Glossary term
OPSEC (operational security)
Definition
The discipline of protecting an investigator's identity, devices, communications, and casework from adversary observation: anonymity and pseudonymity, secure communications, browser and device hygiene, and digital footprint management. Poor OPSEC exposes the investigator and can compromise the admissibility of evidence.
In practice
OPSEC is the inverse of a digital footprint: instead of mapping a subject's traces, the investigator minimises and controls their own. The goal is to research without the act of researching becoming evidence itself.
Most OPSEC failures are boring rather than dramatic — a persona and a real account logged in from the same session, a reused username, a posting pattern that leaks a timezone. The mundane mistakes are the ones that burn cases.
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