Open-Source & Financial Intelligence

8th century · roughly 1,300 years ago

The Tang dynasty imperial court circulated the Dibao gazette of court affairs and decisions

One of the world's earliest regularly published official bulletins informed officials across the empire of court decisions and appointments, and centuries later became a source foreign diplomats and traders in China mined for insight into imperial decision-making.

1851 · 175 years ago

Reuters began transmitting news by telegraph across Europe

The first agency to move commercial and political news faster than the post gave governments, and later intelligence services, a standing open channel of foreign reporting that became a routine input to assessments long before dedicated monitoring agencies existed.

1939 · 87 years ago

The United Kingdom founded the BBC Monitoring Service

Analysts began systematically listening to and transcribing foreign radio broadcasts on the eve of the Second World War, creating an institutional model for open-source monitoring that the United States followed two years later with its own equivalent service.

• The United States created the Foreign Broadcast Information Service

1950s · around 70 years ago

Cold War analysts developed Kremlinology to read Soviet politics from public sources

Lacking access inside a closed system, Western analysts inferred power struggles and policy shifts from the order of officials at public events, the wording of Pravda editorials and other openly published Soviet material, an early model of systematic open-source analysis.

1970 · 56 years ago

The United States passed the Bank Secrecy Act

The law required banks to report large cash transactions and keep records useful to investigators, creating the paper trail that financial intelligence analysis has depended on ever since, and providing a model later copied by other countries.

1989 · 37 years ago

The Group of Seven established the Financial Action Task Force

Created to coordinate an international response to money laundering, the task force went on to set global standards and maintain the grey and black lists that shape how banks and governments treat higher-risk jurisdictions.

1995 · 31 years ago

National financial intelligence units formed the Egmont Group to share information internationally

The informal network let countries' financial intelligence units exchange information on suspicious transactions across borders for the first time in a structured way, becoming a central channel for tracing money laundering and terrorist financing worldwide.

2005 · 21 years ago

Google Earth gave the public free access to satellite and aerial imagery

A consumer mapping tool built on acquired satellite-imagery technology let ordinary users, journalists and analysts examine sites once visible only to states with their own reconnaissance satellites, reshaping what open-source analysis could achieve.

2014 · 12 years ago

Bellingcat was founded, pioneering crowdsourced open-source investigation

Its founder built a methodology for verifying conflict and crime claims using geolocation, satellite imagery and social media, first proving its value tracing weapons in Syria's civil war and later in identifying those responsible for downing flight MH17.

2016 · 10 years ago

The Panama Papers leak exposed the scale of the offshore financial secrecy industry

Millions of leaked documents from a single Panama-based law firm, analysed collaboratively by journalists worldwide, revealed how politicians, officials and criminals used shell companies to hide wealth, prompting new disclosure laws and beneficial-ownership registers in many countries.

• The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists coordinated the multi-country analysis

February 2025 · last year

North Korea's Lazarus Group carried out the largest cryptocurrency theft on record

Hackers linked to North Korea's intelligence services stole roughly a billion and a half dollars in digital assets from a single exchange, financial intelligence analysts said, continuing a multi-year pattern of crypto theft used to help fund the country's weapons programmes.

• The stolen funds were laundered through a complex chain of exchanges

2024–2025 · in the past two years

The European Union added further vessels and companies linked to Russia's shadow fleet to its sanctions lists

Successive sanctions packages named additional tankers, insurers and shipping managers judged to be helping Russia evade the oil price cap, widening a listing effort built largely on open-source shipping and corporate data.

2024–2025 · in the past two years

Kenya and other East African regulators deepened cross-border cooperation against mobile-money financial crime

Regulators shared more data on suspicious transaction patterns across mobile-money platforms used by tens of millions of people in the region, responding to fraud and laundering schemes that increasingly crossed national borders.

2024–2025 · in the past two years

India's Financial Intelligence Unit stepped up monitoring of cross-border digital payment flows

As India's Unified Payments Interface expanded into more countries, authorities increased scrutiny of remittance corridors and instant-payment channels for money-laundering risk, part of a wider effort to keep pace with the growth of real-time digital payments.

• Corridors linking India with the Gulf and Southeast Asia drew particular scrutiny

2024–2025 · in the past two years

China continued state-linked harvesting of publicly available global social media and personal data

Firms reported to have ties to Chinese security services kept building large databases of profiles on foreign officials, military personnel and business figures compiled from open sources, a practice Western governments said supported both intelligence and influence operations.

2024–2025 · in the past two years

Bellingcat continued documenting suspected war crimes and weapons transfers using open-source material

The investigative collective drew on satellite imagery, social media posts and shipping data to trace weapons flows into the war in Ukraine and document strikes on civilian targets, work later cited by prosecutors and journalists.

2024–2025 · in the past two years

AI-assisted geolocation tools became standard equipment in open-source investigation

Machine-learning tools able to match landscape features, shadows and building details to a location sped up the verification of images and video, though investigators reported the same tools were increasingly used to generate convincing fabricated evidence.

2024–2025 · in the past two years

Open-source analysts tracked Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping using vessel-tracking and video data

Researchers combined automatic identification system ship-tracking data with geolocated video claims to verify individual attacks on commercial vessels, often providing faster and more granular confirmation than official statements from any single government.

2024–2025 · in the past two years

Russia relied on a growing shadow fleet of tankers to evade the oil price cap

Open-source researchers used ship-tracking data, satellite imagery and corporate registry records to identify hundreds of ageing tankers moving Russian oil outside Western insurance and shipping services, feeding sanctions-enforcement efforts by several governments.

• The UK and the EU began sanctioning individual tankers by name

2024–2025 · in the past two years

South Africa moved toward exiting the FATF grey list for money-laundering deficiencies

After tightening rules on beneficial-ownership disclosure and cross-border payment monitoring, authorities reported progress against the action plan agreed with the Financial Action Task Force, part of a wider push across the region to strengthen financial crime controls.