This week we open a new series on using Claude for OSINT work. Each instalment takes one capability and builds something you can use the same day.

We start with skills. A skill lets Claude learn a process once and repeat it exactly, every time, for anyone on the team. We explain what skills are, show where to create one, and build a working example you can download and add to your own library.

And of course, we share the latest tradecraft tips and industry news from last week.

Let’s get started.

In case you missed last week…

OSINT Tradecraft Tips & Industry News

Everything you need to know from the past seven days.

• Google Earth Pro desktop will no longer be available for download after June 2027 | read more

• A free i2 Analyst Notebook certification test is available for those with access to the software, alongside an optional training webinar series to help prepare (note: this is not an endorsement, and we have not been paid to promote it) | find out more

• Steve Hedden shared a free resource list on LinkedIn covering 212 knowledge graph tools across 10 categories and 2,012 ontologies, vocabularies, and graphs | explore here

• Open source investigations show up in U.S. Justice Department court filings: cybercrime cases like the criminal complaint against alleged hacker Peter Stokes lay out the digital breadcrumbs investigators used, and Ben H. flags these case studies on LinkedIn as a goldmine for learning online investigative techniques | read more

• French journalist Jean-Marc Manach has identified more than 15,000 AI-generated news sites in French alone (plus thousands more across other languages), tracing how they exploit Google Discover, plagiarize real journalism, and reach up to 40% of French internet users each month, while sharing the metadata-based methods he uses to detect them and a free browser extension his outlet Next.ink built to flag such sites to readers | find out more

• Wired reports that Instagram users with public accounts must now opt out to prevent Meta's Muse Image model from using their photos to generate AI images | read the story

• Nico Dekens outlines "evidence poisoning" — synthetic content, fake identities, manufactured consensus, false context, and manipulated AI visibility polluting the open web — and offers a SOURCE framework plus a source-reliability grading model to help OSINT practitioners verify claims before treating them as evidence | read here

How to Turn Your OSINT Process Into a Claude Skill

Claude can now learn a process once and repeat it exactly, every time, for anyone on the team. A skill is a folder of instructions Claude loads automatically when a task calls for it, so nobody has to re-explain the steps in every new chat. For OSINT teams that run on repeatable procedures, from going through standard checklists to leadership briefings, this changes how tradecraft moves out of one analyst’s head and into something the whole team runs the same way. This week we introduce Claude skills, what they are, and build a working example from scratch.

Read more

This week we step back from tradecraft to ask a bigger question. What should the industry expect from an OSINT professional?

A recent development has pushed the topic forward, and it opens a series we will build on in the future. We make the case for a professional standard, explain why evidence must come first, and invite you to shape the discussion.

And of course, we share the latest tradecraft tips and industry news from last week.

In case you missed last week…

Assessing Applicants

Try our assessment platform as a design partner for free. Create public or private CTFs and timed take-home exams. Build realistic scenarios with us, or run your own tests. Talk only to candidates who pass. Skip cover letters and CVs. For more info and a demo, get in touch via contact@osint-jobs.com

OSINT Tradecraft Tips & Industry News

Everything you need to know from the past seven days.

• The Kit teaches investigative techniques and tools to people and communities who want to start their own investigations | explore The Kit

• ecoi.net focuses on country of origin information for asylum cases and gives fast access to sources on political structures, institutions, and conditions across countries. OSINT analysts working in foreign countries can use these sources to identify reliable local information | access here

• If you struggle to find Google Maps Street View coverage, try Mapillary with over 3 billion street-level images | explore here | access the map

• Emmanuelle Welch maintains an ongoing collation of dating and hook-up sites and apps to help investigators use them in OSINT investigations | explore here

• GitHub user rawfilejson published an open source repo with 1,100+ tools, websites, and bots across 50+ categories | read X post | access repository

• WhatsApp announced usernames. WhatsApp will roll out usernames gradually over the next few months. The feature might not reach you yet. You can reserve your username now | read more

• Gartner recognized BLACKBIRD.AI as a leader in the market for Narrative Intelligence as of June 2026 | read more

Why the OSINT Industry Needs a Professional Standard

One title covers a dozen different roles. One role hides behind a dozen titles. Employers struggle to describe what they need, and candidates struggle to signal what they offer.

What should an OSINT standard look like, and who defines it? This piece makes the case for a standard built on evidence, and explains why one size will never fit all. The full argument, and the development behind it, sits below.

Read more

This week we take a practical look at Snapchat as a collection surface, covering what investigators can access without an account and where the limits are. Alongside that, we share the latest tradecraft tips and industry news from the past 7 days.

In case you missed last week…

OSINT Tradecraft Tips & Industry News

Everything you need to know from the past seven days.

