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1 | Do you remember a situation when you got stuck with your research and wished there was an online tool that could help you continue? If yes, could you describe the thoughts that you had in this situation? | ||
2 | Note: The tool wishes below are from participants of Bellingcat's online researchers survey. We decided to make them public to allow potential tool developers to get insights into our survey respondents' ideas. The fact that we share those tool wishes does not mean that Bellingcat thinks those ideas are necessarily good ideas, technically feasible or that they are useful for the open source investigator community (some are and others are not according to us). Most of them have been suggested by only one person and are not a representative overview of tool needs amongst open source investigators. If would like to build tools based on those ideas, we suggest to check with a larger number of investigators whether they also see a need for such a tool. | ||
3 | |||
4 | Search engines | ||
5 | A tool to compare/combine search results of multiple search engines | I wanted to compare search results of multiple search engines at the same time and couldn't find a tool that could do it well. I spent ages looking online for a solution and ended up wasting the time I could have just used to do it manually which was very frustrating/Have you thought about an aggregator tool? In the beginning of the internet, for me that is early, mid-90s, when there were different search engines and not only google or bing (for the western world) I used Metacrawler, the search engine aggregator a lot to have better results. | |
6 | A tool that helps find the right search terms | An aide to finding the best search terms is key. Google or equivalent spitting out a million results is pointless. Interactive real-time change/effect of different search terms would be good (or multiple simultaneous searches to see what works best)./Ability to 'ask' the right relevant question to obtain data. | |
7 | Search engines that allow to input questions | For this use-case I`d love a search machine that finds real answers which are on-topic and relevant to the question i research. Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo", etc. just haven`t worked out how to do this yet | |
8 | A free web app that pulls down all articles, videos, images for a specific topic | There needs to be a free app like web crawler or Google that can pull down all articles, posts, videos, images etc on a given topic. | |
9 | |||
10 | Username/Name Searches | ||
11 | A tool that suggests different ways of spelling a name | Suggestions on names writing wrong (ex. Katty, Keit, Kity, Kathy...) | |
12 | A tool that helps differentiate between several people with the same name | I was attempting to validate an identity of a foreign citizen and there were multiple people with the same name in the same organization. I needed something to illuminate the publicly available information so I could discriminate between the three people and correlate them to other records. | |
13 | A way to search for historical usernames | Username archives. Pseudonyms now, but historically registered / used variation of name, initials or other PII online…ability to easily pull a log of historical usernames on each account, and pull similar usernames from all corners of the web(s) for linkage/I wish it was easier to track various things like usernames, phone numbers, etc over time. Seeing now is fairly easy, but seeing something in a context of, say, 5 years ago is more difficult and often unreliable even when possible. | |
14 | Something that helps with searching for names | ||
15 | A tool to find private information about a person | How could I find private or concealed information about a person in web? | |
16 | |||
17 | Social media/messenger services | ||
18 | A tool that helps go through Instagram content | I often think "I don't have the extra hours to spend on A or B" when A or B is scrolling through rows of Instagram pictures with certain hashtag/location which cannot be ordered by date. Perhaps a fast-automatic scroll-down web extension? | |
19 | A tool that helps find a name in an Instagram follower list | Sometimes I wish I had a tool to directly search for a name in the Instagram follower list rather than scrolling for a lot of time | |
20 | A tool that helps researching private social media accounts | I'm continually frustrated with Instagram and other social media services with private profiles as it takes time to infiltrate them with undercover accounts. | |
21 | A reliable scraper for social media platforms | ||
22 | A tool that shows of which Telegram channels someone is a member | A way to find what Telegram channels someone belonged to would have been good. | |
23 | A tool to monitor Telegram channels | Telegram monitoring is a pain in the a**. No working solution for automated channel monitorings and mapping. Everything has to be build/implementend by one self, what is time consuming and often not possible due to lack of capacities. | |
24 | A tool to help find the digital footprint of a person based on existing pieces of information | Automating the process of finding people in social networks (when you know phone number, email address or other personal data) or finding their digital footprints on the Internet./locating an association between an email address and the existence of a twitter account. | |
25 | A tool to get data from and analyze Facebook | Facebook groups - wish there was an efficient way to get more out of it, as in members, where they're from, etc. Facebook page - enumeration of likes and such with location based services, as in the locality / region, to get ideas about where what particular topic is relevant./Something to enable extraction of complex data real time and at scale from Facebook, especially private groups/Finding people using facebook/I spent eons trying to find a way to gather data from Facebook, especially private groups. I tried to use screencaptures, and then OCR, but the OCR was all so messy - I tried multiple different tools, from Google lens to multiple Github tools. It was almost invariably messy, and more than that, it was almost impossible to find a way to clean the data into sections (e.g. username, date posted, post, etc.)/I find fetching data from Facebook pretty challenging./Searching PDFs and Facebook pages is challenging/Yes, several times I've found frustrating the lack of comprehensive 'search-within-X-wall' or 'search-within-all-my-friends-walls' service in FB | |
