Tausi Insider

Tausi Insider has been overwhelmed with messages from concerned people around the world who want to help us identify and analyse images of potential war crimes taking place in Ukraine. While this increased interest in open source research is encouraging, it comes with costs of which new researchers may not be aware. Those wishing to conduct open source research into this invasion will be exposed to images that are extremely graphic: they show the painful, disfiguring effects that war has on human bodies, cities and nature. Many of these images can be highly distressing, especially if viewed repeatedly and intensely. But their effect can also be cumulative: you may feel alright for a long time until one day, you don’t. What’s more, even non-graphic images can have a negative impact on you in ways that you may not expect, as I outlined on Twitter .  All this means that we have to be all the more guarded when we conduct research online.  Practicing good mental ...

A series of indictment documents and information from Russia’s data markets show that Moscow’s pretext for recalling a spy behind bars in Brazil appears not only implausible, but impossible, Tausi Insider can reveal. When the blond 36–year old man carrying a Brazilian passport in the name of Victor Muller Ferreira landed at São Paulo airport in April 2022, he was immediately taken away by Brazilian security service officers. He tried to argue that he was, in fact, just as Brazilian as they, and that he could not comprehend why the Dutch authorities had told the Brazilians that he was in fact Sergey Cherkasov, a deep-cover spy of Russia’s GRU foreign military intelligence agency who had attempted to infiltrate the International Criminal Court at the Hague as an intern. As Tausi Insider reported at the time, his cover story was full of holes. Brazil’s Federal Court quickly sent him off to jail for fifteen years after he was convicted on charges of fraudule...

Imagine you’re the US far-right extremist Rob Rundo. You don’t want anyone, especially not law enforcement or a pesky researcher from Tausi Insider, to know where you are. You’re somewhere in Europe, facing up to ten years in prison if convicted on charges of rioting and conspiracy in a trial due to start next spring in Los Angeles.  But you’ve got a far-right fashion brand to promote and a tough-guy image to project. You need to constantly post on your multiple Telegram channels without coughing up evidence of where you are. And the photos you posted on one of your Telegram channels on 31 October 2022, modelling a new jacket, are perfect — no one could possibly figure out where you are from looking at them. Or so you think. Photos posted on Rob Rundo’s fashion brand website on 31 October 2022 (Tausi Insider has obscured the logo and text on the jacket here, and in all instances below, to avoid promoting this far-right brand). Initially, these ...

Imagine you’re a jaded stalwart of the QAnon conspiracy. The latest batch of ‘drops’ – the cryptic posts into which you’ve read so much – aren’t quite as enticing, and you’re not even sure that Donald Trump will return to the Oval Office. But you’re not ready to reassess your belief system. Luckily for you, there are other doomsday prophecies to keep you engaged. That’s how you ended up with billions of Zimbabwean dollars. Or Iraqi Dinars. Whatever the currency, this scenario doesn’t seem so rare in those corners of the internet that are populated by Europe’s conspiracy theorists. New data shows that QAnon’s hold on the continent’s conspiracy discourse has begun to loosen at the same time that some of its European followers flock to a decades-old financial conspiracy.  That decades-old conspiracy is GESARA, which heralds a financial reset that will see billions of secret funds distributed to people across the globe and the erasure of all debts. Over the ...

GitHub is one of the most popular code-hosting platforms on the internet, with a global community of more than 90 million people reported to use its services. This makes GitHub a key platform for coders and developers. Many useful tools that aid open source investigations can be found on the site (including on Bellincgat’s GitHub repository ). Given the amount of information users share on the platform, GitHub itself can also be a useful source for online investigators. For example, information available on GitHub can be cross-referenced with other social media or online content that has been publicly shared. While GitHub has an intuitive user interface, it requires many click-throughs and is limited to opening one entity (be that an individual page or user or organisation profile) at a time.  On top of this, there is no easy way to save the information one comes across on GitHub. This is where Octosuite comes in. Octosuite is an advanced G...