The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #47
Investigating Infrastructure Spending: Cherryvale Soybean Crushing Facility
👋 Welcome to the 47th 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.
🚨 I’ve decided to combine the OSINT News and OSINT Community sections into one section. This makes it easier to read, easier to write, and more sustainable as a one-man operation. Instead of 3 news posts and 3 community posts, there will now be about 4-5 OSINT News posts. There will be no change to the OSINT Tools section.
💰 There are a few more copies of the print version of The OSINT Newsletter left in stock. If you’d like a print copy, grab them while they’re available. Otherwise, there’s a PDF version, too.
OSINT News
🌟 Sponsor: Authentic8
Free OSINT guide for Discord
OSINT expert Nihad Hassan created an in-depth guide for collecting publicly available information on the voice, video, and text messaging platform. Learn the basics of how to use and search communities, uncover hidden servers, investigate user profiles, and more.
📰 search.0t.rocks shut down (again)
The free leaked database search engine, search.0t.rocks, has shut down again. The story behind this is quite interesting. There’s some activism posted on the static notice of shutdown and some history of a feud with IntelX.
📰 How Code Notebooks Enable Open Source Research
The article discusses how code notebooks, specifically Jupyter Notebooks, facilitate open-source research by offering a user-friendly platform for testing and running code, making it accessible to researchers without advanced coding skills.
🎩 H/T: Miguel Ramalho
📰 Key tools and approaches for using AI in OSINT and investigations
The article discusses the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in open-source intelligence (OSINT) and investigations, highlighting tools for photo/video analysis, facial recognition, AI detection, and research, as well as approaches for search enhancement, document/data analysis, and transcription/translation/summarization.
🎩 H/T: Craig Silverman
Read on Digital Investigations…
📰 A Free OSINT Lesson: That email was linked to a PayPal account? Yo, Brah!
The article recounts an OSINT investigation where a seemingly unrelated spam text led to the identification of a person behind an anonymous email through their PayPal account, highlighting the role of serendipity in investigative work.
🎩 H/T: MJ Banias
OSINT Tools
🔎 Wardgraph
Wardgraph is a visual investigative tool for blockchain technologies. Search and explore blockchain wallets, entities, and more.
🔎 Search Engine Ads Scanner
SEADS (Search Engine Ads Scanner) is a tool that automatically detects advertisements on popular search engines based on user-input keywords.
🎩 H/T: Andrea Palmieri
🔎 Google Unlocked
This extension scans hidden search results censored by Google due to complaints, extracts the links from those complaints, and returns them to the search results in a matter of seconds.
🔎 DarkGPT
DarkGPT is an artificial intelligence assistant based on GPT-4-200K designed to perform queries on leaked databases.
✅ 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:
⚡ Investigating Infrastructure Spending: Cherryvale Soybean Crushing Facility
An open source investigation into the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the investment in the Cherryvale Soybean Crushing Facility near Bartlett, KS
👀 All paid posts in the archive. Go back and see what you’ve missed!
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⚡ Investigating Infrastructure Spending: Cherryvale Soybean Crushing Facility
This is the beginning of an open source investigation I’ve decided to conduct to answer a question that I’ve noticed has gone unanswered and isn’t being addressed by most news publications.
That question is what are the outcomes of major government spending bills such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act?
When I’ve asked that question to friends and colleagues, it very quickly becomes a political conversation. I wanted to add a very clear disclaimer here that my goal is not to persuade you politically; I only intend to use open source intelligence methods to show how you can answer these types of questions yourself.
I’ll be starting this series in Cherryvale, KS where plans were made to create a Soybean Crushing Facility using $350,000,000 in funds from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Let’s get started. ⬇️
The White House - Investigating in America Mapping Tool
On The White House website, there’s a mapping tool that displays all of the public and private investments made in infrastructure. You can explore the map and see what is being spent where. This is how I discovered an investment was being made in Bartlett somewhere in Montgomery County, KS.
Gaps in the mapping data
When exploring the data on screen or downloading the raw data that is supposed to power the map, there are some gaps that I aim to solve by finding open source information. Those gaps are:
What is being built?
When is construction starting?
Where is it going to be built?
Who is going to build it?
What’s the status of the project?
These sorts of gaps in information make a lot of people uneasy when it comes to large spending bills. I think transparency into these topics is the best way to remedy this.
➡️ We’ll start by defining a timeline for the project, gathering information, doing some analysis, and verifying the information we have is rational.
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