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Comment by swdunlop | Hacker News Reader

They may mean "Open Source Intelligence" as in OSINT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_intelligence

This is correct. It's not open source as the HN crowd would know it. OSINT as you say is the correct "Open Source" moniker. Source: I use Maltego for work daily.

>[...]the term "open" refers to overt, publicly available sources (as opposed to covert or clandestine sources). It is not related to open-source software or collective intelligence.

Interesting, is there a alternative that is open source for OSNIT?

There are bits and pieces, but not a complete tool that gathers all the same functionality (that I'm aware of, there could alays be something new that's not well known yet).

The main selling point of Maltego is the large amount of plugins and data sources that you can integrate with it.

It is of continuous disappointment to me that there really isn't not only a good FOSS link-analysis tool, but doesn't appear to be any of any quality. I've used yED in a pinch a couple of times but it's not FOSS.

But why would there be? It’s a niche application and the target market doesn’t care about open source.

Plenty of folks in the DEFCON crowd could be building free tools like this; off the cuff, a lot of anti-fascists probably don't have access to high quality OSINT analysis tools, and certainly aren't persuing Palantir contracts.

Governments and police in particular are customers for these tools and they do care about open source. If there was a good competitive FOSS tool out there, not a weekend project by any means, but a serious effort. It would be adopted.

This, and the fact that a lot of organisations use data-sources which are so exclusive and expensive that they dwarf Maltego, so nobody is concerned with the cost of a Maltego license.

Other shops will have their own bespoke versions of a Maltego-like tool, but yeah, nothing in the Open Source. MISP probably comes closes to having some of the features.

Aleph was posted a few weeks ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22457530

"Aleph: A suite of data analysis tools for investigators (alephdata.org)"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com