A little late after being hungover from both food or alcohol for the last week and a half, we decided to make a list of our favorite investigations from the past year. All of the investigations below affected us or taught us a great deal. There are no doubt a few missing from this list […]
Russia Theft Watch: when corporate interests hijack the open-source investigative space
This post was written in August 2022. On the 26 July 2022, the Russian Theft Report dropped, claiming to ‘expose’ Russia’s looting of Ukrainian assets “like steel and grain” using “open-source intelligence tools”. The report was the work of the Initiative for the Study of Russian Piracy (ISRP) a self-described group of “former U.S. government […]
Infographic: Who is transporting Russian oil and gas?
After weeks of wrangling, European leaders last week reached agreement to ban 75% of Russian oil shipments into the EU. The sanctions target all seaborne oil shipments from Russia to European ports. Lots has been written about where Russian oil and gas is going, but I thought it might be interesting to take a look […]
How we used a Twitter bot to identify the companies shipping Russian oil to Europe
In this article, we explain how we were able to identify the companies behind the transport of Russian oil to European markets. Our aim was to identify the shipping companies facilitating the trade of Russian oil and gas and shed a light on the often opaque supply chains run by shipping companies.
Leonardo da Vinci would have been great at OSINT
Up until the beginning of the 16th Century, most maps of cities were drawn from a hillside view, also called a side-on or birds-eye perspective. They often lacked accuracy as buildings in the forefront would appear larger than equally sized buildings in the the distance. The surrounding landscape and prominent features were often exaggerated. Many […]
How to track Russian oil
On March 9th 2022, Greenpeace launched a Twitter bot called @RUTankerTracker. The bot tweets out every time a ship leaves a Russian port with oil or gas. Thanks to the bot, Greenpeace was able to confirm that 148 super tankers had left Russia since the start of the war. The shipping industry is deceptive and […]
Radar, the ‘new’ satellite imagery
Since Russia began the invasion of Ukraine last week, the Twitter OSINT community, open-source investigators, and analysts, have been in full gear and many working around the clock. Volunteers and professionals (often both simultaneously) are verifying bits of information, tracking casualties and lost equipment, and geolocation airstrikes. I have participated in this Twitterverse myself but […]
Ocelli Project: the power of transparent methodologies
The Ocelli Project started as a response to the prosecution of the Rohingya people in Myanmar. In December 2021, Ocelli Project published their findings documenting 38,000 buildings that had been destroyed whereas 24,000 of these had clear burn marks. They did most, if not all of this, remotely and volunteer-run. It is one of the […]
Geolocation: finding a prison in Tibet with Google Earth
Starting a project to map out prison locations in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) is quite a daunting task. Considering there is little to no information and such work has not been done in the region previously. The Tibet Research Project is an attempt to map all prison locations in Tibet, similar to the work […]
Data and storytelling: telling the human story
For those who do not have a statistics or tech background, data-driven stories can be difficult to tell. Luckily for us, this piece by Fatima Hudoon breaks down her experience of working with data and how to use it for storytelling, by using her investigation into private mental hospitals in Brighton (UK) as an example. The piece […]
The trillion-dollar gambling game
In this piece, Philippe Auclair dismantles the structure of foreign gambling investments in the United Kingdom’s Premier League. Unknown Asian gambling companies (predominantly from China and operating out of the Philippines) have in recent years become a dominant sponsor of football teams across Europe and particularly in the UK. They achieved this through proxy’s established […]
Visual storytelling: Sputnik for Sale
Sputnik for Sale is about a Dubai sheikh, a Norwegian businessman previously charged with money laundering, and Steven Seagal, together they have a plan to sell overpriced Russian made vaccines to countries with otherwise little access to vaccines elsewhere. The story by VG, a Norwegian newspaper, is one that highlights the issue of Covid vaccine […]
Pandora Papers: the importance of offshore leaks for investigations
On October 3rd, 2021, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) announced that a collaborative effort between 600 journalists in 117 countries had spent two years deciphering nearly 12 million documents detailing offshore accounts, property, the relationships between people, companies, public figures, organisations – and much, much more. Called the Pandora papers, the leak is […]
Geolocation: AI in Open Source Investigations
Much has been made about Artificial Intelligence (AI) being used to spread disinformation. The latest threat (I use threat lightly here) to open-source investigations is AI created maps and satellite imagery (or deep fakes). However, little has been made about efforts to use AI for citizen investigations, at least on a level accessible to all […]
