Former Green Beret and national-security advocate Doug Livermore joins the ShadowDragon team to unpack how publicly available information (PAI) and commercial open-source intelligence (OSINT) are transforming modern conflict—and why agile private-sector partners now shape outcomes as much as governments do.Key points & take-awaysBreaking the “intel vs. ops” firewall* U.S. commanders once distrusted anything that didn’t come from classified HUMINT or SIGINT; today, PAI often drives the find-fix-finish cycle faster than traditional sources.Field lessons from five theaters* Iraq, Afghanistan, Mali, the DRC, and the Central African Republic showed that PAI is frequently the only data commanders can legally share with immature or non-NATO partner forces.

* Cheap commercial tools—Google Maps, social media scraping, Internet-of-Things exhaust—now reveal patterns of life, financial flows, and physical locations in minutes.Cultural turning points* The Arab Spring (2010) and ISIS propaganda boom (2014-15) proved that open networks can topple regimes and expose targets.

* Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war brought OSINT to prime time, with private analysts mapping tank battalions and documenting war crimes in real time.Afghanistan 2021: Private networks move faster than states* Livermore’s nonprofits No One Left Behind and SOAA used PAI, commercial satellites, and encrypted chat to steer evacuees past Taliban checkpoints when official channels bogged down.

* U.S. intelligence officers quietly pulled data from these civilian ops centers—a preview of future public-private crisis response.Information warfare & influence ops* Open digital terrain lets both democracies and adversaries micro-target audiences, erode civil trust, or rally global support; mastering sentiment analysis is now a core skill for operators.Policy & the road ahead* Expect formalized private-public frameworks that let nonprofits and tech firms plug straight into combatant-command fusion cells.

* Civil-liberties safeguards must keep pace, distinguishing U.S. person data from foreign-adversary exploitation.Special Guest: Doug Livermore.