The article “Balancing National Security and Privacy: Examining the Use of Commercially Available Information in OSINT Practices”, written by Jan-Jaap Oerlemans and Sander Langenhuijzen recently [*] was made available in open access in the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence (pdf) and on Oerlemans’ site: pdf.

‘OSINT’ is an abbreviation of Open Source Intelligence. This is information that is obtained in many different ways, e.g. through purchase from advertising companies [**] and from criminals via the dark web (such as data obtained through data leaks and data theft).
Governments and private parties that have obtained OSINT data, are analyzing the vast amount of data with OSINT tools, posing risks for every person on earth.

In the article, Oerlemans and Langenhuijzen critically examine how intelligence and security services utilize commercially available information from OSINT tools and consider its impact on data protection rights.

[*] See Oerlemans on his site.
[**] Meta, Google and al the others.