Tools and tips round up: Searching YouTube transcripts, monitoring webpages, and more
Plus: video talks about investigating the dark web and the OSINT mindset.
Welcome to another year of Digital Investigations! Thank you for reading and for sharing this newsletter with friends and colleagues. I appreciate your feedback and comments and intend to keep Digital investigations free.
Let’s kick off 2024 with a look at new (to me) tools and readings worth your time. I also added a new section to highlight videos worth watching. One pick is a video of Nico Dekens’s recent talk at Le Hack. He emphasized the importance of mindset, being systematic in your work, developing and testing research questions, and more. Maybe start the new year with a reminder of the primacy of mindset and workflow?
Tools
📍 Klaxon is a great tool that let’s you monitor a webpage for changes. Its main drawback was that it was more complicated to set up and use than Distill. No more! Meet Klaxon Cloud, a new version that’s easier to run.
📍 The Skip Tracer did a demo of a nice looking tool that let’s you collect and search YouTube transcripts for multiple videos from a channel.
📍 Cylect.io is an AI tool for OSINT “that integrates multiple databases and simplifies their search capability into an easily navigable interface.” Gary Ruddell tested it out in this quick video.
📍 Usersearch.ai is a paid people search tool.
📍 Lol Archiver launched a new paid email and phone number search tool.
📍 Xeuledoc is a Python tool that pulls metadata from a variety of Google files (Docs, Sheets, etc.).
📍 Zeeschuimer is a browser extension that collects data as you use social platforms including TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. “Its target audience is researchers who wish to systematically study content on social media platforms that resist conventional scraping or API-based data collection.”
📍 @cyb_detective shared two AI-based tools you can use to geolocate a photo.
📍 Email2WhatsApp is a tool from @dsonbaker that “enables the discovery of WhatsApp numbers from email addresses.”
📍 Have two images and want to see if they match? For example, maybe you’re trying to verify a building in a video. Try this image matching tool from Vincent Qin. Via
📍 Here’s a nice Chrome extension that collects Google search results and puts them into an Excel file. Via the great Boolean Strings site/newsletter.
📍 Osintessentials.com launched a redesigned site with an updated list of tools.
📍 The Global Investigative Journalism Network published a list of the 10 top investigative tools of 2023. It includes tools I’ve featured here as well as some classics and niche choices you may not be familiar with. Worth a look!
📍 Here’s a great start.me page dedicated to deepfake tools, including those used for detection.
📍 @soxoj created a tool you can use in the command line or in Maltego to find similar Telegram channels. (And check out his video below.)
Worth reading
📚 Legendary news researcher Margot Williams launched a newsletter called Desk Set Research. Sign up now! One of her posts looked at how to “Use U.S. records for cross-border investigations.”
📚 George Dyer wrote, “New Tools Dig Deeper Into Hard-to-Aggregate US Corporate Data.”
📚 Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert published an article in Rolling Stone that showed how they used cellphone data from Near to track people visiting Mar-a-Lago.
📚 Tomer Klein wrote, “SpiderFoot for Beginners: An Introduction to OSINT Automation.”
📚 Techjournalist wrote a guide to verifying leak data.
📚 After a hiatus, Derek Bowler is back writing Newsgathering, his newsletter “focused on visual forensics, verification, fact-checking & OSINT best practice.”
📚 Micah Lee wrote “How to authenticate large datasets.”
📚 Eric huber produced a really helpful glossary of terms used by fradusters on Telegram.
📚 Rae Baker wrote, “A Sea of Red: The New Reality of Maritime Shipping in an Era of Conflict.”
📚 Chris Osieck wrote, “How To Track Israeli Airstrikes in South Lebanon.”
📚 The Journalist’s Resource (which has a great newsletter!) published a tipsheet, “How to cover academic research fraud and errors: 4 big takeaways from our webinar.”
📚 Colleagues from ProPublica and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism published an investigation into the application of Community Notes on false Twitter content about the Israel-Hamas conflict. A crack team at Bloomberg did a similar investigation. Both are nice examples of methodology and the Bloomberg story has great visuals.
📚 The Verge has a story about “How the internet reshaped itself around Google’s search algorithms.” Great design and smart concept.
Worth Watching
I often come across great videos about investigative techniques. Here’s a new section to highlight videos that are worth your time.
📹 “Using the OSINT Mind State for Better Online Investigations” by Nico Dekens (aka @Dutch_OSINTGuy)
📹 OSINT Tools for diving deep Dark Web” by Apruv Singh Gautam
📹 “Hardcore OSINT: Reversing social media mechanisms” by Dmitry Danilov Soxoj
That’s it for this edition of Digital Investigations! Thanks for reading. You can find me on Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, and LinkedIn. I’m not very active on Twitter these days.
Wonderful content 🧐