About

A toolkit for open source researchers

Welcome to Bellingcat’s Online Open Source Investigation Toolkit!

Illustration by Ann Kiernan for Bellingcat.

This is your place to discover tools! Our toolkit includes satellite and mapping services, tools for verifying photos and videos, websites to archive web pages, and much more. Most of the tools that we include can be used for free.

On the left hand side, you can see all available categories (for instance, Maps & Satellites or Geolocation). Click on these category names to enter the tool lists.

Click on the name of the tool to view an in-depth description of the tool (if available).

On the right hand side of each entry in the tool list is a direct link to the tool website.

You can also download this toolkit (or some of its categories) as csv.

This toolkit is still a work-in-progress and the number of available tool descriptions will grow over time. You can read more about the toolkit here.

Our Toolkit Maintainers and Guardians

Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit has a long tradition but our newest version is special: It is offered in collaboration with the Bellingcat volunteer community.

Bellingcat volunteers, staff and the wider open source researcher community contribute to writing and updating toolkit descriptions. Bellingcat staff checks each toolkit entry before it goes online.

If our Toolkit Maintainers choose to be publicly mentioned, you can find their names on individual tool pages under "page maintainer".

Our Toolkit Guardians have a special role: They help us further develop this toolkit to make sure it meets the needs of open source researchers.

Our Toolkit Guardians:

Afton is a volunteer open-source investigator with training in digital investigations for use in human rights and criminal accountability. She is the Volunteer Toolkit Guardian for the category Transport.

Anisa Shabir is a volunteer open-source researcher at Bellingcat's Global Authentication Project and holds an MA in investigative journalism from the Arizona State University's Howard Center for Investigative Journalism. Anisa is the Volunteer Toolkit Guardian for the category Image/Video.

Lieth Carrillo is a Colombian anthropologist dedicated to transnational organized crime and corruption research. She is currently involved in OSINT research on transnational wildlife trade and illegal exploitation of natural resources. She is the Volunteer Toolkit Guardian for the Environment & Wildlife category.

Lora is a linguist by education, media and corporate intel analyst by trade, and an occasional due diligence investigator. She is the Volunteer Toolkit Guardian for the Companies & Finance category.

Martin Sona is an interdisciplinary researcher and lecturer with a social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and tech innovation background. He's passionate about science, community coordination, and making complex information meaningful and accessible. Here, he serves as the Volunteer Toolkit Guardian for the Social Media category.

Sophie Tedling has worked with Bellingcat as a volunteer, Tech Fellow & contributor. Her background is engineering, AI & risk, and she runs PeakVisorforOSINV on X which collects input from the research community with the goal to communicate the needs of open source researchers to the PeakVisor developer team. She is the Volunteer Toolkit Guardian for the Maps & Satellites category.

Contribute to this Toolkit

If you are an expert for a specific category of open source research tools and you would like to contribute to this toolkit, get in touch with Johanna via [e-mail]. Feel free to introduce yourself and share a few words about your tool expertise. We would love to hear from you.

Keep in mind that contributing to our toolkit is a long-term volunteer commitment: You write tool descriptions and update them on a monthly basis. We do not accept volunteer contributors whose identity we don’t know.

Please do not suggest tools that should be added to the toolkit via this e-mail address.

Bellingcat Team and Contact

This collaborative toolkit has been designed by Bellingcat staff member Johanna Wild during her 2024 Nieman-Berkman Klein Fellowship in Journalism Innovation at Harvard University.

Viktorija Ignatavičiūtė and Galen Reich contributed to defining the volunteer involvement for this project, with Viktorija Ignatavičiūtė supporting our toolkit volunteer community also on a daily basis.

If you have any feedback or questions, please get in touch with Johanna Wild via [e-mail]. Please do not suggest tools that you would like to see added to the toolkit via this e-mail address.

About Bellingcat

Bellingcat is an independent investigative collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists brought together by a passion for open source research.

You can follow Bellingcat's work here:

Bellingcat website, BlueSky, Discord, Facebook,Github, Instagram, Mastodon, Patreon, Reddit, Soundcloud, Twitch, X,Youtube.

Bellingcat is a non-profit and the ability to carry out our work is dependent on the kind support of individual donors. If you would like to support our work, you can so here.

We also provide workshops on open source investigative methods and tools. For those of you interested in becoming a Bellingcat volunteer, have a look at our volunteer community page.