26 | A tool to retrieve deleted Twitter photos via Google | Finding old Twitter photos that were deleted but still come up on Google, but the image quality is very bad. Wish there was a tool that could recover those photos. | |
27 | A tool that shows Instagram stories or TikTok posts etc. from a specific location | I found quite hard to find a map that aggregates geolocalized instagram stories or tiktok picture / video contents and /or other "live" social media content. That kind of tool would be useful but really depending on each media policy on geolocalization metadata by default. Hence, I had to monitor on Twitter and Telegram ... but to navigate between legitimate content and "noise" / disinformation. Yet, in crisis management such map aggregating geolocalized live image/videos /cams /drones would be of great benefit./Searching for content on Instagram is very difficult. If i had a tool that could search and sort geotagged posts it would have helped me | |
28 | A tool to research the spread of false information on Telegram | One of our challenges is the lack of a tool that would allow as to monitor false information spreading on Telegram. | |
29 | A dashboard to research content from several social networks | I want a dashboard of tools with descriptions of use and videos to analyse tweets, linked in in and facebook /e.g. extract all employees’ profiles on Linkedin for a target company (first name, last name, position etc.), Facebook search – manual search for comments, photos etc./Yes, specially when social networks profiles are blocked or when you want to look at someone´s linnkedin and it shows how is looking into their profile. I use sock puppets but they are time consuming to manage./finding information across all social platforms would be nice | |
30 | A tool to easily analyze Twitter data | Would like an easy way to analyse Twitter data. | |
31 | A reliable archive of social media profiles and posts | I have gotten stuck when social media profiles and / or posts have been deleted to cover their tracks. I really wish there were reliable archives of for example Twitter | |
32 | A tool that extracts text from followers of a specific Twitter account | Load all followers of particular twitter account, with liked entries, and extract text from there to google it - it is time consuming and requires a lot of effort | |
33 | A possibility to map how specific (fake) stories are shared on WhatsApp. | I would be interested in being able to map how specific (fake) stories are shared on WhatsApp. | |
34 | 1-click access to social media APIs rather than having to set up access like a dev. | ||
35 | A way to scrape reviews on Glassdoor | I wanted to scrape the reviews on Glassdoor but they are only visible after login, and that simple manual step is a lot of coding work to automatize with either R or Python. I wish there was an R or Python function in Beautifulsoup for that | |
36 | A tool to find the source of spam accounts on social media | ||
37 | A Pattern-of-life analysis of gab and twitter users | ||
38 | |||
39 | Identify text on images | ||
40 | A tool that identifies text in online pictures | trying to identify/track people by text on clothing. Would be nice to have analysis to clear up photos to identify visible text, predictive analysis for obscured text, and search engine to find images/video based on text string./Ability to extract text from post of image, and run it through something/An image search engine capable of finding search terms/keywords written in images (like the Facebook search feature but for the wider web). | |
41 | |||
42 | Object recognition | ||
43 | A tool to analyze social media posts for sentiment and object recognition | A tool that allowed to analyze social media posts for sentiment and object recognition (tanks, weapons, etc) would help | |
44 | Object recognition for vehicles/landscapes | ||
45 | An alternative to Google Lens for objects and locations | I wish there was a reliable alternative to Google Lens for specific, non-generalized inanimate objects and locations | |
46 | A tool to identify wound types | I wish there was a tool that could help me identify wound types in photos of military and civilian wounded or deceased in war. | |
47 | |||
48 | Facial recognition | ||
49 | An open source facial recognition tool | ||
50 | A facial recognition tool that can be used together with other search tools | Many people finder/lookup and company/charity search tools are hidden behind subscription services and require an account sign-up. If these kinds of tools were bundled with face search tools, if appropriate, that might be useful. | |
51 | |||
52 | Text analysis | ||
53 | A tool to do a quick text analysis in forums | a text analysis pulling in comments from threads/forums. 1. To flag for increases in specific words tagged by the researcher 2. If part of the research requires engaging with an online community, being able to a quick analysis of common in-group terminology AND, especially for women, to match language patterns that indicate gender. | |
54 | A tool that finds and analyzes similar online texts | An online tool that crawls the web for similarities and shows the linguistic features of a text to draw conclusions about/find the author. | |
55 | A text partser that finds text of similar style | I was totally stuck analyzing a text and wished there was a good text syllable/style/grammar parser that would find text consistent with the style in question. | |
56 | |||
57 | Video analysis | ||
58 | A comprehensive video analysis tool | During OSINT work I was unable to reach some video materials in better quality. Also, it would be great to have an online tool for detailed video analysis with all additional software such as transcription tools, language recognition, automated reverse image search, etc. | |
