OSINT for Peace
Open-Source Investigation for Conflict Analysis, Verification and Peacebuilding. Enter the course password. Unlocking is designed to persist for the browser session rather than locking when the tab loses focus.
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OSINT for Peace
This course teaches participants to find, preserve, verify, connect, analyse and responsibly communicate publicly obtainable evidence about conflict and peace. It is deliberately not a philosophy course, a general critical-thinking course, a cybersecurity course, or a human-intelligence course. The peace orientation appears in the choice of investigative problems, the protection of affected people, the communication of uncertainty, and the discipline of not turning evidence into claims it cannot support.
Course contract
What participants will be able to do
- Turn a contested claim into an investigation plan with clear information requirements.
- Search across Burmese and English variants, public web archives and major social platforms.
- Verify images and videos through provenance, reverse search, geolocation, chronolocation and corroboration.
- Use maps, satellite imagery and structured datasets without overstating what they prove.
- Investigate public corporate, procurement and organizational records.
- Preserve evidence, maintain an audit trail and report confidence transparently.
- Use AI as an assistant for triage and extraction while keeping evidence traceable to original sources.
Boundaries of this course
- No credential theft, intrusion, malware, bypassing authentication, or exploitation of exposed systems.
- No breach-database hunting for private personal data.
- No covert doxxing of ordinary people or instructions designed to enable harassment.
- No publishing precise locations of vulnerable civilians merely because the location can be found.
- No treating AI output, a single social-media post, or a detection score as proof.
Suggested delivery
The content can be delivered as a 12–15 day intensive, a 10-week course, or modular newsroom training. A practical intensive can pair Modules 1–3, 4–6, 7–9, 10–12, 13–15 and 16–18, with the capstone occupying the final two days. Participants should work from sanitized or fictionalized case packets when operational security requires it.
Beginner track
Modules 1–8, 14, 17, plus a small verification assignment.
Journalist track
All modules except deeper optional data-network exercises.
Investigator track
All modules plus expanded satellite, corporate and evidence-preservation labs.
Capstone Lab: From Claim to Publishable Finding
The capstone is deliberately messy. Participants receive a packet containing mutually inconsistent social posts, a short video, two photographs, a satellite-image excerpt, a spreadsheet of incidents, a public company document and a small set of archived webpages. Some items are relevant; some are noise; one is recycled from an earlier event.
Scenario
A widely shared claim says that an attack occurred near a civilian site in Township A during a specified 48-hour period. Different actors attribute responsibility differently. A second claim says a company connected to the supply chain may be associated with material used in the operation. The task is not to prove the most dramatic version. The task is to establish what can be responsibly known from open sources.
Capstone grading rubric
| Dimension | Weight | What strong work looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Question design | 10% | Breaks the claim into testable propositions; avoids vague mission creep. |
| Evidence preservation | 15% | Traceable evidence IDs, acquisition records, originals/archives where appropriate. |
| Verification | 25% | Multiple independent techniques; identifies recycled or weak material. |
| Analysis | 20% | Separates observation from inference; considers alternatives and source dependence. |
| Conflict sensitivity | 15% | Does not expose vulnerable people or convert uncertain attribution into accusation. |
| Communication | 15% | Concise, reproducible and appropriately qualified findings. |
Field Templates
These templates are intentionally simple. A sophisticated investigation can fail because the team cannot reconstruct where a screenshot came from.
1. Investigation Question Sheet
2. Evidence Log
3. Visual Verification Worksheet
4. Geolocation Worksheet
5. Source Independence Matrix
6. Publication Decision Note
Living Resources · Checked 25 August 2026
Tools change, disappear, become paid or alter access rules. This course therefore treats the resource list as replaceable. Verify a tool's current terms before integrating it into a sensitive workflow.
| Resource | Use in this course | Important limitation |
|---|---|---|
| Bellingcat Online Investigations Toolkit | Finding current investigation tools and guides by category. | Individual tools can change; check requirements and ethical notes. |
| Berkeley Protocol | Professional guidance for gathering, analysing, preserving and protecting digital open-source information in rights investigations. | Legal/evidentiary standards depend on intended use and jurisdiction. |
| Copernicus Browser | Sentinel imagery, visual comparison, measurement, timelapse and product search. | Free account required; spatial resolution limits what can be inferred. |
| NASA FIRMS | Near-real-time and historical active fire/hotspot detections. | A hotspot is not proof of cause, actor or exact structure burned. |
| InVID Verification Plugin | Keyframes, reverse-search support, metadata and visual verification utilities. | External services and platform integrations may change. |
| C2PA 2.4 / Content Credentials | Understanding provenance claims and cryptographically verifiable media history. | Absence of credentials does not make media fake; credentials do not replace contextual verification. |
| Meta Content Library information | Current research-oriented access to public Facebook/Instagram content for eligible researchers. | Eligibility and access restrictions apply; CrowdTangle was discontinued in 2024. |
| OpenStreetMap | Roads, places and community-maintained geographic features. | Completeness varies; treat absence as absence from the map, not necessarily absence on the ground. |
| Wayback Machine | Archived websites and historical versions. | Archive coverage is incomplete and timestamps indicate capture, not necessarily publication. |