OSINT Language as a Tool with Skip Schiphorst

In this episode, Francis Gorman interviews Skip Schiphorst, an expert in Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and language studies. They discuss the critical role of language skills in OSINT, the importance of understanding cultural naming conventions, and the methodologies for conducting multilingual research. Skip emphasizes the need for careful vetting of sources, especially in authoritarian contexts, and shares insights from his military experience that translate into the OSINT field. The conversation also touches on the use of AI and machine translation, the significance of motivation in language learning, and the broad applicability of OSINT across various sectors. Finally, Skip introduces upcoming free webinars aimed at providing foundational knowledge in OSINT methodologies.

Takeaways

• Language skills are a force multiplier in OSINT investigations.
• Understanding naming conventions in different cultures is crucial for accurate research.
• AI and machine translation should be used as tools, not crutches.
• Methodology is key in multilingual research; keywords are essential.
• Vetting sources and double-checking information is vital, especially in authoritarian contexts.
• Military experience can provide valuable skills for OSINT work.
• Motivation is the most important factor in learning a new language.
• OSINT is applicable across various sectors, including law enforcement and business.
• Language learning can be enhanced through movement and physical activity.
• Free webinars can provide a great introduction to OSINT methodologies.

Sound Bite

"AI should be used as a tool, not a crutch."

Information mentioned in episode:

I-Intelligence also hosts free webinars, including the upcoming sessions on September 22nd and 26th 2025, which will introduce the basics of OSINT in foreign languages such as Russian, Arabic, and Chinese. Everyone is welcome to participate!
Details: https://shorturl.at/jhjhS

Beyond the classroom, Skip explores how movement can enhance language learning. He shares his dynamic, movement-based techniques on Instagram while learning Japanese:
Follow him at https://www.instagram.com/skipmovestolearn/

Transcript

Francis Gorman (00:02.162)
Hi everyone. Welcome to the entry podcast. I'm your host, Francis Gorman. If you're enjoying our content, please take a moment to like and follow the show wherever you get your podcast from today. I'm delighted to be joined by Skip Schiphorst. After serving 17 years in the Marines, Skip went on to earn a degree in China studies from Leiden university and then hone these trade craft across this area. Skip is now a course course coordinator and instructor for I-intelligence, open source intelligence, Arabic, MENA, Chinese and Russian language courses.

The focus of these courses is helping online researchers, KYC compliance investigators, academia and business professionals make better use of online sources and foreign languages. also specializes in helping people learn languages through movement. And if you want to know more about that, you can follow him on Instagram and we'll drop the link into the episode details. Skip, it's great to have you here with me today.

Skip (00:53.046)
appreciated Francis for that warm introduction.

Francis Gorman (00:56.939)
Skip, it's a fascinating area, open source intelligence in general, but then when you layer in the language aspect, there's a whole different level of complexity there that I'm interested to talk about. And what I want to understand a bit more is the intersection of languages and open source intelligence. And the piece that I'm most interested in is why language skills are a force multiplier in open source investigations. If you're able to talk to me a little bit about that.

Skip (01:23.362)
Definitely, so we can break it out into two things. How you can mix languages with OSINT. Well, if we look around us, the people we live with or our friends, I think we can agree that the way people search online in, let's take English, the way they do it doesn't mean per se that they know how to do it in a rigorous way, in a rigorous manner.

putting into account to research something on Google is something very different than doing an OSINT investigation, of course. When you run something with a foreign language using Google Translate to translate maybe a news article or a menu or something like that, Google Translate is going to do just fine. But when you want to do some more digging, precise investigations, which is what OSINT is really about, then nailing the right translations and using the correct platforms of

different countries plays a very important role.

Francis Gorman (02:22.88)
And on that, when I think about languages and I think about different countries and different cultures, the context changes with phrases or with characters. Can you talk to me a little bit of any experiences where the character in Chinese or Arabic or Russian changed the outcome of the research that you were doing? Or does that play a factor?

