Every investigation starts somewhere. For many, it starts with a username. And increasingly, the evidence lives inside a video you don’t have time to watch.
This episode covers Issues 101 and 102 of The OSINT Newsletter and focuses on two practical areas of modern OSINT: mapping a target’s digital footprint using a comprehensive open-source framework, and extracting intelligence from video content at scale.
In Episode 16 of The OSINT Podcast, host Jake Creps opens with a deep dive into TheBigBrother, a GitHub-based OSINT framework that consolidates username enumeration, reverse image searching, network scanning, dark web lookups, EXIF extraction, crypto tracing, and more into a single tool. Jake walks through setup, core modules, and the real investigative value it offers - from identity correlation and social media pivoting to red teaming and privacy audits.
He then moves into one of the more underrated challenges in OSINT: working with video. Jake breaks down how to extract transcripts from YouTube and TikTok using tools like YouTube Transcript API and TokScript, and explains how to scale that process across dozens or hundreds of videos using open-source libraries and lightweight custom tooling.
Once video content is converted to text, the episode shows how to make it searchable - combining local search methods, Obsidian vaults, and LLMs to analyse transcripts at scale and produce actionable intelligence outputs.
Along the way, the episode reinforces a core principle: tools support collection, but intelligence requires analysis. Knowing how to build the pipeline is only half the work - knowing what to do with the output is what separates a collection exercise from actual OSINT.
Highlights include:
🔍 TheBigBrother Deep Dive – a full walkthrough of the framework’s modules including Profiler, Footprint, Net Scan, Dark Web, EXIF, Dorks, and Sky Radar, with practical use cases for each.
🎥 Video Transcript Extraction – how to pull transcripts from YouTube and TikTok one at a time and at scale using YouTube Transcript API, TokScript, and the Summarize library.
📂 Searching at Scale – combining transcribed video content with local search tools, Obsidian, and LLMs to surface patterns and produce intelligence reports.
Whether you’re tracing a username across the internet or digging through hours of video evidence, Episode 16 gives you the tools and workflow to do it efficiently.
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