• A new YouTube tutorial by Bendobrown explains how to track two sanctioned Iranian vessels in the Strait of Hormuz and identify their owners using free tools | watch now

• Google Trends now lets users compare a trend’s change against previous periods with new chips showing percentage changes and historical comparison lines | read more | try it now

• A GIJN masterclass in which Der Spiegel's Christo Buschek explains why journalists should treat "AI" as a marketing term, recognise that technology is not neutral, and remember that a prompt is not a methodology | watch here

• Argelius Labs publishes a bilingual playbook for China-focused OSINT. Baidu, Chinese-language query pivots, and the official portals that index records Western researchers routinely miss | explore here

• Bellingcat tested a machine learning model to rank Telegram posts for likely civilian harm and used it to help process over 2,500 incidents collected after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine | read more

• OpenOSINT is a new open source investigation engine that runs tools in the browser using your own API keys while keeping data private, according to the author. We haven't tested it, so the usual caveats apply | more on LinkedIn | access demo

• MW Metadata pulls details about a single YouTube video and its uploader, a playlist and its creator, or a channel | try now

• Isabelle Bale introduces the “wave and wall” model to address cognitive overload from AI-generated content, algorithmic personalisation, and identity-led information processing | access Academic article (paid)

• Starting July 8, Anthropic will require Claude users to provide a government-issued photo ID, a live selfie, and a facial geometry scan processed by Persona Identities, which retains biometric and identification data for up to three years | read more

How to Collect From Snapchat Without Logging In

Investigators may encounter leads on platforms they cannot access. The reasons vary: they may never have created an account, or policy may prohibit them from doing so altogether.

Snapchat, however, surfaces more than one would expect without a login. This guide covers the main methods that work without an account. Premium subscribers get the full breakdown below.

Read more

A few of you have asked us which OSINT training to take. We have thought about it, and we have decided not to name any specific providers. Staying editorially independent matters more to us than selling ad space, and we would rather give you the tools to choose for yourself.

So we built something we hope is more useful. This week’s issue gives you three of them: a checklist to vet any provider, an email template to send before you book, and a one-page business case for procurement. All of it draws on our own experience teaching across the public and private sector.

Here is the thing to keep in mind. The OSINT industry is not regulated, and anyone can offer training. That openness is a strength, but it does mean quality can vary, and we have heard from people who paid a lot and came away with generic content. This framework is here to help you choose well.

And as always, you will find the latest tips further down the issue.

Missed last week?

OSINT Tradecraft Tips & Industry News

Everything you need to know from the past seven days.

• How to automate common CTI workflows: a new Feedly guide walks one inbound threat report through the full process, from indicator extraction and ATT&CK mapping to ticketing and a leadership update, and shows how to automate each stage with ready-to-adapt prompts, skills, and low-code workflows | read here

• BBC Eye built Haystack, a multi-agent AI system, to help OSINT specialists, reporters, and computational journalists sift through 10,000 social media posts | read more

• A free AI prompt library brings geospatial tasks into QGIS through the AI Edit plugin, processing satellite imagery, enhancing images, visualising developments, and generating map renders | read more | access the plugin

• The author built OpenOSINT, an open source MCP-native OSINT toolkit that agents can run autonomously with nine included intelligence tools and CLI support | access GitHub | read LinkedIn post

• This tweet lists ten open-source GitHub repositories for free web crawling, browser automation, mobile data extraction, and anti-detection capabilities | read more

• Stephen Adams raises questions about whether the UK's under-16 social media ban and its age assurance checks could let platforms link or restrict the covert research accounts OSINT investigators rely on | see his LinkedIn post

• EFF's Tori Noble warns that proposed IETF standards, including the AI Preferences and Web Bot Auth working groups, would let websites block or charge for automated crawling, threatening the open tools used for journalism, research, and archiving | read here

How to Choose an OSINT Training Provider

Credit where it is due

Before the checklist, a word on the providers who get this right. The OSINT community owes a great deal to the people who dedicate their time to teaching others, both free and paid. They built much of what this field is. Their courses, workshops, blogs, livestreams, video tutorials, write-ups and more bring new practitioners in and sharpen the rest of us. This article is not a knock on them. It is a way to help you find them.

Read more

Welcome to this week's issue. To everyone who has just joined, and to those who have read along for years. This is a space for people who do this work, written one practitioner to another.

This week is a practical one. Situational awareness around a live event is one of the most useful things open source intelligence delivers, and one of the easiest to overspend on. So we show how to do it with free, public tools alone, worked through a single example: spotting an unannounced protest around the G7 at Évian before it happens. You get the method, a collection plan to copy, and the tips we rely on in the field.

You will also find this week’s digest: the latest tools, industry news, and tips from across the community. Nothing older than a week.

We also have exciting news. This issue lands alongside a launch: our OSINT Jobs Assessment Platform is now live at https://assessment.osint-jobs.com

It puts you against CTF-style scenarios drawn from the same field of work and under time pressure. Our first CTF is up and running for you to try. You get instant feedback and see how and where you performed. Try it now and get started.

Missed last week?

Introducing Our Assessment Platform

We are soft launching the OSINT Jobs Assessment Platform. One CTF is live now, and we want you to break it.

OSINT is a capability, not a line on a CV. A list of tools tells a hiring manager nothing about whether you can scope a problem, collect against it, verify what you find, and report it cleanly. The OSINT Jobs Assessment Platform measures the work itself.

The platform is built around realistic case studies, not trivia. Each assessment opens with a scenario brief: who you are, what you have been asked to find, and the constraints you are working under. You investigate as you would on a live task, then submit findings against a set of challenges that test collection, verification, and analytical reasoning. You are scored on what you produce, not on how many obscure tools you can name.