Skip (02:44.812)
It definitely plays a factor and one of the areas where it plays a very, very important factor is when you research people, so naming conventions. So your typical John Smith in the Anglo-Saxon world can be searched as John Smith, example, Jonathan Smith, Smith, S and so on and so forth. So that's just 10 or 15 versions that you could get of that gentleman's name. When you research someone in a foreign language in another country,

It really pays to spend some time understanding, for example, what the naming conventions are of that country. If we look at Arabic, for example, throughout the Middle East and North Africa, the way people choose to write their names in a conventional matter in Egypt is going to be very different than how they do it in Iraq or in Algeria or other places. So it pays to spend some time on that. And I think that's the biggest problem, time. We often want to go for a quick buck.

People tend to go straight to Google, Google Translate, or AI nowadays, and then look for the results. What we stress is it's in your benefit to first do your research, read about naming conventions, and then, for example, put that into a browser or other search systems which you have. We see this predominantly with naming conventions. Now, some naming conventions are a bit easier than others. The ones in Arabic are quite complex.

The ones in Chinese are quite easy. But then again, it takes time to understand how they can be written. That's really going to help you find the results you're looking for.

Francis Gorman (04:24.0)
And I suppose on that, you mentioned Google Translate a few times there, and you also touched on artificial intelligence. Do you think people have an over reliance on AI or machine learning or machine translation for OSINT type activities? And is that detrimental to the activity in itself? Are you seeing a shift in the industry with the flood of these capabilities and technologies on the market?

Skip (04:53.453)
Absolutely. So I see AI as a tool and there's lots of tools out there. You mentioned and I mentioned Google Translate, which is also a tool. The better input you put into tools, the better the results are going to come out. What we see now is all too often, not always, because many of them actually do practice the right methodology to research online first and then go to a browser or AI or something else. We often see, however, is that

researchers first go to AI and then go from there. Now, there is nothing wrong with that per se if you want to find a quick answer, right? Because AI is going to help you save a lot of time, right? But just keep in mind that it is a rabbit hole, right? And it does make mistakes. The better information you put into a browser or AI or something else, the better results you're going to get out of it. So do the methodology first and then, and then, then,

use those tools.

Francis Gorman (05:54.463)
And speaking about methodology, Skip, have you got any practical strategies for multilingual research if I was to approach this topic or if the listeners were interested in the area, how do you go about a research topic in a multilingual space?

Skip (06:09.771)
Absolutely. we'll cover this actually. We cover this in all three of our language courses, Chinese, Arabic and Russian. They're five half days in duration. And I would say the first day or even first two days is really focusing on the language, right? Now we don't teach languages in these courses, although I do with my enthusiasm with languages, I do hope it fires people up to maybe give languages a go. Right. My other passion.

But we really focus on the basics. How does one type in a language? What good translation tools are out there? How can we OCR information? How can we translate effectively? How can we double check the translations or triple check the translations which we have in order to find the keywords? And keywords are pretty much what is most important with these languages. I'll give you an example, Francis. If we, if you and I formed a...

a law enforcement task force and we'd have to research the illegal use of cannabis through Europe or in English. You and I would have a list of keywords within 10 seconds really easy, right? Be it for example, ganja, kush, et cetera, et cetera. And if you have to do something similar in a foreign language, then Google Translate isn't per se going to be your best friend there. AI might help.

or ask-int. Ask-int is ask intelligence, asking somebody who actually knows the keywords, right? Keywords play a very important part in our courses, right? Finding them, vetting them, because the more efforts you put in to find the right keywords in combination with the right search operates, for example, and a good analytical mindset, that is going to give you better results.

Francis Gorman (07:58.849)
That's actually, that's actually a really interesting aspect. So you're after saying something there that's after reframing this in my mind and it's, and it's keywords. It's the essentially the data entry point into the foreign language research topic that you want to go. And like you used, you know, cannabis, ganja, you know, all of the, all of the slang terms that you would have in the English language that you could leverage to go down different rabbit holes or, or, you know, pull at different threads of, of research.

How do you gather that for, say, Chinese or Russian? I don't know what Russian native speakers or what the different cultural aspects call certain things. How do you figure that out? How do you reverse engineer certain terms into a different language set?

Skip (08:28.928)
EAT UP!

