Tools and tips round up: A new way to use OpenStreetMap and tools for Wikipedia, Telegram and more
Plus: guides for investigative journalism and for using OSINT for Bluesky.
This is the final edition of Digital Investigations for 2024. Thank you for reading and for subscribing. If you have a moment, you can vote for me in OSINT Team’s poll for the best OSINT newsletter of 2024. See you in the New Year!
Tools
📍 SPOT is a geospatial search tool for OpenStreetMap from DW Innovation. It’s similar to Bellingcat’s OpenStreetMap search tool, except it allows you to submit a natural language prompt for a specific location type. For example, “Show me all shopping malls near a traffic light with a park within 300 meters in Nairobi.” Learn more in SPOT’s tutorial section.
📍
highlighted a tool called Recruitryte that offers a couple of interesting free options. (You need to register.) It has a free tool that generates keywords and boolean strings to help you search for relevant profiles across LinkedIn, GitHub, and elsewhere. That’s useful for finding potential sources. Recruitryte also gives you 50 free credits to extract emails from LinkedIn profiles.📍 She also shared IntellGPT, a “ChatGPT agent that's set to help in intelligence analysis with data science approaches and OSINT.”
📍 And she shared Robofinder, a Python script “to analyze the history of robots.txt. It analyzes all versions of the file from the wayback machine and displays a list of all found directories.”
📍 ProFaceFinder is a paid facial recognition tool.
📍 Maigret is a username search tool in Python from Soxoj. You can also use the tool’s Telegram bot if you don’t want to install it.
📍 Instantusername.com is another username search tool. (via Jesse William McGraw)
📍 Benjamin Strick’s OSINT Advent Series has shared a new tool/technique per day in December. View all them in the Shorts section of his YouTube channel.
📍 Hiya is a Chrome extension that can assist with deepfake voice detection.
📍 Hawker is an “OSINT tool in python to find information about an email or phone number and get information about a URL then get information about an IP address.”
📍 Tosint is “a tool designed to extract valuable information from Telegram bots and channels.” (via Binni Shah)
📍 XTools offers a variety of tools for analyzing user and page behavior on Wikipedia.
Courses/events worth attending
🖥️ The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas is offering an online course, “New Digital Investigative Techniques to Supercharge Your Reporting.” Attendees will learn “strategies for finding people and information, get introduced to mapping tools and approaches to geolocating images and videos, try out some of the latest tools for tracking the digital footprint of people and companies, and get a no-code introduction to using AI in your reporting.” I’m helping teach it and you can register here.
🎤 The Layer8 conference is returning to in-person in 2025. It will be held June 14 in Boston. Registration is open and the call for proposals launches on January 1.
Worth reading
📚 The Global Investigative Journalism Network published “Guide: Introduction to Investigative Journalism.” This is a great collection of articles filled with advice and approaches for doing investigative journalism. It includes a solid chapter dedicated to OSINT and verification.
📚 Rae Baker wrote, “Stop Playing Catch-Up: How an AI Mindset Can Streamline Your Intelligence Analysis”
📚 Mike Reilly of Journalists’ Toolbox published, “Notes from Launching an AI Journalism College Course in 2024”
📚 Rowan Philp wrote, “GIJN’s Top Investigative Tools of 2024”
📚 Derek Bowler wrote, “Digital Hygiene: A Guide to Protecting Yourself Online - Part 1”
📚 Jemma Ward wrote, “Blueprint for Bluesky: An OSINT Guide.” (via Ritu Gill/The OSINT Roundup)
📚 The Centre for Information Resilience wrote, “A day in the life of an investigator: Inside the world of open source at CIR”
📚 Michael Spencer and Jeremy Caplan wrote, “Your AI Assistant Kit: 12 Practical Tools by Wonder Tools 😲”
That’s it for this edition of Digital Investigations! Thanks for reading. You can find me on Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, and LinkedIn.
thx, very interesting. The ProFaceFinder tool looks as if it had not really been updated in a while, and wants you to pay before one is clear that it offers any results -- has anyone confirmed whether it really works (and is legit)?
UPDATE -- tried it, it's about $2.50 a search. It was OK. I did not turn up anything I was really interested in, and it did not find things I knew were out there. But can be worth an extra check.