Our first CTF Fault Lines is live now. It runs entirely in the browser, and it is always free for candidates. Sign up, work the case, receive instant feedback on how you performed, and let us know where it holds up and where it does not.

This is a soft launch with our community, so your feedback shapes what comes next. We want to know if the scenario felt real, if the scoring was fair, and what we missed.

Try the live CTF and send us your feedback: contact@osint-jobs.com

OSINT Tradecraft Tips & Industry News

Everything you need to know from the past seven days.

• OSINTracker is a free, open-source tool that lets you visualise and run investigations in your browser. The OSINTracker user guide, now available in English and French, explains how to use it for browser-based open-source investigations | read here | access the tool

• Stephen Abbott Pugh has launched BODS stream, a free open-source tool that turns the UK's live Companies House beneficial ownership feed into standardised BODS statements in real time, letting investigators watch owners appear, change, and cease with built-in structural risk signals such as FATF-list links, trusts, nominees, and sanctions flags | read his blog post

• Nico Dekens a.k.a. DutchOSINTGuy generated a fake Amsterdam street with ChatGPT, then watched a fresh AI session confidently geolocate it to a real address, demonstrating why OSINT practitioners must treat visual plausibility as the start of verification rather than proof | read here

• Roberto Del Prete announced on LinkedIn that ESA Φ-lab has open-sourced sarpyx, a Python toolkit for advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar processing that integrates with ESA SNAP | read the post

• The upcoming Apple Maps Flyover upgrade in iOS 27 hints that Apple has switched from photogrammetry to Gaussian Splatting, a shift that could give OSINT practitioners more detailed 3D city models for geolocation and verification work| find out more

• Mullvad VPN reports that a UK spyware proposal would require government spyware on every mobile device to monitor, block, and control content in real time, removing user control and handing full device authority to the government and its proxies | find out more

• Signal has issued a statement opposing the UK government's demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned for presumed nudity through a combination of age verification and content scanning, arguing the proposal will not safeguard children and endangers everyone | official statement

• The US government has ordered the suspension of all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national | read the full statement

How to Build a Free Event Monitoring Dashboard for Situational Awareness

Every event opens a window of elevated risk. A festival, a summit, a match, a protest: each draws a crowd, a timeline, and people who want something from it. This post shows how to build a working monitoring picture for one using free tools alone, then watch through it.

Read more

This week, we cover Telegram, specifically how to access channels without an account, a phone number or the app. The content is already on the open web. You just need to know where and how to look.

Plus, the latest tradecraft tips and industry news from last week. As always, nothing is older than a week.

Missed last week?

As ususal, here is last week's tradecraft and industry news roundup:

OSINT Tradecraft Tips & Industry News

Everything you need to know from the past seven days.

• Author Snooptsz published a 46 page Snapchat-focused open source research manual, updated on 2 June 2026 and shared via LinkedIn | explore here

• Eitan Livne shared a practical update on Tinder OSINT techniques, noting that username lookups remain possible but rarely useful, and GPS spoofing has become far less reliable | read more

• The Cognitive Warfare Literature Database (CWDB) launched as an open and collaborative resource to help users access and contribute literature on cognitive warfare and related topics | access archive | read announcement

• Christian H. shares OpenOceanWatch, a tool combining satellite data, AI, and open maritime databases to identify vessels that lack a matching AIS signal | access demo | read announcement

• Mullvad VPN argues that global age verification laws, framed as child protection, function as identity verification infrastructure that enables state surveillance, censorship, and the erosion of anonymous speech online | read more

• Peptide companies spam the biohackers subreddit to manipulate ChatGPT and Google using AI-engine optimization, 404 Media reports | find out more

• On LinkedIn, Chen Assayag Kedem outlines ten developments that reshaped web scraping between June 2025 and today | read more

• This German-language blog post may interest those hiring in the OSINT space: HR managers can conduct background checks during recruitment, provided they know and follow GDPR requirements | read more

Accessing Telegram Without An Account

You do not need an account, a phone number, or the app to access Telegram channels. The content sits on the open web, search engines already index it, and you can pull the full history to disk without ever appearing as a subscriber.

The full issue gives you the exact steps: the preview URL and how to page through an entire channel archive, how to search inside a channel from the browser with no account, what a public group actually exposes to a non-member, and the operational security caveat that still applies when no account is involved.

Read more

This week we look at what Google’s biggest search overhaul in over 25 years means for OSINT practitioners. AI Mode as the default. Background agents for additional support. Search operators are not dead (yet), but the interface it was built for is changing.

We break down some of the announcements from Google I/O 2026 and look at what the shift from keywords to agents means for the skills the field will need.

Plus, the latest tradecraft tips and industry news from last week.

Missed last week?

Before we get into it, here is last week's tradecraft and industry news roundup:

OSINT Tradecraft Tips & Industry News

Everything you need to know from the past seven days.

