Open sources, and what we do with them.
What this is
OSINT is open-source intelligence: what can be established from material that is public and lawfully accessible. Company registers and filings. Court, land and procurement records. Regulatory publications. Archived web pages, imagery, maps, published data. Academic and trade literature. And the very large amount that people and organisations publish about themselves without meaning to.
Nothing in that list is exotic, and that is the point of it. Anything we find, you could in principle have found. What you are paying for is that somebody went and did it properly, exhaustively, and wrote down where every piece came from.
Why it works now
Twenty years ago most of this material sat on paper, in the building that issued it, behind a counter with opening hours. It is now online, indexed, and in many countries free. That is the change that made this kind of work possible for a small practice rather than only for an institution.
It is also why the discipline is young and uneven. The material is open to everybody, so access is no longer what separates a useful report from a worthless one. Method is.
What we will not do
We work only with what is open and lawfully accessible. We do not hack. We do not pretext, impersonate or social-engineer anybody. We do not buy leaked, stolen or scraped personal data. We do not follow people. We do not touch anything that would need a consent we have not been given.
This is not squeamishness, and it is not only about the law. A finding whose provenance you cannot show is a finding you cannot use: not in a negotiation, not in front of a board, not in front of a lawyer. The restraint is what makes the output worth carrying into a room.
How a report behaves
- Every finding names its source, in full, so it can be checked without us and without asking us.
- Uncertainty is written as a range. A confident sentence is not a substitute for a measurement, and we do not use one as though it were.
- A question we could not answer is written down as unanswered, together with what it would take to answer it. An open question is a result. Quietly dropping it is not.
- Nothing is rounded in the flattering direction, including when the flattering direction is ours.
- Corrections are published and dated. If we get something wrong and find out later, you are told. Documents are not reissued quietly.
The practice
Small, and meant to stay small. Work is taken by commission, or offered as a finished document that already exists. There is no bench of juniors, no research pool, and nothing is subcontracted: whoever found a thing is whoever wrote the line about it, and can be asked about that line a year later.
The consequence is a real limit rather than a boast. Only so much can be under way at once, and a question that needs a hundred people is a question for somebody else. We say which it is at the start, not at the end.
Where to go next
The four kinds of document we produce, with what each one contains and how long it runs, are set out under fields of expertise. Anything prepared for you is in the client area, readable in full before anything is agreed. Everything else goes to tower@lhch-lyb.com.