dashboards, several new ones every day almost on my feeds and wondering why someone... is just staring directly into the sun, essentially. We're just bombarded with news alerts, push notifications. On TV, it is just terrible news every day. And, you know, why would someone want

even more inputs? I think there are a few reasons, and it depends on the person. One is, there is this allure of bringing the capabilities of an intelligence agency, the powerful, dark, smoke-filled rooms, and giving it to the people. And it's this, it's this democratization of surveillance that I think is illusory, but is appealing to people. And similarly, with every new notification, I feel like I know the world less, and it makes less sense. And it may be a reaction to trying to establish some sense of control over a very uncontrollable world. But there are other, I think, more, I want to say, crass reasons behind it. And if we want to talk about how a lot of these dashboards are now integrated with prediction markets, one of the ideas for a lot of people is

is that with more inputs, more data, they make better informed bets and therefore make more more money. And so that's a very material reason, I think, for some of these dashboards. And you see Polymarket, especially advertising or themselves putting out some of these dashboards. And it's a very obvious, like, one-to-one, I think, of the users that, a lot of the users that use these dashboards are a lot of customers in Polymarket. And Polymarket knows that. Yeah. Well, let's get into that a little bit more because I do totally get the psychology of it as a way to feel more control as a world spins out. Maybe it's also a way to feel like important or to show a kind of expertise that looks really impressive, but it is also a way to make money. And, you know,

last week, Polly Market announced that they're opening a bar in the D.C. area called the Situation Room. And here's how they describe it. Imagine a sports bar, but just for situation monitoring, live X-Feeds, flight radar, Bloomberg terminals, and Pollymarket Scream. Do you worry about how this could all lead to more inaccurate OScent content or straight-up misinfo and disinfo shrouded in like the aesthetics of OSIN, in the service of bets? Absolutely. I mean, one of the things I should have mentioned in your last question is that people have a tendency to believe things that look good and look authoritative. And now anyone can make a very well-designed, sharp-looking dashboard that is believable just on site. But this gets even more dangerous, as you were saying, when the incentives are toward making money on a prediction market, rather than getting out information that's verified and contextualized.

A lot of times, journalists have information that they have to sit on for quite a while because they need to verify it with several sources. They need to make sure it's accurate and true. The prediction market side of it throws that out the window. It's all about getting the edge to the millisecond on getting the best odds for a certain bet. So I think that that shrinks the timeline and the incentives skew toward misinformation rather than good quality information for the public. I mean, this goes exactly to how toxic the marriage of osint and prediction markets can be to the greater information environment. This was a story from December. There's a DC-based think tank called the Institute for the Study of War that maintains a almost to the minute map of Ukraine in the changing front and the changing possession of land based on.

the Russian military versus the Ukrainian military. And it's a very well-regarded project. So well-regarded that holly market uses it as its arbiter of truth, essentially, to determine whether will the Russians advance to X town by X date? You know, no one, as far as I know, at these prediction markets are, you know, in this town in Ukraine. So they have to rely on something like this map. But what ended up happening was that someone who works on the map,

or formerly worked on the map, had placed a bet. on a prediction market and then changed the map at 1159 p.m. And then at 1201, the next day, changed it back so that I think he thought that no one would notice, but that he would cash in massively on this bet. And so you see how, you know, if the goal is just to win a bet, you could change reality essentially by changing what's seen as true to advantage your position in the market. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, and I think Ukraine has banned polymarket over these world-related bets, but I mean, you could still use it. I'm sure there's lots of ways people are still getting around it, even in Ukraine, but certainly outside Ukraine. Let's talk about how OSINT fits into how people are trying to know what's actually happening in the war with Iran right now. A lot of OSIT reporting relies on commercial satellite images, but according to reporting from the economist last week, a number of private satellite companies like Planet Labs and Vantar are restricting or delaying the publishing of high-res images from the Middle East. Planet Labs says the reason for changing its policy is to, quote, balance our commitment to transparency with our responsibility to limit the risk that our images are used to plan attacks that hurt allied and NATO forces or civilians.

