Open source investigation, or ‘OSI’, refers to information collected from publicly available sources. Common OSI sources include social networks, online forums, corporate and governmental websites, blogs, videos, news reports, and publicly available satellite images.
Civil society investigators such as ourselves commonly do not have privileged access to classified information, making the information that is available from ‘open sources’ crucial in identifying and analysing human rights violations by states and militaries.
While open source information is available to anyone, it’s not always easy to find, and open source investigators are required to use a wide variety of open source and proprietary research tools. Our partners and friends at Bellingcat maintain a live directory of such tools here.