• Web scraping is an important capability for most OSINT practitioners, but the legal and ethical side carries as much weight as the technical execution. For a thorough breakdown of licensing obligations, PII handling, infrastructure impact, and responsible collection practices, we highly recommend this blog post by The Web Scraping Club on How to Scrape Open-Source Datasets Ethically | read here

• Trace Labs released the OSINT VM, which now includes new tools and documentation updates, and offers multiple download options | explore here

• Benjamin Strick's latest tutorial, part 29 of the OSINT At Home series, shows how investigators use Strava data to expose facilities, patterns, and home addresses that were never meant to be public, then covers five settings to lock down your own account | watch here

• LinkedIn user Paolo Walcher shared newsmap.cc, a visual, geographic news monitoring tool that helps analysts cut through information noise during fast-moving events | explore the tool | read his post

• Google announced a significant overhaul of Search at I/O 2026, integrating Gemini 3.5 Flash, an AI-powered search box, background information agents, agentic coding capabilities, and expanded personal intelligence features across nearly 200 countries | read here

From Dorking to Agents: How Google's Biggest Search Overhaul Changes OSINT Practice

At Google I/O 2026, Google announced the biggest changes to Search in over 25 years. For years, the practitioner controlled the search. You wrote the query. You specified the file type. Operators like site:, filetype:, and intitle: gave you precision. You knew exactly what you asked, could record it, repeat it, and hand it to someone else.

That model is changing. The new search box interprets your intent and rewrites the question before it searches. Agents run in the background and return summaries. You read the output.

The field has spent years teaching Google dorking as a core skill. The interface it was built for is changing. The question now is what the practitioner needs in the next version of this work.

Read more

This week we walk through the techniques we use to find public WhatsApp and Telegram groups in the open, for narrative intelligence work, extremist monitoring, and any investigation where the analyst has to be inside the room before any content is visible.

Plus, the latest tradecraft tips and industry news from last week.

Missed last week?

Before we get into it, here is last week's tradecraft and industry news roundup:

OSINT Tradecraft Tips & Industry News

Everything you need to know from the past seven days.

• GIJN’s latest guide walks you through QGIS, from the basics to advanced data analysis, with practical applications drawn from investigative work on crime hot spots, environmental destruction, demographic patterns, and war crimes | read here

• Matthieu F. has developed a French-language tool to document and compare influence operations analysed from open sources, consisting of two standalone HTML tools usable offline: a structured input form based on the Diamond Model, DISARM Framework, and DIMA, and a viewer to visualise multiple operations simultaneously on an interactive timeline | read LinkedIn post | access GitHub

• New updates released for the free browser-based tool Osintracker | explore here | test here

• Google Labs has introduced three new exploratory tools for AI-powered scientific discovery:

  • Literature Insights (built with NotebookLM) for literature search and artifact generation

  • Hypothesis Generation (built with Co-Scientist) for multi-agent research ideation

  • Computational Discovery (built with AlphaEvolve and ERA) for generating and scoring code variations against optimisation metrics | explore here

• TechCrunch reports that Google has unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search at its I/O conference, with a reimagined search box that drops users into interactive AI experiences, deploys “information agents” to gather data on their behalf, and lets users build personalised mini apps directly in Search. TechCrunch has since clarified that links are not entirely gone, following misinterpretations spreading online | read here

• Geoff Khan argues for the Cipher Brief that the intelligence cycle cannot keep pace with the current environment, and that tradecraft, not technology, is now the limiting factor | read here

• Theresia Tanzil breaks down what makes web scraping in Asia distinct, from super-app login walls and behavioural CAPTCHAs to sophisticated bot mitigation and a country-by-country legal patchwork, and what it takes to operate there at scale | read here

• Mirko Lorenz argues for DW Innovation that the AI-mediated content economy is breaking the chain of provenance, attribution, and trust that holds professional content together | explore here

• A new three-year research project, PADSE, brings together Fraunhofer IDMT, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, and Deutsche Welle to develop a detection system for manipulated and partially synthetic audio content | read more

• Tara Calishain shares three free, ad-free search tools she built as alternatives to Google’s AI-driven search: MiniGladys, Wikipedia Seismograph, and Wiki-Guided Google Search (I & II), each using Wikipedia to support link-based discovery and topical exploration. | view here

Finding public chat groups that do not want to be found

Chat platforms are difficult to monitor. Unlike X, where posts sit in the open and can be searched and visualised at scale, WhatsApp and Telegram groups require an analyst to be inside the room before any content is visible.

For groups that are genuinely private, the kind extremists set up among trusted contacts and circulate by word of mouth, there is rarely a way in from open sources. Those rooms are not the subject of this week’s post.

What we are looking at are groups that are meant to be public. Communities, movements, and networks that want members, and therefore have to share their invite links somewhere a stranger can find them. The link has to surface. The question is where, and how to find it. We use these techniques regularly for narrative intelligence work, for monitoring extremist ecosystems, and for any investigation that requires us to be inside a WhatsApp or Telegram room before we can see what is being said. The methodology transfers across use cases. The tools change. The logic of where a public invite link ends up does not.

Read more

This is Part 3 of our narrative intelligence series. In this issue, we introduce another new technique for extracting narratives from television programs, demonstrated through a real case study.

