States can know the truth, but can’t show it | Kate Millar
Kate Millar is an intelligence and communications specialist working across conflict and humanitarian contexts, with a focus on building OSINT capability inside institutions. In The Intelligence Spotlight, she frames today’s OSINT boom less as a tech story and more as a symptom of a widening accountability crisis in modern conflict.
The conversation starts in the “messy middle” of warfare: grey zone campaigning, activity that sits between peace and war and is designed to achieve strategic objectives while staying below the legal threshold of armed conflict. Kate lays out how this space is fuelled by coercive, destabilising tactics, from cyber operations and disinformation to economic pressure, all engineered to avoid direct military confrontation while still shifting realities on the ground.
From there, the episode turns to attribution, and why the law struggles to keep pace. Kate explains the control tests used to attribute actions to states, and how grey zone actors deliberately exploit those thresholds to preserve plausible deniability. Proxies, deniable forces, and cyber obfuscation (routing through multiple compromised servers across jurisdictions) make responsibility difficult to prove publicly, even when private confidence exists. The outcome is an information vacuum: traditional intelligence may identify ties, but much of the evidential basis remains classified and unusable for public legal accountability.
That vacuum, she argues, is why OSINT surged in the civilian and NGO sphere after 2014, with the MH17 downing and the wider realisation that institutions were failing to deliver consequences. OSINT became a form of civilian-led fact-finding, building publicly verifiable attribution chains intended to support legal proceedings, sanctions, and international pressure.
But the “so what?” problem remains. Kate describes a mismatch between the volume of open-source documentation and what courts treat as valid evidence, alongside a legal system she characterises as outdated relative to modern technology. She warns too that OSINT aesthetics can be weaponised, where screenshots and tool outputs get recycled into disinformation, making standards and professionalisation essential.
A scenario-based segment makes it practical: a hospital strike, competing videos, and pressure for a statement within four hours. Her instinct is restraint, verify first, geolocate imagery, assess munitions and context, and avoid confident attribution without a minimum evidentiary package. Even then, she notes, proving intent can be easier than meeting the legal bar for attributing state responsibility and securing prosecutions.
She closes with three non-technical habits for anyone entering the field: stay curious, be tenacious, and stay grounded by knowing why you are doing the work.
