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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Understanding Bias in Open Source Investigation
Bias in research, journalism, investigation, means several things. However, more often than not, when investigating using open source techniques we are often subjected to specific types of bias. Investigators are often using specific tools, methods, and language, that help form our investigations and the type of information and/or evidence we interact with. Generally, we can […]
Verification Handbook
Verification is one of the single most important steps in an investigation. There will be other useful sources for verification added here, but a useful one to start off with is the Verification Handbook. Free online, this handbook provides you with the very basics of verification. Recommended to anyone just getting started or in a […]
Digital Witness
Digital Witness: Using Open Source Information for Human Rights Investigation, Documentation, and Accountability is a must-read for anyone new or old to the field of OSINT and human rights investigations. The book goes into great detail about a number of various tools and methodologies. It teaches you about the importance of verification and archiving. Written […]
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 […]
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 […]
