Old-school techniques like persistence, teamwork, and knocking on doors remained the central drivers of investigative projects around the world in 2023. Even The New York Times’ high-tech visual forensic investigation into possible Russian war crimes in Bucha, Ukraine, was dependent on two young reporters Yousur Al-Hlou and Masha Froliak going door to door, asking survivors if they had captured phone video from the invasion last March. GIJN offers the following 10 user-friendly tools that you might consider in your next investigations: 1. The space bar to find potential whistleblowers on LinkedIn. 2. The “super-powered” Telepathy tool for researching Telegram. 3. Osint.industries email and phone connections tool. 4. The Aleph cross-reference feature. 5. Bellingcat Auto Archiver to preserve video evidence in seconds. 6. Epieos tool to track bad actors from their Google reviews. 7. Affordable GPS devices to track waste and smuggling routes. 8. Junkipedia: the tool that hopes to become the 'CrowdTangle for everything.' 9. Global Forest Watch and the MapBiomas Alert database for deforestation investigations. 10. DocumentCloud add-ons for redactions and PII. [2f215555]
