The Growing Weaponization of Open-Source Information

BY JOHN P. RUEHL

 JULY 5, 2024
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Photograph Source: Dan Lafontaine – Public Domain

Within a day of the June 2, 2024, release of a video documenting the abuse of prisoners of war by a Russian soldier in Ukraine, open-source intelligence (OSINT) researchers had identified the Russian citizen and his involvement in Ukraine going back a decade. Ukrainian officials subsequently sent letters to the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations to document the abuse for potential use in a future criminal trial.

This case is just one example of how OSINT is influencing the war in Ukraine. Online platforms have allowed citizens to broadcast updates to the world, democratizing information and intelligence dissemination. Powerful commercial satellites enable both sides to constantly detect troop and vehicle movements, while georeferencing allows internet users to pinpoint targets through photos and videos. Additionally, social media analysis can track public sentiment and propaganda efforts, providing crucial local and international insights into the psychological nature of the war.

Though the Russia-Ukraine war has shown the latest innovations in wartime OSINT, online platforms and global technologies have increased public involvement in conflicts for years recently. OSINT is being used to shape perceptions of wars, aid in military operations, provide insight into military performances, and expose wrongdoing. Driven by innovations from the private sector, the public, and governments, the growth of OSINT is expected to pose increasing risks to national security and personal privacy.

Foreign maps, news, and propaganda sources have been gathered for centuries to gain insights into the capabilities, preparedness, and strategies of foreign militaries. However, the establishment of the BBC Monitoring Service in 1939 marked a major application of OSINT centralization to gather information about World War II. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. created the Research and Analysis Branch to serve a similar purpose, and as the information age has rapidly progressed since then, OSINT has evolved into a crucial element of modern conflicts.

While Publicly Available Information (PAI) makes up part of OSINT, it also includes commercial data that can be bought or obtained, data about network functions, and algorithms to organize information. Additionally, effective OSINT usage depends on access to data sources, the effectiveness of storing and organizing the data, and reliable and constructive communication to share and debate the findings. Today, individuals thousands of miles away from the front lines play major roles in the fighting, planning, and perception of conflicts, with governments and private actors similarly seeking to exploit OSINT in their own ways.

The Russia-Ukraine War continues to show the critical role of OSINT in modern conflict, building on its application in Ukraine over the past decade. Investigative journalism group Bellingcat used OSINT to expose Russia’s involvement in the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine and released another report in 2016 documenting Russian artillery attacks against Ukraine. Additionally, OSINT researchers were able to unmask the identities of numerous Russians working for private military and security companies operating in Ukraine from 2014 onward.

In the weeks leading up to the 2022 Russian invasion, organizations like Conflict Observatory amassed large amounts of public and commercially available data to help identify potential targets and attack points by Russian forces. Hours before Russian forces rolled across the border, Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies used traffic reports on Google Maps in Russia to indicate Russian action was imminent. Some of the first images of the invasion then came from civilians livestreaming Russian tanks crossing the border.

Since the start of the invasion, OSINT has increasingly favored Ukraine. Social media posts featuring vehicle license plates helped researchers determine what types of military vehicles Russia had deployed and where. Viral images and videos of large numbers of destroyed Russian vehicles helped convince Western countries to support more aid to Ukraine, together with other OSINT that has helped expose potential war crimes, debunk Russian claims, and identify war criminals. Meanwhile, Russia banned U.S. social media platforms shortly after the war began, limiting the ability of Russian internet users to coordinate, disrupt, and influence discussions on major global platforms.

Cross-referencing Google Street View photos, viral images and videos, and public satellite data, online researchers have tracked Russian missile launchers. Commercial satellites have helped provide damage assessments of Ukrainian attacks on Russian air bases. Russian soldiers have been targeted through their phones and fitness trackers after connecting to Ukraine’s telecoms network, dating apps, geotagged social media posts, and other smartphone features, resulting in fatalities.

A web scraping website, Call Russia, meanwhile collects publicly available data on Russian citizens and allows Russian speakers from around the world to call and talk to them about the war. OSINT relating to the war has also spread to Europe. Bellingcat used OSINT to identify a Russian spy with a fake identity working in Italy in 2022, and Ukrainian OSINT group Molfar subsequently unmasked 167 Russian spies working across Europe in 2023.

