A walkthrough for backgrounding

OSINT is a method for investigating public information online

Happy Friday, reporters! Some of you may be off work today, especially if you’re in the US, but if you’re not, we’ll learn a new tool.

This is another one I learned from my co-panelist, Anna Massoglia, at IRE. It’s a very simple website - in fact, a webpage, really - called the OSINT Framework.

OSINT means “open source investigation” and typically refers to methods like geolocation, social media identification and reading into the background of a photo. As someone mentioned at the conference, the tools here adapt rapidly - so if you want to do OSINT you’ll need to keep up.

One way to do this is the OSINT Framework. It walks you though various modes of questioning. Do you want to trace a username, for example? A photo? The person’s actual name? The OSINT Framework explains these options as well as tools for carrying them out.

If you haven’t tried these methods before, reporters, give it a try!

Did you miss the last TFR? Use SiteDelta, a Firefox extension, to track changes to websites