Industry news and the latest tradecraft tips are further in the newsletter.

Parts 1 and 2 of the series are linked below

Before we get into it, here is last week's tradecraft and industry news roundup:

OSINT Tradecraft Tips & Industry News

Everything you need to know from the past seven days.

• Earth Genome launches Earth Index, a new AI-powered satellite imagery mapping tool, now open to anyone. Users have already exposed narcotrafficking airstrips in the Peruvian Amazon, mapped illegal palm oil expansion in Brazil, uncovered hazardous quarries in the Balkans, and tracked wetland loss from rose farming in Uganda | access the tool | for more info

• Researcher tmctmt finds that Mullvad VPN assigns exit IPs using a seed-based RNG algorithm tied to users’ WireGuard keys, limiting exit IP combinations to 284 and enabling cross-server identity correlation with over 99% accuracy | read here

• Meta gave up on end-to-end encryption on Instagram | read here

• In this Twitter thread, the author details a six-hour process using Claude to remove 47 data broker listings, delete 12 inactive accounts, and suppress three search results | learn here

• LinkedIn user Christoph S. warns that using inappropriate data sources in pre-employment checks frequently causes legal violations and negative consequences for both companies and applicants | originally posted in German, read here

• Google researchers identified the first known case of a threat actor using AI to help discover and weaponize a zero-day exploit against a popular open-source web admin tool | read here

• LLMs enable compliance teams to filter false positives, speed up KYC, and enrich entity matching by analyzing both structured and unstructured data | explore here

• We came across this website developed by Rise Up Labs, which uses storytelling techniques to show users exactly what data their browser exposes the moment they visit a page. No login, no form, no permission required. | test here

Television programs are a primary vehicle for narrative introduction. In particular, state-run broadcasters use them to seed narratives with mass audiences before those narratives migrate to online platforms, where organic discourse amplifies and entrenches them. Tracking television at the source gives analysts an earlier signal than social media monitoring alone.

In Parts 1 and 2 of this series, we introduced narrative intelligence as a discipline and walked through two techniques.

Part 3 introduces a new technique we developed for television content.

How to Track Narratives Across Global TV

Read more

In our last issue, we looked at narrative intelligence as a discipline. What it is and why it is so important. This issue moves from theory to method, where we cover two specific techniques for identifying and monitoring narratives in the wild.

As always, you will find the latest tools, tips, and job listings further in the newsletter.

Missed last week?

Before we get into it, here is last week's tradecraft and industry news roundup:

OSINT Tradecraft Tips & Industry News

Everything you need to know from the past seven days.

• The Social Media Data Toolkit (SMDT) standardizes, anonymizes, and enriches social media datasets using a common schema and analysis tools. | read here

• Google is indexing web content more selectively, allowing website owners greater control and causing a wider gap between what exists online and what appears in search results. | read here

• MAX messenger in Russia displays viewing and user statistics anomalies across major channels, including more views than subscribers and slower than expected view accumulation for a chronological feed. | view here

• ImageWhisperer 2.0 launched with faster speed, improved detectors, custom investigation plans, fact-checking against 7,000+ verified claims, and multi-platform search from one interface. | read here

• Tristan Lee built and published a facial recognition pipeline and website for identifying people in the Epstein files. | view here

• Clément Molin lists several open-source tools with which you can follow the war in Ukraine. | read here

• Anthropic launched Claude for Financial Services, a Financial Analysis Solution that unifies market and enterprise data from providers like FactSet, Snowflake, and S&P Global into one interface powered by Claude 4. | check out here

Two Techniques for Identifying and Monitoring Narratives

Part 2: How to Spot the Signs and Track Them

Read more

This week we open a new multi-part series on narrative intelligence, a discipline that sits at the intersection of open source intelligence, threat analysis, and information operations. It is one of the fastest-moving areas in the field right now, and one that every practitioner should understand.

As always, you will find the latest tools, tips, and job listings further in the newsletter.

Missed last week?

Before we get into it, here is last week's tradecraft and industry news roundup:

OSINT Tradecraft Tips & Industry News

Everything you need to know from the past seven days.

• Timelines are an investigative reporter’s most powerful organisational tool — here is how to build one. Mark Lee Hunter walks through the step-by-step process of constructing and maintaining investigation timelines for GIJN | read here

• Forbes reports that Google has launched a new opt-in "Personal Intelligence" feature that connects Google Photos to Gemini, allowing the AI to scan users' entire photo libraries to generate personalised images featuring real people from their lives | read here

• Stephen Abbott Pugh introduces OpenCheck, an open-source customer due diligence tool that queries open datasets including Companies House, OpenSanctions and Wikidata, surfacing sanctions, PEP status and complex ownership structures in a single attributed intelligence report | view here

• A new research paper by Paul Roettger et al. suggests AI writing assistance distorts how readers perceive writers, making them appear more extreme, confident, and privileged | read here

• The Institute for the Study of War published an interactive map titled "Russia's Cognitive Warfare Infrastructure" and a research report titled "The Kremlin's Expanding Media Conglomerate 2026 | view here

• Aleksandra B shared on LinkedIn that investigators can access hidden Google search result tabs by modifying the "udm" parameter in a trimmed search URL, with different numerical values unlocking different result modes beyond the default tabs | read here

• Claude-osint is a GitHub repository published by ElementalSoul containing a pair of SKILL.md files that equip Claude with structured external reconnaissance methodology and tactical tooling for authorised red-team and bug-bounty engagements. We have not tested it, but Claude users may find it worth exploring | check out here

A Practitioner’s Introduction to Narrative Intelligence

Part 1: What It Is and Why It Matters Now

Read more

AI detection tools dominate the conversation about verifying synthetic content. This week we argue that detection is the wrong starting point, and that the questions analysts should ask are older, harder, and more productive.