Governments were quick to recognize the utility of OSINT in the war and organize it effectively. The U.S. State Department gave immediate support to the Conflict Observatory, and Europol launched an OSINT task force to assist in investigating Russian war crimes. The Ukrainian government created an app for citizens to provide information on military movements and illegal activities, and Ukrainian citizens have been able to direct Ukrainian attacks on Russian positions through their phones.

Nonetheless, Russia has enjoyed some balance in OSINT’s application throughout the war. Various sources use OSINT to document Russian and Ukrainian military equipment losses, as well as update daily maps that document troop movements and changes to the frontline. Chatbots continuously scour the internet for data and update receivers with real-time OSINT analysis to identify and alert soldiers to potentially valuable information. U.S. satellite companies are also suspected of providing images to Russian forces, resulting in damaging and deadly attacks that show the vulnerabilities of the West’s more open business and internet standards.

Other recent conflicts, particularly in the Middle East, have seen extensive use of OSINT. Throughout the Syrian Civil War, the Live Universal Awareness Map has primarily used social media posts to map current military movements, unrest, destruction, and violence. In 2016, social media users combed through satellite data and located a terrorist camp in the Syrian desert, which was bombed by Russian forces hours later.

OSINT serves as a force equalizer for militant groups with limited access to advanced technologies, and they have drastically increased their use of OSINT in the 21st century. Since the start of the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen’s civil war in 2015, Houthi militants have used social media and satellite images to monitor and target the movements of the Saudi-led coalition, though the Saudi coalition has also relied on social media information to target Houthi forces as well. Following the onset of the Red Sea Crisis in late 2023, the Houthis, in coordination with Iran, have used commercially available maritime intelligence services, such as Marine Traffic and ShipXplorer, to track and attack ships through the narrow body of water.

Hamas has employed OSINT against Israel for decades, capitalizing on Israel’s open media environment to monitor Israeli policy changes, troop movements, and public sentiment. Since Israel’s military bombardment of Gaza began in 2023, the Washington Post’s Visual Forensics has mapped Israeli advances using videos, photos, and satellite imagery. Al Jazeera’s fact-checking unit Sanad disproved Israel’s claim of a Hamas tunnel under al-Shifa Hospital, and additional OSINT proved that Palestinian civilians had been killed by Israeli forces along the safe routes advised by Israel.

Contrastingly, OSINT was used by Israel to challenge reports by Hamas, and repeated by global media outlets, about an Israeli strike that destroyed a hospital. Bellingcat investigators analyzed footage from the sites of two Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7 to piece together the assault. Additionally, Israeli intelligence actively monitors Hamas on social media, as well as using OSINT in other ways to track Hamas activities.

Outside of active conflict zones, OSINT is also increasingly used as a geopolitical tool. In 1992, the deputy director of the CIA stated that over 80 percent of the agency’s analysis was based on OSINT, and the U.S. actively uses OSINT against adversaries and allies. However, the availability and commercialization of data in the West has undermined U.S. global military power. In 2018, for example, the Strava fitness app’s user map exposed the positions and movements of U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Syria.

Algorithms can now instantly detect the presence of a ship using global port webcams, while U.S. military aircraft can be tracked on programs like Flightradar24, helping map the U.S. global military presence in real-time. Additionally, WarshipCam and ShipSpotting contain extensive image databases of almost all warships and onboard system configurations. A 2023 report by the University of California’s Berkeley Risk and Security Lab stated that China is using various OSINT images of U.S. warships for AI training datasets to build highly detailed computerized images of U.S. and allied vessels.

Additionally, machine learning has made it easy to analyze social media. Lexical analysis, web scraping, and sentiment analysis provide information on language usage and demographics of social media posters. Russia’s history of using social media to inflame the U.S. public over divisive issues is well documented, and other states are employing similar tactics to influence the U.S. and Europe. OSINT is also being increasingly used in DNA analysis. China’s Beijing Genomics Institute, which works on the Human Genome Project, has amassed millions of people’s genomic data for use in studies of populations.

