- Data Mining and Collection of Information from open sources , i.e. the media (newspapers, radio, television, etc.), professional and academic records (papers, conferences, professional associations, etc.), and public data (government reports, demographics, hearings, speeches, etc.)
- Provision of info from hidden sources , e.g. the deep web which is the portion of world wide web content that is not indexed by standard search engines.
- Distillation of intel in order to boil down a huge volume of facts and figures into a concise and useful stream of info.
- Qualitative analysis of distilled information.
- Final Synthesis , hypothesis evaluation, predictions.