We use the Akhbar Enfejari case from the 2026 Iran conflict to show what provenance-first analysis actually looks like in practice.

Tips and news as usual below.

Missed last week?

Before we get into it, here is last week's tradecraft and industry news roundup:

OSINT Tradecraft Tips & Industry News

Everything you need to know from the past seven days.

• An excellent list of tools that allow users to access social media content without creating an account or logging in, curated by Aleksandra B. | see here

• Damien Leloup explains how journalists can investigate online scams in a #GIJNAcademy masterclass video | watch here

• Micah Hoffman reported that Instant Data Scraper quietly changed ownership to Flavr Technology LP with little transparency, prompting concerns and a recommendation to uninstall the extension | check out here

• Book recommendation: We came across The SAR Analyst's Handbook by Kyle McCloud. We have not read it, and this is not a paid promotion, but it looks like a practitioner-written, practitioner-focused guide to SAR analysis worth knowing about | explore here

• Grok created a fake French citizen complete with ID and notes that video verification is becoming ineffective, according to Pedro J. | view here

• Citizen Lab's new research exposes two sophisticated surveillance actors exploiting global telecom infrastructure, marking the first time researchers have directly linked combined 3G and 4G network attacks to mobile operator infrastructure | read here

• A Pew Research Center report found that 26% of web pages published between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, but a new Internet Archive study shows that the Wayback Machine has restored 16% of lost pages and preserved 56% before they disappeared | read the report

• The explosion of OSINT, UAS, and AI-driven analytics has flooded the US intelligence enterprise with more data than analysts can process, and fixing it requires hybrid human-machine workflows rather than purely technical solutions, says Jared Martin in Smallwarsjournal | read here

• Orchestrated autonomy will replace AI assistants in intelligence work — networks of agents will monitor, analyse, and surface insights continuously, removing the need for analysts to initiate queries, writes Rep. Scott Perry in Federal News Network | read here

Why “Is This AI?” Is the Wrong Question — And What Analysts Should Ask Instead

Read more

In the last issue, we talked about getting Ollama and Open WebUI running locally. This issue picks up where that left off, namely using that setup to build a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline.

RAG lets a local model answer questions using documents you provide rather than relying solely on its training data.

For investigative and intelligence work, that matters. You feed the model your source material, and it draws on that material to respond. The model does not reach the internet. The documents stay on your machine.

Missed last week?

Before we get into it, here is last week's tradecraft and industry news roundup:

OSINT Tradecraft Tips & Industry News

Everything you need to know from the past seven days.

• Monetization Archive identifies and tracks monetized social media accounts on Facebook and Instagram | explore here | HT Aleksandra B.

• GDELT will migrate its services to Google Spanner using Gemini 3 Pro for architectural design and development | read here

• Researchers using CYGNSS satellites identified 85 GPS jammers in the Persian Gulf | explore here

Read more

This week we start building. Over the coming issues we will show you how to run your own AI capability, fully open source, fully in-house, with no internet connection and no running costs.

As always, the latest news and and tradecraft tips from across the OSINT industry are also inside.

Missed last week?

New Vacancy: Associate Analyst, North Quay — London

We have launched the first CTF on our new assessment platform. The challenge is not fictional. It reflects the actual work of the role. Complete it, perform well, and you progress through the application. A CV remains a formality.

If you think you can do the work and have the right to work in the UK, go here.

PS: Hiring? Contact us for a free company account and run the same process.

How to Run a Private AI Assistant on Your Own Hardware

This week we show you how to run an AI assistant entirely on your own hardware. No API key. No cloud. No cost per query. The model runs locally, your data stays with you, and the setup takes around 10 minutes.

The full guide, including chat interface setup and model recommendations, is below.

This is the first instalment in a series on building a local AI capability specifically for OSINT work.

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This week we tackle a topic that runs deeper than any tool list: what open source intelligence is, who practises it, and why the field consistently mistakes tool proficiency for analytical capability.

As always, the latest tradecraft tips and industry news. Nothing older than seven days. Practical and ready to use today.

Last Week And This Month's Free Roundup

Threat Intelligence Analyst, 6-Month FTC, Tech Against Terrorism

Tech Against Terrorism is hiring a Threat Intelligence Analyst on a 6-month fixed-term contract with potential to extend. Full details here.

The Tool List Problem

Why OSINT's obsession with software is holding the field back

Hiring managers and job applicants make the same mistake.

One writes tool requirements where skill requirements should be. The other lists platforms instead of problems solved. The field ends up measuring software proficiency rather than actual tradecraft.