Just as governments and groups use OSINT abroad, they are adapting to its deployment domestically. During the Arab Spring protests in 2010 and 2011, regional governments faced vulnerabilities from protests organized online, with live maps, government atrocities depicted on social media, and other forms of OSINT used. In recognition of this, Beijing acted quickly to pressure foreign companies to remove the HKMap.live app tracking police forces from their platforms and put restrictions on communications during the 2019 and 2020 Hong Kong protests. Western governments may find it challenging to employ such measures amid widespread unrest, resorting instead to tactics such as event barraging by overwhelming the information space with a flood of content to distract and obscure valuable information, misinformation campaigns, trend hijacking, and other methods to undermine OSINT and prevent effective data analysis.

There is also a natural incentive for governments to use OSINT against their populations. By aggregating and analyzing publicly available information and other data, governments can gain valuable insight into citizens’ lives, behaviors, and opinions. However, this comes at a significant cost to personal privacy and can make individuals and groups vulnerable to unwarranted surveillance. Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using OSINT in criminal investigations. Moreover, OSINT can be manipulated to shape public opinion, as demonstrated by the “Ghost of Kyiv” during the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which highlighted the potential for OSINT to be hijacked for propaganda purposes.

OSINT is increasingly a major component of the surveillance economy, with companies selling personal and public data for profit. Major names in the OSINT industry include Palantir Technologies, Recorded Future, and Babel Street, among others. These companies, along with numerous smaller firms, continue to drive market growth and innovation. These applications of OSINT extend beyond traditional intelligence gathering, with the increasing sophistication of targeted marketing being one result.

Instances of public misuse of OSINT are widespread, ranging from researchers falsely identifying war criminals to hackers exploiting OSINT for profit. But OSINT has significant positive impacts, including coordinating evacuations and humanitarian aid, alerting civilians to threats, and allowing them to document their experiences that can counter or complement traditional media.

However, much of OSINT continues to be focused on conflict and domestic surveillance, and its capabilities are rapidly expanding as it integrates with machine learning technologies. As OSINT becomes increasingly weaponized and commercialized, the evolving landscape will require increased attention to the ethics of large-scale data accumulation and the threat to personal privacy.

John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C. He is a contributing editor to Strategic Policy and a contributor to several other foreign affairs publications. He is currently finishing a book on Russia to be published in 2022.

Trusting the “Five Eyes” Only

BY MICHAEL T. KLARE

 JULY 5, 2024
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Image by by Prachatai.

Wherever he travels globally, President Biden has sought to project the United States as the rejuvenated leader of a broad coalition of democratic nations seeking to defend the “rules-based international order” against encroachments by hostile autocratic powers, especially China, Russia, and North Korea. “We established NATO, the greatest military alliance in the history of the world,” he told veterans of D-Day while at Normandy, France on June 6th. “Today… NATO is more united than ever and even more prepared to keep the peace, deter aggression, defend freedom all around the world.”

In other venues, Biden has repeatedly highlighted Washington’s efforts to incorporate the “Global South” — the developing nations of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East — into just such a broad-based U.S.-led coalition. At the recent G7 summit of leading Western powers in southern Italy, for example, he backed measures supposedly designed to engage those countries “in a spirit of equitable and strategic partnership.”

But all of his soaring rhetoric on the subject scarcely conceals an inescapable reality: the United States is more isolated internationally than at any time since the Cold War ended in 1991. It has also increasingly come to rely on a tight-knit group of allies, all of whom are primarily English-speaking and are part of the Anglo-Saxon colonial diaspora. Rarely mentioned in the Western media, the Anglo-Saxonization of American foreign and military policy has become a distinctive — and provocative — feature of the Biden presidency.

America’s Growing Isolation

To get some appreciation for Washington’s isolation in international affairs, just consider the wider world’s reaction to the administration’s stance on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden sought to portray the conflict there as a heroic struggle between the forces of democracy and the brutal fist of autocracy. But while he was generally successful in rallying the NATO powers behind Kyiv — persuading them to provide arms and training to the beleaguered Ukrainian forces, while reducing their economic links with Russia — he largely failed to win over the Global South or enlist its support in boycotting Russian oil and natural gas.