But what does that all mean for how accurate a picture we're getting of the day-to-day developments in this war? Yeah, these types of restrictions, which, by the way, are not new. There have been many instances, especially in the U.S. restriction on commercial satellite imagery. But it's really interesting as applied to, or as it relates to Ocent, because on the one hand, it makes Ocent research so much more difficult. A satellite imagery is one of the best inputs for Ocent. So it makes it a lot harder. But at the same time, there are other Ocent tools and methods that are developed for exactly these kinds.

of, you know, restricted environments. Oh, and I guess the other thing is the censorship in Iran and also in Israel is making the amount and quality often of user-generated content that much harder to find. And user-generated videos and images are, again, another great input for OScent. But that doesn't mean there's nothing coming out of these areas. And it doesn't mean that there's no other way to, for lack of a better term, monitor the situation there. In one example, the strike on the girls' school in Iran, the U.S. government was claiming either that it wasn't us, it could have been someone else, or that it was under investigation. Meanwhile, Ossent researchers, I believe, Bell and Cat, you know, encountered a video of the strike, verified it by, through geolocation, through metadata, and their very sophisticated methods. And then also was able to isolate a screen grab of the missile itself, determined that it was a Tomahawk missile.

and, you know, determine that only the U.S. is using Tomahawk missiles in this conflict. Therefore, we can say with a very high degree of confidence that the U.S. is responsible for this strike that resulted in the death of dozens and dozens of children. That same economist piece that I was talking about earlier also reported on how the Trump administration, both through the National Reconnaissance Office and outside of it, have been pressuring private satellite companies to censor more of the government. their output to hide things like American military movements around Iran. And to your knowledge, how much does this administration and the Pentagon think about OScent,

investigators, and how much more and more people are trying to watch their every move through whatever avenues they can find? Sure. First I'll just caveat my answer by saying, for the piece that I wrote in the baffler, I did not speak with any government sources. I didn't reach out to them for comments either. But from what I heard from either other Pentech gun reporters and public comments and also photos that the U.S. government themselves have posted, they are quite aware of OSIN. So there was one picture that I believe President Trump posted during the Maduro raid in Venezuela. And they had set up a situation room. And you could see quite clearly in the back of the photo that there is a large monitor with X on a browser in the search bar they had searched Venezuela.

and one of the top tweets, you know, very prominently displayed on the screen was from a big Ocent account. So some people looked at that photo and said, wow, Ocent is so powerful that the highest levels of the U.S. government are using it for actionable intelligence to inform military movements. But the Pentagon reporters I spoke to said, not so fast. More likely, they were looking at what Ocent researchers were picking up and was their first. for being, you know, disseminated in the public to see if, you know, people were onto their trail or to see maybe if they had sent planes another direction as a decoy, if Ocent researchers were picking up on that, essentially using them, using Ocent researchers as useful idiots as the term I used. Maybe that's a bit too harsh. But so I think both could be true, but I think it's

pretty clear that the U.S. government is aware of Ocent. There was actually a Fox News reporter who had asked Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth whether he was aware of the pen, chaghan pizza index, and he said, yes, that he was. And that... I haven't thought of just go to the caps here. I've thought of just ordering lots of pizza on random nights, just to throw everybody off. Some Friday night, when you see a bunch of Domino's orders,

it might just be me on an app, throwing the whole system off, so we keep everybody off balance. Trust me, we look at every indicator. Whether he's done that or not, I have no idea. But, yeah, it just shows that the Trump administration is quite aware of this OSIN phenomenon happening. There is another thing that I've been thinking a lot about. We've been thinking a lot about is just, you know, it's clear that OSIN, both informal newsrooms and these cowboys at home with their souped-up dashboards, isn't going anywhere and can actually, as we've discussed, be very helpful in some cases. But at a time when there is so much international turmoil to cover and news organizations are shrinking and laying off journalists and sending fewer correspondence abroad,

Do you think that we run the risk of seeing global conflict from an increasingly removed lens through maps and radars and other cold hard data, rather than up close and personal on the ground reporting? Yeah, Jamie, I think I couldn't have said up better myself. That is one of the biggest dangers and one of the things I worry about. And that remove becomes even more pernicious when people are betting on it, as we spoke about earlier, when it becomes not only something, thing that you can watch from a remove, like perhaps, you know, viewing animals behind a paint of glass in the zoo. Now it becomes a spectator sport where you have an active vested interest in the outcome of it and, you know, that changes the game as well. And I think one of the biggest dangers and one of my biggest worries is for OSENT to be seen as something that could

replace journalism and the professional journalism. Because there's a lot that goes into conveying information rather than that's much more than just looking at a map. It's it's contextualizing it. It's pointing you in the direction of what's important versus what's not. It's verifying. And so I am very nervous about where this is headed as these dashboards look better and better, as there's more people in the space who don't really know what they're doing, but who can get a lot of attention. It's a troubling future that one can see. Yeah. Yeah. And you kind of, you layer that on top of how these wars are now being fought, which are more remote in their nature with missiles and drones instead of boots on the ground. And it does this sort of detachedness of it all.

Yeah, it does. It worries me. It worries me. Tyler, thank you for this. This was really interesting. I really enjoyed talking to you. Jamie, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. All right. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.