To understand how the Internet has become recognized within OSINT as an investigative tool, it's essential to explore the history of open source investigations prior to the Internet and to understand its transition into using the Internet as an investigative tool. OSINT began in the 1940s following Pearl Harbor. The initial investigations were very basic and investigators found names and addresses using phone directories. These methods and investigations prior to the Internet were difficult but they did demonstrate the effectiveness of OSINT and analysis before the Internet was introduced. With the introduction of the first version of the Internet in the 1990s and the second in 2004, OSINT took a different approach to conducting investigations and, as a result, transitioned online. OSINT was considered in many ways the result of changing human information relationships resulting from the growing dominance of the Internet in everyday life. It provides a framework to understanding human intelligence in the Internet age. As the Internet developed, it transformed the ways that intelligence was gathered and analyzed. A wealth of information and potential intelligence suddenly became available and created an array of new areas for intelligence analysts to cover. The Internet has opened new possibilities to access key information that offers a constant stream of intelligence. This has offered a new framework for reaching beyond the traditional boundaries of cultural intelligence. It became a new stage for investigators to collate and analyze intelligence using new forms of freely accessible information. As Cattell and Horn identify, it has changed the dynamic relationship between two factors of human intelligence, both crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence. The impact the Internet had on OSINT investigations can be seen in particular with the United Kingdom with a shift in the branding of OSINT to III investigations. This was also known as Internet Intelligence and Investigations which was the use of Internet resources to gather information, intelligence, and evidence. Conducting III has become an attractive method for law enforcement agencies for a number of reasons. Firstly, in comparison to officers working on the ground, manually searching for information offline, III has made the groundwork more effective. For example, using III law enforcement agencies can pick up a suspect from the airport after having posted online about being on holiday and in some occasions posting their flight and travel information also. III requires a lower amount of resources which has the potential to save large amounts of physical and financial costs for law enforcement agencies. The method can be used remotely and requires a small amount of training. The overall potential risk is relatively lower than other offline investigations. The rise in social media use has significantly increased the way that data is collected due to the rapid construction of user-generated content that is continuously updated to social media platforms. It also allows investigators to look for and make connections between users that are not immediately apparent or may seem, in some regards, as counter-intuitive. With this rise in user-generated content comes the questionability and reliability and accuracy of the data. As Allcott explained, information can often become vulgarized, meaning that any user could claim to be an expert online. The ability for users to freely upload content needs to be approached with caution by investigators and consider how potential influences such as political or social values may underline the content that is produced. As the Internet has become more prominent in everyday life and new social media platforms are emerging and dissolving at rapid speeds, it's more important than ever to understand the Internet as a key medium to supporting open source investigations.