I've always been fascinated by open-source intelligence (OSINT). There's something inherently thrilling about treating the open internet like a vast, interconnected puzzle where the truth is just waiting to be pieced together from public data.
Recently, I watched a fascinating documentary-style video following Christo Grozev (also known by his moniker Christo Files). For those who might not be familiar, Christo is a brilliant, Vienna-based Bulgarian investigative journalist and the lead Russia investigator for Bellingcat. Watching his methodological approach to geolocating footage and connecting digital breadcrumbs completely shifted my perspective.
Re-evaluating My Toolset
Watching Christo work made me look inward. I spend a lot of time tinkering with custom microservices, web apps, and self-hosted tools. But seeing how powerful custom-tailored OSINT tools can be when investigating geopolitical events inspired me to completely redo my homepage and shift my focus toward building resources for intelligence gathering.
I realized I already possessed a uniquely relevant skillset: GeoGuessr.
From GeoGuessr to Geolocation
If you've played GeoGuessr at a competitive level, or spent time digging through Google Street View to create custom maps, you unknowingly train your brain to act like a geolocation analyst. You learn to recognize subtle environmental clues: the type of utility poles used in specific regions of Romania, the particular yellow-painted road lines in South Korea, or the specific architectural styles of Soviet-era panelka housing blocks.
These same deductive reasoning skills—the ability to look at a singular frame of a video and figure out exactly what hemisphere, country, and city it was filmed in based on the flora and infrastructure—are exactly what OSINT investigators use to geolocate footage from active conflict zones.
What's Next for the Lab?
Moving forward, I am dedicating a chunk of my Lab to creating tools that streamline this process. If you check out the Links directory, you'll see I just added the Bellingcat OSINT toolkit as a primer. Over the coming weeks, expect to see new homegrown applications built specifically to aid in reverse-image searching, metadata extraction, and street-level architectural identification.
The internet leaves traces. We just need to build the right lenses to see them.
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