By Guillen Torres Sepulveda
Publication Date: 2025-11-27 08:00:00
(Guillen Torres Sepulveda is a specialist in open source investigations with the Human Rights Center at the Berkeley School of Law.
Pinar Yolum is Professor of Trustworthy AI at the Institute of Information and Computer Science at Utrecht University.
Open source investigations collect, review, and analyze publicly available information to answer investigative questions. These questions range from fact-checking to monitoring human rights to analyzing environmental violations. Established methods for open source investigations include geolocation and chronolocation of images or videos, visualization of large amounts of data for analysis, analysis of social networks of individuals or organizations, and tracking of ships and flights. Typically, open source researchers perform these methods by collecting, systematizing, and making sense of analog and digital data using structured methods. Investigators are increasingly using various…