Skip (08:48.631)
So great question. It's not easy, but it's also not too complicated if you make yourself a checklist. you can search for those yourselves. And I don't bash on Google Translate. I think it's a great tool. You can definitely check that and other tools out there. So that's doing the research yourself. And that's going to give you the formal translations usually. I definitely leverage AI asking it, give me a list of colloquial terms for whatever research topic you have in what language.

The other thing I would do, and this is something that we tend to forget, I make the same mistake, guilty as judged, is having a look online who has already posted lists concerning what you're looking at, right? The languages we cover, so for example, Arabic, Russian, and Chinese are languages which are spoken a lot throughout the world. Many people study those languages and actually make the effort to maybe research something, write something, and then post it online saying, hey,

In case somebody's interested, I've got a list of keywords about Chinese corporate or financial information. List of keywords, right? Now, of course, you'd have to vet all those keywords one by one. But again, there's nothing wrong with that. When I usually say that, people think, well, that's going to take some time, right? Vetting keywords can take anywhere from two, three, four, sometimes 10 minutes. And just to touch on that point, go a bit further.

It's very important to keyword combinations. Now, single keywords, those can be done quite quickly, Francis. But if we think about things like United Nations Security Council or the Arab League or any other combination of words, the way we say that in English is impressive going to be perfectly translated with translation tools which are readily available. So the more effort we put into those keywords and really vetting them, the better.

your results are going to come out once you start using them.

Francis Gorman (10:49.32)
And Skip, I have to ask a lot of the language sets that you're focusing on are in countries where the government are authoritarian. How do you make sure that the information that you are, or the data that you're deriving from the information is actually accurate and it hasn't been skewed to give a certain perspective on the world?

Skip (11:12.053)
You mean when doing open source intelligence research?

Francis Gorman (11:14.314)
When you're doing research. So for example, when DeepSeek came out, one of the large language models from China, it was really good in comparison to some of the models in Europe. But certain questions when you asked it had skewed misinformation. It was trained to say things that weren't factually accurate, but shone a different light on, let's say, the Chinese government orders. And you can understand why that would happen. So I suppose

when we think of Russia, China, so the Arabic states, the reality versus the facts may be slightly different depending on the messaging that has been put out there. So how do you differentiate kind of the clear stuff?

Skip (11:58.254)
That's a difficult question and it's a question we can actually run a bit because the information we get from the three regions you stated, the way we want to vet those results and double check those results, actually, regardless of which country we look at, we have to vet that and be very critical of the information that we get across double check sources.

is this result from this news outlet and then see what other people write about that. Again, that's going to take time, but that's important. What I do see is that in many cases news outlets are in a hurry and we're all in a hurry. I get it, things are different nowadays. We all want to get that information. We all want to get that information out. Journalists are actually the same. You would imagine they would have to spend a bit more time on

double checking sources, information, et cetera. What we do see across the board is that people go for a quick buck and just translate as fast as they can. And then, yeah, sometimes end up with wrong translations, which can have influence, right? But as they say, if it bleeds, it leads.

Francis Gorman (13:15.338)
Very good, if it bleeds, leads. must use that line. That's a good one to have. Skip, can I ask you, you spent 17 years in the Marines. Did you carry any lessons forward to translate into how you operate today?

Skip (13:29.005)
Definitely. I wish I would have had the tools available, the digital tools nowadays available to translate things. Before going to the Middle East for work, I started self-teaching myself Arabic in the end of the 1990s because I thought it might be... I had a knack for languages, so thought I could just pick one extra up and just study that language. So I didn't do it professionally. I studied in my own time. I'd carry around a book.

in a double Ziploc bag, whether I was in the jungles doing jungle training or up in the Arctic, I'd always have a book to practice or read Arabic. And then finally got deployed and I was able to use that Arabic a lot in the Middle East, which was, I learned more in three months or four months speaking it every day than having that book with me for four years all over the world. To your question,

So interacting with people, was one thing, but at some points I was also asked, people have started painting graffiti on our base or on walls close to our base. Can you give that a check? Can you see what that translates into? And at that time, the only thing I had was a dictionary, but it's quite impossible. A, it's very difficult to translate what's written by hand with a graffiti. And usually people don't really use the Queen's English when graffitiing something against a wall.

