OSINT Post-traumatic Stress Disorder
Most open-source intelligence (OSINT) gathering is done in safe and controlled places, like an office in a city. Still, those who work or are trained in the discipline may see violence. For example, as a result of watching videos from war zones.
The process of identifying and locating violent footage will mean that the operator spends extended amounts of time analyzing the pictures.
“Exposure to such violent images can have psychological consequences that those undertaking open-source investigations, or training students in the ability to conduct their own, must take steps to mitigate,” according to researcher Jason Rhys Parry from Purdue University.
The specialist suggests frequent breaks as a possible way to relieve the stress of witnessing acts of violence.
Defense Research and Development Canada, an agency with the Department of National Defense, published a possible alternative to using machine vision to mitigate the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for operators going through data sets—especially unvetted material from social media.
Operators at the highest risk were identified as those cleaning, tagging and inspecting data pictures presenting violence, according to authors Mélanie Breton, Valérie Lavigne, Malek Djaffri and Maxime Dionne.
The authors suggested that mitigating risks of PTSD for operators includes controlling factors such as the unexpected and sustained, along with the intensity of the images.
The government-affiliated authors propose using artificial intelligence to identify and limit the stimuli this content produces on operators. Still, “using AI will not identify all sensitive images in a dataset but will help raise awareness of sensitive content for data scientists,” they argue.
