#osint

Most "people search" tutorials end where the real work begins. They show you how to type a name into a free aggregator, screenshot the result, and call it intelligence. That's not OSINT. That's typing. Public records — the actual ones, filed with governments — are where investigations live or die. Court dockets, co…

You don't need a zero-day. You need a name and forty bucks. That's the unglamorous truth about PERSINT.PEOPLESEARCH — the layer of people OSINT that runs entirely on aggregators, data brokers, and the receipts of every "I agree" button a target has clicked since 2008. This isn't hacking. It's reading the file the bro…

One photo, thirty minutes, and a fugitive who'd been hiding for three decades was back on the front page. That's what facial recognition does in a serious OSINT workflow — and that's also exactly why it scares regulators. Facial recognition is the loudest sub-discipline of IMINT (Imagery Intelligence) right now. Not …

An employee in Hong Kong watched her CFO and several colleagues join a video call. Familiar faces. Familiar voices. She wired $25.6 million across 15 transactions. Every face on that call was synthetic. That's the IMINT deepfake problem in one sentence. Not a future risk. Not a research paper. A line item on a forensic…

Pixels lie. The job is to make them confess. IMINT forensics is the part of imagery intelligence that doesn't care what the picture shows — it cares what the file betrays. Every edit leaves a fingerprint somewhere: in the compression grid, in the sensor noise, in a shadow that points the wrong way. A working analyst …

An image is rarely just an image. It's a timestamp, a location, a face, a logo on a wall, a reflection in a window — and somewhere on the public web, there's a chance it's been posted before. Reverse image search is how you make that chance work for you. Done badly, it's a single drag-and-drop into Google. Done prope…

A grainy 9-second clip filmed from a kitchen window doesn't look like evidence. Until you stretch it across a 30-meter elevation grid, line up the horizon with a digital terrain model, and prove that the smoke trail in frame 47 could only have come from one specific tree line. That's GEOINT 3D — turning flat pixels i…

A shadow is the cheapest witness in any investigation. It can't be bribed, it doesn't get tired, and it has no political opinions — it just falls where physics tells it to fall. If a photo claims to be from Donetsk at 11:40 in July but the shadows are pointing the wrong way, you don't need a confession. The sun alrea…

A timestamp on a tweet is a claim. The shadow under the burning building isn't. Chronolocation is the OSINT discipline of pinning down when a photo or video was captured — without trusting metadata, captions, or the source. EXIF strips on every social upload. Dates lie. Captions lie harder. What doesn't lie: the angl…

By the time a Telegram channel posts a "fresh" video from a frontline, the satellites have already imaged that frontline four times. That gap — between what's happening and when civilians can see it — is exactly where GEOINT-by-satellite earns its keep. This is the discipline analysts file under GEOINT.SAT: pull fr…