So that would be difficult. If I would have had the tools at Midas Pulse, which I have now, I would have just gone out, taken a picture, gone back inside, and then give that a check with tools which actually do translate quite accurately. I wouldn't go to Google Translate, but I'd go to to Debo Translate. The text weren't too positive, by the way. They weren't saying, yay, Crusaders, great that you're here. was a bit different, but there you go.

Francis Gorman (15:22.942)
I can imagine. I can imagine. What is your toolkit for research, What do you go to? What are your go-to tools? Are there any ones you can recommend out there?

Skip (15:32.055)
Definitely. So I guess what you're asking is what is my toolkit for languages specific?

Francis Gorman (15:38.176)
specifically correct.

Skip (15:39.712)
Yeah, I'd use all the language translation tools across the board, but then more specifically looking at a region, for example, Yandex Translate is very, very accurate for all Russian based or Cyrillic alphabets out there. If I would go to check out Chinese, I would go to Baidu Translate, adding that in the mix. And one of my absolute favorite ones out there, which has been so for quite some time covering many languages, including the ones we

we teach Arabic, Chinese and Russian is it's free. So people are going to like it because we like free stuff. It's called deep L translate D E P L translate. And I find that the, the accuracy is really, really good with that. I'll give you an example. Francis, the, my, my, my mother tongue is French and the French I learned back in 1990s was Swiss French slang, which is

very difficult to understand unless you've grown up there. And if I put that into Google Translate, it's just going to give me absolute gibberish. To my surprise, I put that into D-Bell Translate, and it got out fairly, fairly well. No, pretty good, actually. It nailed it. It's a great tool to use. Quick tip for anybody listening, I know that some people rely on Google Translate to send a letter or an email, sorry, to their counterparts all over the world.

Don't do that because people are going to know, yeah, this just sounds way too formal. If you're going to do that, pro tip, go ahead and use deep L and then your translation is going to sound way more natural. The second pro tip, if you do that, you want to keep your brownie points, delete the last sentence because it's going to say translated by deep L. You don't want to have that, right?

Francis Gorman (17:22.932)
That is a great tip, Skip. I'm sure there's plenty of people going to leverage that one into the future, you know, especially if there's any summer romances cracked up over the last couple of months. Skip, for other veterans that may be taking a transition into OSINT, have you got any advice for them? Did you find that transition seamless? seemed like you always had the knack for languages and, you know, it was more of a passion.

Skip (17:48.568)
military transitions are great. Transitions are great. They always work out fine. No, I'm kidding. It's a whole new world out there. Well, I find that, so I spent quite some years in reconnaissance units in the Marines. Now that stuff that you do outside in the bush or just outside, I found that many of those things actually translate fairly similarly into the digital realm, right? You're often alone doing your work.

You have to be aware of what's around you. So your security has to be top notch. You have to know what you're looking for. You have to know where to look for it, and then how to get that information and then get it safely back to where you come from. So you can use that as an analogy sometimes. Your second question, languages. If you got the chance to learn languages before or during your career in the military, that's going to be very beneficial.

It certainly helped me a lot when I was deployed abroad. I used French a lot during operations and exercises. spanish quite a bit in the Caribbean and South America and Central America during...

disaster relief operations, used Arabic as well, used some Chinese as well when I was deployed in Haiti when we had to work together with other nationalities. There's no age limit to learn a language, right? It is true that if you're lucky like me that you grew up in a place surrounded by languages, you're going to pick up on them very naturally and fast. It takes a lot more work when you're in

to learn languages, right? But if you've got the most important thing that you need to learn language is, not tools, not, it's not a budget, it's really that thing called motivation. There's really no limit to that. But I'd say it really works well. If you do want to learn it, learn a language, then having that motivation is absolutely key. doesn't matter what else, what tools you use. And they translate well into the the OSIN sector, I would say.

Skip (19:59.022)
Probably one of questions you want to ask me, is it easier to research if you do speak another language? The language obviously is yes, right? And what we do see is that many people think, I have to research in a foreign language. A, I'm not going to do it. Or B, I'm going to ask AI to do it. Or C, I might do it. I'll use Google Translate, et cetera. Or in another case, what they'll do if a company, a bank, for example, has specialists who actually are bilingual or speak another language.

