The OSINT Newsletter

The OSINT Newsletter

The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #119

Creating a Facial Recognition Search Engine Without Storing Faces

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The OSINT Newsletter
Aug 20, 2026
∙ Paid

👋 Welcome to the 119th issue of The OSINT Newsletter. This issue contains OSINT news, community posts, tactics, techniques, and tools to help you become a better investigator. My goal with this newsletter is to help promote the OSINT industry, develop better investigators, and raise awareness of ethical use cases for open source intelligence.


🪃 If you missed the last newsletter, here’s a link to catch up.

⚡ OSINT Tool Tuesday: Library of Leaks

The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #118

The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #118

Aug 11
Read full story

⚡Everything Must Go (Including Their OPSEC): OSINT on eCommerce and Marketplace

The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #117

The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #117

Aug 6
Read full story

Let’s get started. ⬇️


OSINT News

📰 Getting Started with OSINT: A Beginner’s Guide

The guide emphasizes starting with a clearly defined objective, using specific tools like Shodan and Google Dorks, verifying information across multiple sources, and conducting investigations ethically while documenting findings.

Read on Rae Baker’s Blog…

🎩 H/T: Rae Baker

📰 The Cyber Command suicide cluster: how to verify a defense story before you repost it

Most disinformation in 2026 isn’t fabrication but real stories losing precision through each repost; Tracing a defense story back to primary sources takes about an hour and changes everything.

Read on Project OSINT…

🎩 H/T: Project OSINT

📰 What can you actually do with just an IP address?

An interesting discussion worth following along with, giving you real world examples of what you can do with only an IP address.

Read on Reddit…


OSINT Tools

🔎 WayTrace

WayTrace pulls a domain’s entire history from the Wayback Machine and extracts 43 categories of intelligence (emails, API keys, subdomains, tech stacks, people) with timestamps showing when each appeared and disappeared, all passive, no active scanning.

Web App | GitHub

🎩 H/T: Thomas Housset

🔎 ShadowBroker

ShadowBroker brings together 60+ live OSINT feeds like aircraft, ships, satellites, conflict zones, police scanners, and internet devices onto a self-hosted real-time map with 35+ toggleable data layers and no telemetry.

GitHub

🎩 H/T: Shadowbroker

🔎 HaveIBeenFlocked?

Search Flock ALPR audit logs to see if police looked up a license plate and why, drawing from over 4 million public records to expose mass vehicle surveillance.

Web App


✅ That’s it for the free version of The OSINT Newsletter. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support this publication and independent research.

By upgrading to paid, you’ll get access to the following:

⚡ Creating a Facial Recognition Search Engine Without Storing Faces

  • Facial recognition search engines like PimEyes, FaceID, Clearview AI, etc. are all a necessary ethical grey area in the OSINT space. Something about storing millions, if not billions of faces and running searches against them has always rubbed me wrong, though. In this issue, I’ll cover a method for matching faces to OSINT data, such as usernames, email addresses, phone numbers, etc. without associating faces to people.

🗒️ This is a pretty advanced OSINT topic; I’ll try my best to make it accessible to multiple readers of different experience levels and technical skill sets.

👀 All paid posts in the archive. Go back and see what you’ve missed!

🚀 If you don’t have a paid subscription already, don’t worry there’s a 7-day free trial. If you like what you’re reading, upgrade your subscription. If you can’t, I totally understand. Be on the lookout for promotions throughout the year.

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