ISJ hears exclusively from Tony D’Angelo, Vice President of Sales for Fivecast about boosting security at major global events with OSINT during the World Cup 2026.
The FIFA World Cup is bringing together fans together across Mexico, Canada and the US, but major global events also unfortunately create opportunities for organised crime, extremist activity and coordinated disruption.
Set to be the largest global sporting event to date, featuring 48 teams and 78 matches in 11 cities, the event is highly complex and presents a long list of security challenges.
How well the authorities in the three countries fare in protecting the event depends heavily on intelligence capabilities and vetting procedures as much as on their ability to defeat physical threats including the new danger of drone attacks.
For criminals eager to prey on an estimated five million traveling supporters, the opportunities are almost innumerable – from match-fixing and fake merchandise to organised pickpocketing.
Waiting in the shadows, posing a more worrying threat, are the terrorists, extremists and activists who see the event as an ideal platform to inflict outrage or disruption, exerting power and gaining publicity.
For example, The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has a history of terrorist activity on American soil and is likely to be motivated by the current conflict between Iran and the US.
And, as with any football event, the threat of violent clashes between supporters or between supporters and police, is never far away either.
GB Jones, the chief safety and security officer for the World Cup, is a former senior FBI officer who admits there are many threats, which is why in his public interviews, he has warned about complacency and explained the lengths to which US authorities are going.
Where security has to improve for major tournaments
While preparations for the World Cup have now been successfully completed, the event re-emphasises the challenges facing law enforcement and public protection agencies in their missions to protect communities surrounding major sporting events.
There are two key initiatives that can aid in this mission:
The first is more effective use of open-source intelligence – especially across social media and the dark web.
Advanced open-source intelligence (OSINT) capabilities enable law enforcement agencies to use AI in the online detection of organised crime activity, terrorist and activist recruitment, planning and disinformation.
It picks up the telltale signs of violence planned by ultras – the more extreme fan groups, providing indicators of threats that can result in much earlier intervention.
The second is the vetting of the thousands of people who require event-specific credentials, such as temporary security staff, broadcast teams, catering personnel and employees of commercial partners with access to sensitive areas.
With so many people involved in delivering an event of this scale, robust and proportionate background checks are essential to help ensure that access is granted appropriately and that any potential risks are identified before the event begins.
OSINT and how it transforms intelligence-gathering
If we focus on the first point, it is clear the authorities should be using AI-powered OSINT software to extract necessary intelligence insights from the masses of information online.
Traditional event security measures are no longer sufficient, given that threats are now both physical and digital.
Many agencies are unable to keep up with the speed and volume of messaging, especially across social media: there is estimated to be 5.75bn social media users now, many of whom have multiple accounts.
Tracking and analysing them manually is no longer adequate.
It’s in the online world where many threats originate or gather momentum.
We know that violent extremists coordinate on social media and that activist groups signal plans for direct action on their websites and informal networks.
Hostile countries such as Iran and Russia use social media to recruit proxies to carry out acts of terror and sabotage.
Football supporters’ groups goad one another and arrange confrontations on message boards.
Analysing thousands of conversations
To be effective in their roles, security analysts must gather as much information as possible from many thousands of conversations about a sporting event in the obscure corners of the web and social media.
Across these platforms and forums on the surface, deep, and dark web, threats take shape and risks evolve in relation to changing sentiment and emotion.
Deliberate disinformation can stir up trouble, extremist recruiters approach the sympathetic or vulnerable, and rogue gambling syndicates exchange strategies indicating they intend to influence players or officials.
Authorities face challenges due to the vast amount of online material and the shifting platforms used by violent extremists and criminals. Intelligence teams need to track movements across various platforms like 4chan, 8chan/8kun, Discord, Telegram, TikTok, WeChat, and Weibo.
To filter and analyse this mass of data at scale and speed, law enforcement agencies need AI-powered OSINT tools which are purpose-built for detection of extremist content.
These solutions deploy analytics to establish connections between individuals and groups, saving days of human analyst time.
Without requiring expertise in data science or data-management, intelligence teams can customise AI-enabled risk detectors to uncover content relevant to their investigations.
The technology will map online entities and establish links between threat groups and extremist ideologies, creating a new set of vital capabilities.
Analysts can use the data to validate what they have gleaned from other sources, and surface new leads. Social media intelligence technology (SOCMINT) is the subset of OSINT that focuses on mainstream and niche platforms and country-specific sites.
This is especially valuable during live events, where timely collection and analysis help identify risks and relevant activity as they unfold.
AI-powered SOCMINT analyses large volumes of content, providing scalable, near-real-time data from digital conversations and online chatter.
For an international sporting event, OSINT technology offers the advantage of working in multiple languages, detecting sentiment and other indicators of illegal activity.
Visualisations rapidly map the links between groups and individuals across national boundaries. These are capabilities that teams of analysts relying on manual methods can never match.
Human expertise is vital in assessing the intelligence supplied by OSINT.
Skilled and experienced intelligence and law enforcement officers must decide what action to take, correlating the data provided by the technology with information from other sources.
The use of OSINT enhances but does not replace law enforcement decision-making in operations to protect people at major events.
Assessing risk at scale
People are at the centre of events, and when it comes to vetting applicants for roles with any level of security-sensitivity, OSINT also has a key role to play.
Clearly, there is no need to subject every ice cream vendor to deep vetting, but any tournament will see hundreds or thousands of people unknown to the authorities gaining access to sensitive areas or information.
Traditional vetting uses interviews, references and manual background checks.
This provides only a limited view of an individual’s risk, while resource constraints limit the number of individuals that can be vetted by officers or external agencies.
Agencies can now surmount these severe constraints through vetting solutions that deploy AI-powered OSINT.
These not only provide the full picture of an individual across their social media and web presence, but they also enable vetting at a vastly greater scale.
Using the technology, analysts can establish an applicant’s online identity more than 20 times faster than someone can by clicking on a screen.
Agencies can set which risk indicators to highlight during vetting, allowing AI-driven OSINT solutions to focus solely on relevant information and exclude unrelated images or data.
Conclusion
As sporting events and tournaments like the FIFA World Cup continue to grow amid a heightened threat landscape, their security requirements become more complex, encompassing new threats in both the physical and digital realms.
Traditional security measures are no longer adequate when the safety of thousands of sports fans trying to enjoy themselves is at stake. The online world is where so much of the malign activity that threatens lives and livelihoods is incubated. Threats are fast-moving, often influenced by highly dynamic sentiment or propaganda.
The agencies responsible for event security need more advanced technology to detect dangers earlier and to weed out malicious infiltrators much more effectively and at far greater scale.
Security at major sporting events must be more proactive, predictive and powered by AI-enabled OSINT.