That means that all too often folks dump their research on their desk because they assume they can't do it themselves. All That means that these specialists who actually do speak another language have to drop what they're doing to solve something which is actually quite, quite solvable if you don't speak a foreign language. If that makes sense, Francis.

Francis Gorman (20:49.184)
It does make sense. I think the attributes of someone that's good at this, I'm hearing patience, critical thinking. Is there anything else? there any of the key ones? And motivation, obviously.

Skip (21:00.685)
For OSINT in general, for OSINT, get, well, not only me, but my colleagues, the folks that were very generous with their time to show me the ropes in OSINT, it was a really great online community out there. They get the same question. One of the questions we get, Francis, is how do I start at OSINT? What should I do in OSINT? It sounds like, it sounds a bit like a big carrot hanging in front of them. What I always say is, well, first figure out

why it is you want to do OSINT, right? Try it out. See what you want to do because the other question we get is, how do I know everything in OSINT? What are the best tools out there? There are no best tools out there. It is impossible to know everything in OSINT. It's so vast. So master the basics. Try those out. If you think it's not a right fit for you, then you're correct. It's not going to be a right fit for you. If you like solving puzzles, if you like really going deep and

comparing information, having that analytical mindset, then yeah, OSINT definitely is something for you. And then what I would say once you mouse the basics is find something that you're passionate about. If you want to counter human trafficking, there's tons of companies out there that really specialize on that using OSINT. Or could be environmental protection, or could be news or anything. There's more than enough to go by.

Francis Gorman (22:25.588)
And okay, that's interesting. you've mentioned human trafficking and a number of things there. So when you think of OSINT, who are the biggest consumers of the open source intelligence? Where do you see it? I know in cybersecurity, threat intelligence, obviously a big consumer and, you know, looking for bad actors and different threats and vulnerabilities and trying to preempt what's going to happen from a security perspective is where I would see it from. But outside of that, who are the largest consumers of this type of research?

Skip (22:57.741)
I would say most entities or governments or corporations that want to analyze things happening in the world. The answer would be all of them. Of course, large chunk of what I think you can't really do any research without OSINT. If you're a law enforcement and you don't have an OSINT capability, you're going to be very hampered. Most departments in law enforcement really rely on OSINT and so do banks.

other financial institutions, think tanks, and so on and so forth.

If I would open a bakery, Francis, I would definitely rely on OSINT to figure out what are the best times to open my business, what kind of do people want, so you can use it across the board. It's important to know the difference between searching for something on Google and OSINT, of course. But I think you catch what I just said, right?

Francis Gorman (23:52.609)
Get your drift basically applicable everywhere. Perfect, Skip. am interested to talk a little bit about languages through movement. I know it's something that you've started up recently. Can you talk to me a little bit about the concept and where it came from and what it actually involves?

Skip (23:54.605)
Cool.

I so.

Skip (24:13.875)
Sure. All right. So usually at the beginning of the year, and this has been going on for forever since I was on LinkedIn, is in January, usually January 3rd or 4th or 5th. That's friends, also connections and even random people reach out to me on LinkedIn. I started with one or two every year and now it's roughly about 20, 25 people that send me messages saying,

The good question I like to hear is, Skip, I finally decide to learn this language. How do I go about it? That's a fun one. The sillier question I get is, Skip, I've decided to learn a language. Which one should I learn? That's a very silly language because there's tons of other languages that are out there. Now the thing is, I get fired up when I get these questions. And by the way, we all know that people, when they...

they take these new year's resolutions, right? They've had their last cup of whiskey on on the, New Year's Eve. That's the, that's when they decide this is going to be the year of the six pack. This is going to be the year that I'm never going to smoke again. I'm going to learn another language. That's it. so when you usually, people usually reach out, reach out in that period. And I love that. I mean, I get fired up. I drop anything I'm doing. I jump on a call and I hear what they want, why they want to learn a language. And I also usually ask, well,

what works for you best. And I end up sharing how I learn languages, works for me, but not for everyone. It took quite some time to always jump on those calls and then share that. And a friend of mine said, maybe you should open a channel where you share how you learn languages. then next time people ping you, can say, just want to take a look at how my tiny brain works. Check out the Instagram page and I explain how I learn languages there.

