All learning in the School of Intelligence & Strategic Studies is bound by this ethics and legal-boundaries policy. Every OSINT-related course links to this page, and learners must acknowledge it before undertaking practical analytical work.
The policy is not a formality attached to the curriculum. It is part of the method. Analytical training teaches people how to find, verify, and interpret information about institutions, events, and actors, and those capabilities can be misused. Teaching them without also teaching their limits would be professionally irresponsible.
Required principles
Seven principles govern all analytical activity undertaken in the School.
Lawful source collection only. All collection must be lawful in the jurisdictions involved. Public availability is not the same as lawful use; some publicly reachable material is protected by data-protection law, terms of access, or professional confidentiality.
Respect for privacy and data minimization. Collect what the analytical question requires and no more. Incidental personal data encountered during research is not retained because it might later be useful. Minimization is a design decision made before collection, not a cleanup afterwards.
Public-interest justification and proportionality. Any intrusion into privacy must be justified by a legitimate analytical purpose and proportionate to it. Curiosity is not a justification. Proportionality is assessed against the least intrusive method that would answer the question.
Non-discrimination and fairness. Analysis must not target or characterize people on the basis of ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender, political affiliation, or similar attributes. Groups may be studied as institutional or political actors; they may not be treated as inherently suspect.
Source protection and responsible publication. Where identifying a source could expose a person to harm, that source is protected. Publication decisions consider foreseeable consequences for identifiable individuals, not only the accuracy of the claim.
Verification, corroboration, and human review. No allegation is repeated without verification. Corroboration must come from genuinely independent sources, and every product passes human review before release.
Documentation and audit trail. Collection and reasoning are documented sufficiently for another analyst to reproduce the finding and for a reviewer to inspect how a conclusion was reached.
Prohibited conduct
The following are prohibited without exception. Engaging in any of them is grounds for removal from the program.
No harassment, stalking, or doxxing. Compiling or publishing personal details in order to expose, intimidate, or enable harm against an individual is prohibited regardless of who the individual is.
No impersonation. Analysts do not misrepresent their identity, affiliation, or purpose to obtain information.
No unauthorized access to systems. No circumvention of authentication, access controls, paywalls, or technical protections. No use of credentials that are not yours.
No operational targeting of individuals. Analysis in this School concerns institutions, policies, events, risks, and publicly accountable conduct. It does not build profiles of private individuals or support operations against them.
No solicitation of classified or restricted data. Learners do not request, accept, or use classified, restricted, or confidential material. Anyone holding such material through employment must keep it out of coursework entirely.
No misuse of AI-generated allegations. AI systems fabricate specific, plausible, and false claims. An AI-generated allegation about a person or institution is not evidence and may not be published, repeated, or treated as a finding without independent verification against primary sources.
AI-assisted analysis
Artificial intelligence is used in analytical work at this School, and its use is bounded rather than open.
AI may assist with collection support, translation, summarization of long documents, organizing evidence, generating alternative hypotheses to be tested, and drafting text that a human then verifies and rewrites. These are acceleration tasks.
AI may not determine a judgment, assign a confidence level, verify a source, approve a product, or generate a factual claim that enters a report unverified. Accountability for every published judgment rests with a named human being who can explain the reasoning independently of the tool.
Where AI has been used materially in producing analytical work, that use is disclosed. The relevant course is IS-S04, AI-Assisted Intelligence Analysis, listed in the course catalog, and the governance frame sits in Cluster 7 of the academic clusters.
This position is not provisional. The requirement of human judgment does not weaken as models improve, because the issue is accountability rather than capability.
Working with sensitive subjects
Much of what the School studies is contested: conflict, political instability, electoral integrity, disinformation, and security risk. Three practical rules apply.
Study the institution rather than the person wherever the analytical question permits it. Most questions about governance, policy, and risk can be answered at institutional level, and doing so reduces privacy exposure without weakening the analysis.
Handle allegations at the level of evidence available. An unverified claim is reported as an unverified claim, attributed to its source, with the verification gap stated. It is not upgraded by repetition.
Consider foreseeable harm before publication. Accurate analysis can still cause disproportionate harm to identifiable people. Where that risk exists, the product is reviewed for whether the identifying detail is necessary to the finding.
Learner acknowledgement
By enrolling in any analytical or OSINT course, the learner acknowledges these boundaries and agrees to conduct all research lawfully, ethically, and with respect for privacy and human dignity. Violation may result in removal from the program.
The acknowledgement is recorded, and it is substantive. Learners who encounter a task that appears to require prohibited conduct are expected to stop and raise it with academic staff rather than proceed. In supervised research, ethical scope is agreed before collection begins.
Institutional position
The School is not a government intelligence agency, a law-enforcement body, a military intelligence unit, or a covert operational organization. It does not claim access to classified information, does not provide unlawful surveillance services, and does not target private individuals. This is set out on the about the School page, and it defines the outer limit of what any program here will teach.
The same boundaries apply to analytical work published by the KBA13 Intelligence Center and to advisory work delivered through KBA13 Consulting. A client request that would require prohibited conduct is declined rather than scoped around.
Methodological requirements that sit alongside these ethical rules are published under analytical standards. Questions about the School’s legal position and what it does not do are answered on the FAQ page.