How to Build a Free Event Monitoring Dashboard for Situational Awareness
Spotting an unannounced protest before it happens, using only public, free tools.
Welcome, the OJ Team here.
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?
Here is the section with the platform name corrected throughout.
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.