This week we look at why the OSINT community over-indexes on tools, how the field has fractured into four distinct groups, and what a genuine OSINT role actually looks like when you build it from real job descriptions rather than convention.

Premium subscribers read the full post below.

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March kept the OSINT world moving. Here is what you missed and what it means for your work.

This edition is free for ALL subscribers. The analysis behind it is not.

Premium subscribers got access to four in-depth pieces this month:

Cut Hiring Time, Cut Costs, Hire Professionals Who Actually Have the Skills

Hiring for an OSINT role? We will list it and help you assess your candidates at no cost and faster using our brand new OSINT Assessment Platform. Reach out: contact@osint-jobs.com

Find Your Place In the OSINT Industry

Built on five years of in-house research and thousands of real job descriptions, our career taxonomy maps the industry and helps you find your path. Check it out: https://www.osint-jobs.com/osint-careers

A Small Selection of Tradecraft Tips & Industry News from March 2026

• released Dark Light Viewer, a browser-based tool that uses VIIRS night-time light data to track changes in night lights across the planet | try here

• Bellingcat released Turnstone, an open source tool that searches historical ADS-B flight data to explore patterns over time and in specific locations | view here

• The SIPRI Arms Transfers Database updated on 9 March 2026, replacing all previously published arms transfer data with new figures covering 1950 to 2025 | try here

• FlightGlobal reports that commercial satellite imagery from Chinese intelligence firm MizarVision tracks US forces operating against Iran | read here

• OSINT Field Notes - from Benjamin Strick geolocated Taliban special forces drills by matching sand dunes in desert terrain, confirming Kandahar Airfield as the departure point and pinpointing the exact soldier drop-off location and bombed dune south of the airfield | watch here

• Anna Schild and Jochen Spangenberg shared lessons and outcomes from the concluded VERA.AI project, discussing ongoing results and past and future efforts to counter disinformation | read here

• Cloudflare launched a web crawling API that lets free-account holders crawl up to 100,000 public web pages via a single API call | try here

• FIMI ISAC operates a central hub that shares in-depth reports on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, covering the latest TTPs, threat actors, and mitigation strategies for stakeholders, policymakers, and CSOs | read here

• Bellingcat’s Trevor Ball spoke with host Charlotte Maher about identifying weapons and munitions used in conflict, including those appearing in the Iran conflict | watch here

• OSINT Combine published an in-depth guide to searching and monitoring Reddit | read here

• OSINTERSECT’s Joseph Jones released a free Chrome extension called ‘vkXtract’ that extracts and presents VK data in various formats | try here

• The Office of the Director of National Intelligence published the 2026 Annual Threat Assessment (ATA) of the U.S. Intelligence Community | read here

• Cyabra begins trading on the Nasdaq | read here

• A CBC Front Burner episode examines how amateur “OSINT cowboys” use AI-powered dashboards to monitor the Iran conflict and questions what happens when war coverage becomes gamified on prediction markets | view here

• A GIJN webinar led by investigative trainer Henk van Ess covers the latest tools and techniques journalists can use to detect and verify AI-generated text and images | watch here

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This is the second in a series on GDELT.

Last issue we covered the API access. This issue we go into Google BigQuery. We’ll show you how to access GDELT’s full dataset for free, query it using SQL, and apply a structured analytical framework to a real-world case study.

As always, the latest tradecraft tips and industry news. Nothing older than seven days. Practical and ready to use today.

Missed last week’s newsletter?

From the OSINT Jobs Team

1. Our Assessment Platform

Hiring for OSINT roles? Reach out: contact@osint-jobs.com. We'll walk you through our assessment platform and advertise your role — all at no cost.

2. Our OSINT Careers Taxonomy is live

Built on five years of in-house research and thousands of real job descriptions, our career taxonomy maps the industry and helps you find your path. Check it out: https://www.osint-jobs.com/osint-careers

3. OSMOSISCon 2026

For those in the US, the OSMOSISCon Career Fair on 31 May 2026 in Bonita Springs, Florida connects sponsors and exhibitors directly with OSINT professionals across corporate, government, law enforcement, and military sectors.

Set Up BigQuery, Query GDELT, and Start Analysing Global Media Coverage in Minutes

This is the second in a series on The GDELT Project. Supported by Google Jigsaw, GDELT monitors broadcast, print, and web news in over 100 languages from nearly every country in the world.

This issue goes further. We set up Google BigQuery, explore GDELT's two core datasets, and run our first SQL query against real data. We use US-Iran media coverage as a live use case and build a visualisation from the results.

As our ongoing research into open source intelligence job descriptions confirms, data analysis is one of the most in-demand skills in the field. This issue shows you what that looks like in practice.

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This is the first in a series on GDELT — a free, real-time global media dataset that most analysts have heard of but few use directly. No code. No account. No subscription. Just a browser, a prompt, and a dataset that most analysts pay someone else to process for them.

As always, this issue includes the latest tradecraft tips and industry news. Nothing older than seven days. Practical and ready to use today.

Missed last week’s newsletter?

Hiring for OSINT Roles? Become a Design Partner.

