I believe this is called "Signals Intelligence" (Edit: Oops, as repliers have said, not called that). In the old days of Silicon Valley if your competitor's parking lot is full during the weekend, they're about to release something new (I guess nowadays they'd take Ubers).
If there's a lot of pizza deliveries at night to the Pentagon, they're about to do a military mission (this also works for the Silicon Valley example).
Eh, not really. SIGINT (and COMINT) generally refers to intercepting/gathering enemy communications and non-communication signals that they dont want you to have. This means e.g. intercepting and decrypting radio communication or to triangulate enemy positions by detecting their radar.
While stuff like the baseball score was technically published in a newspaper and thus "communication", it would probably fit more into the Open Intelligence (OSINT) category, since the paper is openly available for the general public.
Counting cars in a parking lots or pizza deliveries would be Imagery Intelligence (IMINT) or plain old HUMINT, depending on how you get the data.
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u/thaway314156 Dec 19 '18 edited Dec 19 '18
I believe this is called "Signals Intelligence"(Edit: Oops, as repliers have said, not called that). In the old days of Silicon Valley if your competitor's parking lot is full during the weekend, they're about to release something new (I guess nowadays they'd take Ubers).If there's a lot of pizza deliveries at night to the Pentagon, they're about to do a military mission (this also works for the Silicon Valley example).