Despite what should have been a foreboding lesson, Biden returned to the same universalist rhetoric in 2023 (and this year as well) to rally global support for Israel in its drive to extinguish Hamas after that group’s devastating October 7th rampage. But for most non-European leaders, his attempt to portray support for Israel as a noble response proved wholly untenable once that country launched its full-scale invasion of Gaza and the slaughter of Palestinian civilians commenced. For many of them, Biden’s words seemed like sheer hypocrisy given Israel’s history of violating U.N. resolutions concerning the legal rights of Palestinians in the West Bank and its indiscriminate destruction of homes, hospitals, mosques, schools, and aid centers in Gaza. In response to Washington’s continued support for Israel, many leaders of the Global South have voted against the United States on Gaza-related measures at the U.N. or, in the case of South Africa, have brought suit against Israel at the World Court for perceived violations of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

In the face of such adversity, the White House has worked tirelessly to bolster its existing alliances, while trying to establish new ones wherever possible. Pity poor Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has made seemingly endless trips to Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East trying to drum up support for Washington’s positions — with consistently meager results.

Here, then, is the reality of this anything but all-American moment: as a global power, the United States possesses a diminishing number of close, reliable allies – most of which are members of NATO, or countries that rely on the United States for nuclear protection (Japan and South Korea), or are primarily English-speaking (Australia and New Zealand). And when you come right down to it, the only countries the U.S. really trusts are the “Five Eyes.”

For Their Eyes Only

The “Five Eyes” (FVEY) is an elite club of five English-speaking countries — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States — that have agreed to cooperate in intelligence matters and share top-secret information. They all became parties to what was at first the bilateral UKUSA Agreement, a 1946 treaty for secret cooperation between the two countries in what’s called “signals intelligence” — data collected by electronic means, including by tapping phone lines or listening in on satellite communications. (The agreement was later amended to include the other three nations.) Almost all of the Five Eyes’ activities are conducted in secret, and its existence was not even disclosed until 2010. You might say that it constitutes the most secretive, powerful club of nations on the planet.

The origins of the Five Eyes can be traced back to World War II, when American and British codebreakers, including famed computer theorist Alan Turing, secretly convened at Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking establishment, to share intelligence gleaned from solving the German “Enigma” code and the Japanese “Purple” code. At first an informal arrangement, the secretive relationship was formalized in the British-US Communication Intelligence Agreement of 1943 and, after the war ended, in the UKUSA Agreement of 1946. That arrangement allowed for the exchange of signals intelligence between the National Security Agency (NSA) and its British equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) — an arrangement that persists to this day and undergirds what has come to be known as the “special relationship” between the two countries.

Then, in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, that intelligence-sharing agreement was expanded to include those other three English-speaking countries, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. For secret information exchange, the classification “AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY” was then affixed to all the documents they shared, and from that came the “Five Eyes” label. France, Germany, Japan, and a few other countries have since sought entrance to that exclusive club, but without success.

Although largely a Cold War artifact, the Five Eyes intelligence network continued operating right into the era after the Soviet Union collapsed, spying on militant Islamic groups and government leaders in the Middle East, while eavesdropping on Chinese business, diplomatic, and military activities in Asia and elsewhere. According to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, such efforts were conducted under specialized top-secret programs like Echelon, a system for collecting business and government data from satellite communications, and PRISM, an NSA program to collect data transmitted via the Internet.

As part of that Five Eyes endeavor, the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Australia jointly maintain a controversial, highly secret intelligence-gathering facility at Pine Gap, Australia, near the small city of Alice Springs. Known as the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG), it’s largely run by the NSA, CIA, GCHQ, and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization. Its main purpose, according to Edward Snowden and other whistle-blowers, is to eavesdrop on radio, telephone, and internet communications in Asia and the Middle East and share that information with the intelligence and military arms of the Five Eyes. Since the Israeli invasion of Gaza was launched, it is also said to be gathering intelligence on Palestinian forces in Gaza and sharing that information with the Israeli Defense Forces. This, in turn, prompted a rare set of protests at the remote base when, in late 2023, dozens of pro-Palestinian activists sought to block the facility’s entry road.