59 | A tool that helps verify videos | I ran into problems with video verification, I find it difficult that video is considered as a collection of images. I find it hard to proof synthetic video other than with visual analyses, I find synthetic audio impossible to handle, archiving my process and the info that I used to come to decisions is difficult and takes up a lot of time, finding an original is very complex to me. | |
60 | A tool to find out whether a video has been taken recently | Trying to see if video footage is relevant to the time, wanting to know if its historic footage or recently taken | |
61 | |||
62 | Network Analysis | ||
63 | A network analysis tool to analyze social media connections | I was looking for a tool to utilize CSV/JSON files to visualize connection between accounts on Twitter over time/ An online tool that could show you social media connections for all topics would be useful (but maybe illegal/unethical) /A free social network analysis tool would be awesome/A comprehensive Facebook tool for example, to map interactions/Sometimes I would like to be able to see human interactions better and it's not usual to find a Social Network Analysis component in a platform. I wish I had a chance to use it, and to select parameters I want, such as degree centrality or eigenvector centrality./I needed and need a tool that gives clear graphs of friends and acquaintances in social media/Automated graph tools could be useful, social network analysis types of tools, that can take tabular databases and visualize relations between entities/ I would appreciate access to social graph tools (node/edge tracing social media connections) to trace the content origins and propagation/ A cheap network mapping tool (network In a math sense, with connections between any type of arbitrary objects) with customizable objects and A to B based viewing possibilities. E.g. the possibility to show a network of events based on a timeline giving the possibly to step through what nodes change at the same time./Visualizing connections and interactively navigating a graph is mostly possible with commercial tools/ I would like to see an online tool that searches for connections between social media accounts, or scrapes the entire history of a Twitter account for specified parameters/Mapping social and professional network | |
64 | A tool that helps draw networks from data, eg a sociogram | ||
65 | A simple tool to visualize connections | Visualizing connections in a "pinboard" kind of way without having to dive into advanced database visualization tools | |
66 | A tool to map relationships between companies | A method to diagram company interactions similar to social media tools that map account relationships. eg .Netlytic | |
67 | A combined search and network visualization tool | A tool that combines I2 with Yose, Maltego, UCINET and Gephi, but also has the ability to search for license plates and recognize human faces | |
68 | A tool to link social media accounts through followers | Linking social media accounts by followers/following was easy through Chrome plugins, but a lot of those systems are killed once the platform makes a change. | |
69 | A tool that shows connections between websites | What: I've recently wished there was a user-friendly, aptly-linkable, visual/graphic (ideally interactive) reference tool that acutely identifies media sites known to deal in counterfactual information and visually maps relevant connections between distinct outlets. Why: Explaining connections between repeat counterfactual offenders a la carte is tedious for the writer and tedious for the reader. Clicking this make-believe link would, in a perfect world, bring the reader to a visual page where Gateway Pundit and Project Veritas, for example, would be duly contextualized in a visually appealing manner. In my imagination: The collapsed view: could show connections where different counterfactual media sites shared the same or similar iterations of a false or deceptive story. The expanded view: could be disinformation dossiers linked to original deceptions alongside concise and rigorous corresponding explainers. | |
70 | A tool that shows connections between topics in texts | I needed a tool that could connect words from newspapers and make a wordcloud with connection between things that are related. Filtering both information and connecting topics./another great thing would be a graph database where certain terms could be linked if once mentioned together, e.g. in one twitter post or a journal article | |
71 | |||
72 | Visualization tools | ||
73 | A tool to visualize timelines | The time aspect of events is covered less than the geography. There are less tools that easily visualize, simultaneity and time dimension. | |
74 | |||
75 | Distance calculations | ||
76 | A tool that identifies objects in pictures for measurements calculations | I had to use a very crude distances calculator to get an estimate on size etc. of an object visible in a picture. Wish I had a tool that immediately finds common objects within the image that could be automatically used for measurements calculations, maybe even with estimations based on local vegetation. | |
77 | |||
78 | Geolocation/satellite imagery | ||
79 | A central place to coordinate ongoing geolocation/OSINT research efforts | When I am working on a geolocalisation I never know if someone already did it or is working on. So I regularly wish for a centralisation of works or a tools who search with keywords if someone already worked on the event. (similar to liveuamap or a search engine with OSINT investigations)/One problem I've seen is duplication of effort in OSINT work. While I believe multiple independent researchers coming to the same conclusion (on, eg, a geolocation) is very important, it's also counter-productive when new content comes out and 10 independent researchers all frantically invest an hour (some more or some less) solving the problem. This leads to (a) aggregate wasted effort [only 2-3 independent researchers doing the work are needed for good independent verification; 8-10 might be overkill], and (b) missed opportunities [the other 7-8 researchers could have been looking at other problems]. The tool that is needed is to facilitate better crowdsourcing/coordination within the OSINT community - a way of automating and managing both the collection of the source data (eg. raw unverified social media content) and the distribution of it to researchers (eg. "nobody has started researching this yet" or "@janeOSINT_23 and @joeResearcher_37 are researching this" or "@joeResearcher_37 made some progress on this, but is stuck") so that researchers can make smart decisions about what they spend their time on | |
