Methodology & Standards
How investigations are built, documented, and defended. Critical analysis of tools, frameworks, and the evidentiary principles that separate rigorous OSINT from sophisticated-looking guesswork.
4 posts in this category
Open-source intelligence (OSINT) is a discipline of restraint as much as discovery. Anyone can scrape a profile or run a username search, but professional investigators are judged on whether their work is scoped, lawful, repeatable, and safe — for them, for their subjects, and for the integrity of the case. This guid…
Open-Source Intelligence is a field built on acronyms. Whether you are a journalist tracing a sanctioned vessel, a corporate due-diligence analyst chasing a beneficial owner, or a SOC analyst pivoting on indicators, you will encounter a shared vocabulary that spans military doctrine, civilian forensics, and internet pr…
Every OSINT investigation starts with one thing. It might be a username found in a forum post, an email address pulled from a leaked document, a phone number printed on a business card, or a face cropped from a photo. Whatever it is, that first item is a seed identifier — the single point of entry into a subject's di…
The Problem In October 2024, Sector035 identified a structural fault in modern OSINT practice: investigators are building findings on platforms they cannot see inside, audit, or reproduce. He called them "black box (CL)OSINT tools," and the name sticks. In legitimate OSINT, the investigator controls source selection, d…