From all accounts, in other words, the Five Eyes collaboration remains as robust as ever. As if to signal that fact, FBI director Christopher Wray offered a rare acknowledgement of its ongoing existence in October 2023 when he invited his counterparts from the FVEY countries to join him at the first Emerging Technology and Securing Innovation Security Summit in Palo Alto, California, a gathering of business and government officials committed to progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity. Going public, moreover, was a way of normalizing the Five Eyes partnership and highlighting its enduring significance.

Anglo-Saxon Solidarity in Asia

The Biden administration’s preference for relying on Anglophone countries in promoting its strategic objectives has been especially striking in the Asia-Pacific region. The White House has been clear that its primary goal in Asia is to construct a network of U.S.-friendly states committed to the containment of China’s rise. This was spelled out, for example, in the administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States of 2022. Citing China’s muscle-flexing in Asia, it called for a common effort to resist that country’s “bullying of neighbors in the East and South China” and so protect the freedom of commerce. “A free and open Indo-Pacific can only be achieved if we build collective capacity for a new age,” the document stated. “We will pursue this through a latticework of strong and mutually reinforcing coalitions.”

That “latticework,” it indicated, would extend to all American allies and partners in the region, including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, and South Korea, as well as friendly European parties (especially Great Britain and France). Anyone willing to help contain China, the mantra seems to go, is welcome to join that U.S.-led coalition. But if you look closely, the renewed prominence of Anglo-Saxon solidarity becomes ever more evident.

Of all the military agreements signed by the Biden administration with America’s Pacific allies, none is considered more important in Washington than AUKUS, a strategic partnership agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Announced by the three member states on Sept. 15, 2021, it contains two “pillars,” or areas of cooperation — the first focused on submarine technology and the second on AI, autonomous weapons, as well as other advanced technologies. As in the FVEY arrangement, both pillars involve high-level exchanges of classified data, but also include a striking degree of military and technological cooperation. And note the obvious: there is no equivalent U.S. agreement with any non-English-speaking country in Asia.

Consider, for instance, the Pillar I submarine arrangement. As the deal now stands, Australia will gradually retire its fleet of six diesel-powered submarines and purchase three to five top-of-the-line U.S.-made Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs), while it works with the United Kingdom to develop a whole new class of subs, the SSN-AUKUS, to be powered by an American-designed nuclear propulsion system. But — get this — to join, the Australians first had to scrap a $90 billion submarine deal with a French defense firm, causing a severe breach in the Franco-Australian relationship and demonstrating, once again, that Anglo-Saxon solidarity supersedes all other relationships.

Now, with the French out of the picture, the U.S. and Australia are proceeding with plans to build those Los Angeles-class SSNs — a multibillion-dollar venture that will require Australian naval officers to study nuclear propulsion in the United States. When the subs are finally launched (possibly in the early 2030s), American submariners will sail with the Australians to help them gain experience with such systems. Meanwhile, American military contractors will be working with Australia and the UK designing and constructing a next-generation sub, the SSN-AUKUS, that’s supposed to be ready in the 2040s. The three AUKUS partners will also establish a joint submarine base near Perth in Western Australia.

Pillar II of AUKUS has received far less media attention but is no less important. It calls for American, British, Australian scientific and technical cooperation in advanced technologies, including AI, robotics, and hypersonics, aimed at enhancing the future military capabilities of all three, including through the development of robot submarines that could be used to spy on or attack Chinese ships and subs.

Aside from the extraordinary degree of cooperation on sensitive military technologies — far greater than the U.S. has with any other countries — the three-way partnership also represents a significant threat to China. The substitution of nuclear-powered subs for diesel-powered ones in Australia’s fleet and the establishment of a joint submarine base at Perth will enable the three AUKUS partners to conduct significantly longer undersea patrols in the Pacific and, were a war to break out, attack Chinese ships, ports, and submarines across the region. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the Chinese have repeatedly denounced the arrangement, which represents a potentially mortal threat to them.

Unintended Consequences

It’s hardly a surprise that the Biden administration, facing growing hostility and isolation in the global arena, has chosen to bolster its ties further with other Anglophone countries rather than make the policy changes needed to improve relations with the rest of the world. The administration knows exactly what it would have to do to begin to achieve that objective: discontinue arms deliveries to Israel until the fighting stops in Gaza; help reduce the burdensome debt load of so many developing nations; and promote food, water security, and other life-enhancing measures in the Global South. Yet, despite promises to take just such steps, President Biden and his top foreign policy officials have focused on other priorities — the encirclement of China above all else — while the inclination to lean on Anglo-Saxon solidarity has only grown.