We built an Assessment Platform so companies find candidates with the right skills, and candidates show what they can do before writing a CV or cover letter.

We have a few spots left in our design partner group. If your team is hiring for OSINT or intelligence roles, reach out: contact[@]osint-jobs[.]com

How to Use GDELT: The Free Real-Time News Dataset Built for Analysts (Part I)

This is the first in a series on The GDELT Project. Supported by Google Jigsaw, GDELT monitors broadcast, print, and web news in over 100 languages from nearly every country in the world.

In this issue we cover what GDELT is and how to start pulling from it today using nothing but a browser. No code. No account. No subscription.

We focus on the war in Iran as a live use case. The examples are practical and ready to run. Advanced querying and Google BigQuery setup follow in a later issue.

One thing worth noting. Through our ongoing research into job descriptions across the global open source intelligence job market, data analysis and technical skills rank among the most in-demand capabilities. This series builds on both.

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Every week we cover the latest tradecraft tips and industry news. For our main section this week, we drew inspiration from a newly published guide on detecting AI imagery.

With conflicts escalating around the world and AI-generated content surrounding these events at scale, we took it as an opportunity to go back to basics.

We walk you through a verification framework we use ourselves — built for anyone working with digital content in an environment where AI makes everything look real.

Missed last week’s newsletter?

OSINT Jobs at the OSMOSIS London Expo

The OSMOSIS London Expo brought together OSINT professionals for thoughtful discussion, practical insight, and real peer-to-peer collaboration. From evolving tradecraft to responsible AI integration, the conversations reinforced that the profession grows stronger when practitioners share experience openly and challenge each other constructively.

OSINT Jobs was proud to be part of it. A big thank you to the organisers for putting it together. If you joined the event in London, thank you for contributing. If not, the conversation continues at OSMOSISCon in Florida this May.

Learn more about OSMOSISCon 2026 and continue the conversation in person or virtually! Receive 20% off Virtual Registrations OSMOSISCON 2026 - OSMOSIS

Use Code: CON2620PR

One Framework, Any Content: How to Verify in the Age of AI

The line between real and fabricated content keeps shrinking. Generative AI tools now produce visual material so convincing that even trained eyes struggle to spot the difference.

In a past newsletter, we highlighted an experiment where a researcher used Gemini to generate location-specific imagery that matched real geolocations with striking accuracy, a reminder that even established verification methods face new pressure from GenAI.

This week, AI Forensics published an updated “Human Guide to Detecting AI Imagery,” giving researchers, journalists, fact-checkers, and social media users a practical resource to identify AI-generated content.

We take this as an opportunity to go back to basics. Analysts already navigate a sea of information, deciding what matters, filtering out the noise, and then dedicating time to verify material on top of that.

This framework has never been more critical. It holds everyone to a standard process, keeps verification consistent, and leaves no room for speculation or AI-generated fakes.

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This week we go deep. Anthropic published a study on AI and the labor market, and we used it as a lens to look at our own industry.

We pulled in findings from our Community Survey, hundreds of analyzed job descriptions, and four years of watching this field evolve week by week. The result is our most research-driven edition yet.

If you’ve ever asked whether AI will replace your OSINT job, this one’s for you.

Plus, a summary of the latest tradecraft tips and industry news from last week. As usual, never older than a week.

Missed last week’s newsletter?

Job Opportunity

Product Manager - Threat Intelligence

Tech Against Terrorism is looking for a Product Manager | 🇬🇧 UK | Full-time | Apply here

Is AI Coming for Your OSINT Job? Anthropic Has Some Answers — So Do We

Anthropic published a paper this week — Labor Market Impacts of AI: A New Measure and Early Evidence — that adds something significant to the debate around AI replacing jobs, and it deserves attention.

At its core is a new metric called observed exposure, built to measure not just what AI can theoretically do, but what people actually use it for in professional settings. Tested against early data, it finds limited evidence that AI has affected employment to date.

To measure exposure, the team combined the O*NET database covering around 800 US occupations, Anthropic’s own Claude usage data, and third-party estimates of whether an LLM can theoretically make a task at least twice as fast.

Computer programmers top the list at 74.5%, followed by customer service representatives at 70.1% and data entry keyers at 67.1%. At the other end, 30% of workers sit at zero coverage: cooks, motorcycle mechanics, and bartenders.

The headline finding cuts both ways. AI is far from reaching its theoretical capability, and there’s no systematic rise in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022. But hiring of younger workers into exposed roles has started to slow.

What does this mean for the OSINT industry? What we’re seeing through our community survey and four years of weekly newsletters points in a similar direction and when mapped against what Anthropic found, the picture for OSINT gets specific.

AI is embedding itself across the full workflow, from collection and analysis to processing and report writing, amplifying tradecraft rather than replacing it. But the skills needed to use it well are unevenly distributed, and the hiring landscape hasn’t caught up.

We've shared our community survey findings openly and if you haven't read them yet, they're free for everyone.

But in this edition, our premium members get more: a deeper look at actual hiring trends across the industry, based on an analysis of job descriptions from around the world. What skills matter, where AI replaces or augments, and how to catch up to grow your AI skills.

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