OSINT, or open-source intelligence, is information gathered from publicly available sources — news reports, social media posts, satellite imagery, ship and flight tracking, public records — and checked carefully enough to rely on.

Which OSINT tool should I start with?

Start with capture and verification: a way to keep copies of what you find (the Wayback Machine, archive.today or a personal archive such as WHT.day) and a reverse image search. Most mistakes in following breaking news come from trusting a post that later changed or an image that was old.

Are these tools free?

The Wayback Machine, archive.today, the InVID-WeVerify plugin, Google Earth Pro, Copernicus Browser, SunCalc and TimelineJS are free. Hunchly is paid; MarineTraffic and Flightradar24 have free tiers with paid history; WHT.day is a subscription.

Why archive posts and articles instead of bookmarking them?

A bookmark only points at a page. When a post is deleted, an account is suspended or an article is edited, the bookmark shows the new version or nothing. An archived copy keeps what you actually saw.

Where can I find a complete list of OSINT tools?

Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit is the most widely used community-maintained list, organised by task, with notes on cost and how each tool is used.

OSINT Tools for Following a News Story Over Time

A workflow, not a list

Open-source intelligence — OSINT — is the practice of answering questions from public information: posts, photos, videos, satellite images, ship and flight data, and the news itself. Groups like Bellingcat have made it famous, but the core habits are useful to anyone who follows a war, an election, a disaster or a market closely. Most of the work comes down to five jobs: keep a copy, check it is real, find where it happened, check what was moving nearby, and put it all in order. The tools below are grouped by those jobs.

1. Capture it before it changes

Posts are deleted, articles are quietly edited and accounts disappear. The first rule of open-source work is to keep a copy of anything you might rely on, at the moment you find it.

Wayback Machine: The Internet Archive’s public, timestamped copies of web pages. Use Save Page Now on any public page you may need to cite; anyone can check the snapshot later. It cannot capture pages behind a login or paywall, and many X posts do not archive well.
archive.today: A second public archive that stores both the page text and a screenshot. It often succeeds on pages the Wayback Machine struggles with, which makes it a good second copy for important evidence.
Hunchly: A paid browser extension built for investigators that automatically records every page you visit during a case, with hashes and timestamps for an audit trail. Use it when you need to prove exactly what you saw and when.
WHT.day: A private archive for the news and X posts you follow day to day. One click keeps the full text and media of an article or post, filed on the day you saved it, and your X bookmarks can sync in automatically. It is built for the long tail of reading that matters later, rather than for formal evidence handling.

2. Verify images and video

Most viral visuals of breaking news are either real but old, real but from somewhere else, or edited. A few checks catch most of them.

InVID-WeVerify plugin: A free browser extension from European fact-checking projects. It splits a video into keyframes you can reverse-search, reads metadata, magnifies details and bundles links to other verification tools. It is the standard starting point for video.
Reverse image search: Google Lens, TinEye, Yandex: Search with the image itself to find where else it has appeared. TinEye can sort results by oldest first, which is the quickest way to show a “new” photo has been online for years. Run more than one engine: they index different parts of the web.

3. Place it on the map

Geolocation means matching what you see — buildings, roads, coastline, signs — to a real place. Satellite imagery then tells you whether the scene was there on the day claimed.

Google Earth Pro: The free desktop version includes a historical imagery slider (the clock icon), so you can see a location as it looked in earlier years — useful for confirming when a building appeared or was destroyed.
Copernicus Browser: Free access to the European Union’s Sentinel satellite imagery, the successor to Sentinel Hub’s EO Browser. Resolution is too coarse for small details, but frequent revisits make it good for fires, floods, burn scars and large ships.
SunCalc: Shows the sun’s angle for any place and time. Comparing it with the shadows in a photo can confirm or rule out the time of day a picture was claimed to be taken.

4. Track ships and aircraft

Many vessels and aircraft broadcast their position. That makes movements around a news event checkable — with the important caveat that transponders can be switched off or spoofed.

MarineTraffic and VesselFinder: Live and historical ship positions from AIS signals. Essential for shipping stories, port strikes and sanctions evasion; a vessel going dark is often part of the story. Detailed history usually needs a paid plan.
ADS-B Exchange and Flightradar24: Aircraft tracking from transponder signals. ADS-B Exchange is popular with researchers because it does not filter out aircraft that other services hide at owners’ request, including many government and military flights.

5. Put it in order

Verification tells you whether one piece is real. A timeline tells you what the pieces mean together: what came first, what was a reaction, and where the gaps are.

WHT.day narrative timelines: Builds a dated timeline of any topic from the articles and posts you have saved — from one item or from a search — finding related saves by meaning, with no tagging. Share it as a link or download it as an image.
TimelineJS: A free tool from Northwestern University’s Knight Lab that turns a Google Sheet into an embeddable interactive timeline. Ideal for publishing a hand-curated chronology on your own site.

Go further: Bellingcat’s toolkit

For a deeper catalogue, Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit lists hundreds of tools by task, with notes on cost and how researchers use them. It is maintained by the community and is the best place to look when a story needs something specialised.

Good habits that matter more than tools

Save first, judge later. The post you skip past today is the one that gets deleted tomorrow. Record the date it happened, not just the date you found it — a reaction only makes sense next to the event it reacted to. Keep the source with every copy, so you can go back to the original or show where a claim came from. Look for the second source before you trust the first. And revisit the story: early reports are often wrong, and the correction is part of the record.

Those habits are why we built WHT.day. Everything you save is kept in full and filed by the day it happened, X bookmarks can sync in automatically, you can search your archive by meaning, and any topic becomes a timeline in one click. For one-off captures, see how to archive a webpage and how to see deleted tweets.

OSINT tools for following the news