However, by reserving Washington’s warmest embraces for its anglophone allies, the administration has actually been creating fresh threats to U.S. security. Many countries in contested zones on the emerging geopolitical chessboard, especially in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, were once under British colonial rule and so anything resembling a potential Washington-London neocolonial restoration is bound to prove infuriating to them. Add to that the inevitable propaganda from China, Iran, and Russia about a developing Anglo-Saxon imperial nexus and you have an obvious recipe for widespread global discontent.

It’s undoubtedly convenient to use the same language when sharing secrets with your closest allies, but that should hardly be the deciding factor in shaping this nation’s foreign policy. If the United States is to prosper in an increasingly diverse, multicultural world, it will have learn to think and act in a far more multicultural fashion — and that should include eliminating any vestiges of an exclusive Anglo-Saxon global power alliance.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

We Need Rational Patriotism

by Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall Posted on July 04, 2024

As we approach Independence Day, patriotic displays will be everywhere. U.S. flags; red, white, and blue clothing; patriotic décor; and calls to appreciate our freedoms will greet us in the news, in stores and restaurants, and even in our workplaces.

Some 67 percent of U.S. adults report being “proud” or “extremely proud” to be an American. U.S. citizens across generations report high levels of patriotism, as do immigrants.

Unfortunately, for many, patriotism is blind. Children in 47 states are taught to pledge allegiance to the flag every morning in school. Do they know what they are reciting or why? We’re conditioned to place our hands over our hearts for the national anthem, to stand for the flag, and so on without giving it any thought.

Nowhere is blind patriotism more apparent than in the realm of U.S. military and foreign policy. A majority of Americans say they trust the military. We are conditioned to thank members or veterans of the armed forces for their service regardless of how long they were in the military, whether they volunteered or were conscripted (as men were until 1973), what function they performed, and despite the fact that such platitudes make many veterans uncomfortable.

Failure to do these things is a grave offense. It’s even worse to question or criticize military policy.

What if one declined to thank a 30-year-old veteran for his time in the military, having familiarized oneself with the ample evidence that the war on terror has done nothing to make us safer but instead has made us less safe and less free? What if instead one said, “Thanks, but no thanks,” considering that that the veteran willingly had enlisted and engaged in operations that eroded liberty and safety at home and abroad,

To many people, such a statement would be unconscionable. The very thought is taboo in many circles and would lead to the person being labeled “un-American” and “unpatriotic.”

Both of us have been sharply criticized for our skeptical work on U.S. foreign policy. After reading or hearing us speak, people have suggested we move to another country or be forced into military service. We’ve received emails and phone calls expressing outrage.

We submit, however, that the person who says “No thanks” to the veteran, like the person who openly criticizes U.S. officials and their policies, has a better claim to the “patriot” label than the people sending us angry emails or blithely thanking every veteran.

Just before World War I, writer Randolph Bourne distinguished country, state, and government. For Bourne, “country” referred to the nonpolitical aspects of a place and its people – things like language, culture, and ideals. “State” represented the group acting as a “repository of force.” “Government” denoted the mechanisms by which the state carried out its activities.

People have come to conflate these three things. State and government have become synonymous with country. This could lead them into blind patriotism by making it seem impossible to love one’s country while being skeptical of and even appalled by the state’s and government’s actions.

Our founders understood the need to rationally question the government and the state, especially in warmaking. As James Madison noted, “Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.” He also said, “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Having studied the seen and unseen costs of U.S. foreign policy, we are well aware that many state actions not only fail to guard the liberties we hold so dear but actively erode them.

So, this coming holiday, as we prepare to celebrate our independence and our freedoms, let’s also embrace a healthy skepticism. We need a rational, not blind, patriotism. Our most cherished liberties depend on it.

Christopher J. Coyne is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and professor of economics at George Mason University. Abigail R. Hall is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and an associate professor of economics at the University of Tampa. They are coauthors of the new book How to Run Wars: A Confidential Playbook for the National Security Elite (Independent Institute, June, 2024).