80 | A database with collections of specific features of a city | "I wish there was a compilation of types of street lights in every country" or a "compilation of bus stop designs in each country". Some sort of database of specific features of a city that would aid locating it | |
81 | A better source of altitude data that could be overlaid/integrated with a terrain viewer like Google Earth Pro | ||
82 | A tool that helps find all available images related to a specific location | I often use aerial images to help determine the type of activity performed at a given location. A tool that helps find all the available related images including street views would accelerate my work. /3D-Modeling would be very helpful, also street view, or other 360° pictures from some places, that have bad quality in satellite photos... | |
83 | An affordable AI image analysis tool | Would be interesting to see what future possibilities there are for AI image analysis, e.g. geolocation by reverse image search/feature identification, solar data. I’m sure these are already featured in intelligence industry software but will be interesting to see if this can be made affordable / practical for OSINT community and journalistic use | |
84 | A tool that helps geolocate social media posts | I wished there was a tool that could geolocate the subject of social media posts from its content. So not just geotags but, e.g. if it referenced an area nearby that I may not be aware of, then that post might be useful to me. | |
85 | A tool that allows to import spatial data into a 3D visualization software | I had wished that there was a tool that could allow me to import spatial data from Google Maps/Earth/etc. into a 3D visualization software like Blender so that I could navigate to specific points of perspective to get visuals sort of like Peak Visor. The second part to this would be to have support to be able to import a 2D image (photo or still from a video) into the software to be able to overlay and line it up with possible perspectives to check if they're spatially compatible. Perhaps components of these things are available somewhere, but I have not seen a ready-made, stand-alone tool that can request + package + import such data into some sort of an easy-to-use solution like a Blender plug-in with adjustable transparency (necessary for aligning the overlay of a 2D image). | |
86 | A collection of pre-analyzed satellite images | I've often wondered if there could be a collection of pre-analyzed satellite images of interest for potential flashpoints. It would be great to have some sort of a "curated" collection so those of us not formally trained in IMINT can have our homework checked, or at least not rely on a bad interpretation. | |
87 | |||
88 | Documents and OCR | ||
89 | A tool to compare financial statements | A tool for getting and comparing several financial statements with each other without the need for OCR, manual extraction and sorting into a spreadsheet. | |
90 | A tools that helps solve the challenge of working with documents in different formats | Tools that make gathering and sorting information more streamlined and workable than several different documents of different formats. | |
91 | An OCR tool | There is no good way to OCR the documents (related to a current research) and have the contents be searchable./A good and easy to use open source ocr tool would be great; | |
92 | A parser for pdfs | it's easy to scrape html tables into data frames for further analysis, but if the same table is in a pdf file? Not so. I wish there was a tool to parse them the same easy way/Pdf parser for official forms would have been very useful | |
93 | A tool to search pdf documents | Searching PDFs and Facebook pages is challenging | |
94 | A document search tool | Also a bulk public document searching tool (with maybe multiple regions you can click on a global map). | |
95 | |||
96 | Companies/properties/tender calls | ||
97 | A tool that combines company registries from various countries and states | Not that I got stuck per se, but I lost a lot of time. When investigating a network of companies in the US, I had to check company registries for almost every state. There are many websites that claim to have consolidated company information, but I have yet to find a tool that allows me to search up-to-date company registration information per country (and that is reliable). Many countries have separated database per county or state (US, Brazil, Switzerland, etc) and it is time consuming to search each of the websites accessing the local database. | |
98 | A tool that helps research the connections between businesses and individuals and the owners of a company | Trying to understand relationships between matrix of businesses and individuals from Companies House records, it took a vast amount of manual effort. I struggled to unpick the web of interconnected ownership of shell companies, and find apparently completely unrelated companies and people who were consistently registered to the same business or correspondence address. A tool that could have trawled the Companies House website building a network map showing the interconnections between address, people and business nodes with the ability to do a quick search on any of those nodes for other info (eg: news reports and social media)/Identifying the real beneficial owners of a company. Seeing how many companies are incorporated in one location/one office. It allows to see connections between individuals. | |
99 | A tool that helps research property ownership records by county or state | Property ownership records are fragmented by county in the US and often behind a paywall. I wish there was a better way to search multiple counties or states. | |
100 | A tool that helps compare public data across states in the US | Some US state sex offender registries provide an API to access their data. Others use extensive defensive measures to prevent scraping. It's very difficult to compare data across states because the registries, laws, and access vary so greatly. | |