What Makes an Intelligence Product? | Raine Luntta
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Created<br>July 14, 2026
#Design<br>#Data<br>#AI<br>#Geopolitics
When I built Varjolaivasto.fi (a shadow fleet radar for the Baltic Sea) 2 months ago, I called it a demo built on open data, not an intelligence product. It combines public AIS position signals broadcast by ships with sanctions data and shows sanctioned tankers moving through the Baltic, often uncomfortably close to European critical infrastructure.
Multiple people asked me whether I had shown it to any of the Finnish authorities, like Finnish Border Guard, Finnish Defence Forces or our intelligence agency. And if I had, what did they think of it?
Well, I didn't and I haven't. Varjolaivasto was a demo born in 6 hours of work. I hadn't built it with any users or authorities in mind except for myself, and I really had no insider knowledge to fall back on. I haven't worked in intelligence, and I haven't designed or built intelligence products before. I've done and written a lot of research and analysis and used them to build plenty of products and services, including tools for people working in mission and safety-critical environments, but this is a totally different field.
Those questions still got me interested in the subject. What would make Varjolaivasto an intelligence product? How could AI integrate to an intelligence product?
In this note I'll go through some of the stuff I found interesting during this learning journey and introduce a prototype of what Varjolaivasto as an intelligence product could look like.
Reading the public rulebook
Intelligence is an awkward subject to research from the outside. A lot of the interesting details are, quite reasonably, not public. Different countries and organizations also do things differently and public doctrine (as at least UK calls it) can tell me something that is totally different from the reality of the day-to-day work.
Still, I was pleased to learn that there is much more public material than I expected. I ended up reading or scrolling through the Finnish Military Intelligence Review 2025, US directives on analytic standards (ICD 203), sourcing (ICD 206) and product utility (ICD 208), the newer standard on citing public and commercial information, open-source intelligence (OSINT) and AI-assisted services (ICS 206-01), and the UK's joint intelligence doctrine and wonderfully plain-language guide to uncertainty.
The US and UK standards are not Finnish product requirements, and I'm definitely not claiming they reveal how Finnish intelligence organizations work. I used them as public clues and design material since I couldn't find similar documents from Finnish authorities.
I wanted to focus on analytic products. So not just reporting where a vessel is, but helping someone judge what it might be doing. That's kinda where the harder rules begin in these documents.
The first interesting piece of knowledge was that the term "product" means totally different thing to me and the intelligence community. Intelligence Community handle intelligence products as these tangible products, where it's basically the output (report, assessment, publication etc.) of intelligence work and not an intangible product, for example digital service or system, like it would be in my vocabulary. Another useful clue was that the format doesn't define the product. ICD 206 explicitly includes assessments, studies, databases, graphics and interactive publications in its definition of a "disseminated analytic product". But it also says they are created by an intelligence-community analytic component. So, the analytic component could potentially be part of a digital support system that outputs intelligence products.
The way I understand this is that, in the case of Varjolaivasto, a map-based UI is not disqualified just because it isn't a PDF. Open information isn't disqualified either. Under the US standard, publicly or commercially available information becomes OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) when it addresses a specific intelligence priority, requirement or gap.
Under this definition, I also interpret that open data can become intelligence. It just doesn't become intelligence by putting it on a dark map and making it look terribly official.
Start with the requirements, not a dataset
Varjolaivasto started with data I could easily get. An analytic product normally starts somewhere else. There's probably a customer or a user somewhere with requirements, priorities, information gaps or customer needs.
This important detail appears in multiple documents. ICD 208 (Maximizing the Utility of Analytic Products) starts with knowing the customer. What they need, when they need it, what they are allowed to receive, and how the product will reach them. The UK doctrine starts the intelligence cycle with direction and requirements, then moves through collection and processing to dissemination. As a designer, I can't but love the customer- and user-centricity....