The way I learn languages is with several different techniques. use language shadowing, which is repeating what you hear while moving. I do a lot of movement while learning languages. So I really focus on audio and speaking, right? Because I found that that's what helped me most in my career. So shadowing is when you repeat a native speaker with MP3 files, for example, something I show in the videos I make.

Skip (26:35.957)
And here's the funny thing, right? I've put some science in there, backed by science, because I, without knowing this, for years I've been listening to these languages and speaking them while taking a walk, going on a run. And I found out that when you run, you do light exercises, right? could be high exercise and you speak to yourself listening to that. Apparently the front part of your brain gets a boost and then you start memorizing things better.

I figured out that when I do these hikes or runs on uneven terrain, I get to remember more of what I listened to. Did the research and found out that the section of the brain which regulates your balance is directly linked to the front part of your brain which helps you remember new things. So that's my technique of learning languages is by taking hikes, talking to myself.

Sometimes it looks a bit weird if people pass you. That's kind of what works. For language lettering, that's definitely how I encourage people to do that. can also, if you don't like running or walking, as long as you've got that movement or that physical activity going, could also just be bit of balance, just balancing yourself on a pipe in the garden. It sounds weird. And like I said, I always stress, this is what works for me. If you work better in a classroom environment, please do so. I like moving and that works for me.

shadowing, do language laddering where I learn a new language by using a former learned one, make vocabulary lists. And I wish I'd all into this new thing on Instagram and make new videos on that. it's a new skill. Actually, I wanted to save some time, Francis, by making that Instagram page telling people, hey, listen, just go to the Instagram page. I talk about it, how I do it there to save time. But then there's this new skill I have to learn about.

how to edit videos, et cetera. that sometimes takes longer than a 30 minute call, but it's really fun. I get fired up and especially when people reach out to me and use my methods and then ask for advice or say that it works. That's, it's really fun.

Francis Gorman (28:50.26)
It's also fascinating. I live in a small rural community, so I think when people see me running, they'll be shocked. But when they see me running and talking to myself, I'm probably going to get myself in bother. But I must I must check it out now and I'll get my wife to look it up on Instagram. I'm not on social media, so I'll get her to I'll get her to look it up now and we'll we'll start running around together, talking to ourselves, which, you know, happens naturally when you have kids. But we'll just add another layer to it and skip.

Skip (28:56.432)
Ha

Francis Gorman (29:17.952)
I do want to mention that you have a couple of free webinars coming up. Just want to tell me a little bit about Doors. I'm going to post the details into the episode when it goes live as well so people can check them out if they're interested in the Northend.

Skip (29:31.959)
Definitely. So our full courses are take two and a half days per course. That's a long time. And then what we did is me and my colleagues, Paolo and the tennis respectively teach the Arabic and the Russian course. I do the Chinese course. We thought it's a great opportunity to help people who are thinking about going into OSINT of showing them how to do OSINT with languages. So we're holding two free webinars of two hours this month, actually in September.

on the 22nd of September and the 26th of September, where in two hours we're going to explain the basic methodologies of tackling a foreign language. And then we'll take little dive into Chinese, bit of Arabic, a bit of Russian, also a bit of AI in there, how to leverage that kind of an introduction into enthusing folks to sign up for our full course, of course, but also as an alternative way for folks to get a little bit of an idea of what OSINT is and maybe...

take some tools from us and some methodologies. So people are more than welcome to reach out to me by o-syncing me and I'll gladly sign them up and have them participate.

Francis Gorman (30:40.672)
think it's great idea. Look, someone can dip their toe in and see if they like it or not before they before they decide to invest in a course down the road. So, no, it's definitely very, very admirable thing to do. Skip, it was was a real pleasure having you on. I enjoyed the conversation. I think of a lot of takeaways there that I'm going to have to reflect on this evening. But it was was great to have you on the show.

Skip (31:04.198)
Thanks so much. Also, thanks for the Entropiqe Outcast for everybody to have tuned in. Thanks so much for your time, Francis. I appreciate it.

Francis Gorman (31:12.459)
Thank you.