Intelligence grading compared: 5x5x5, 3x5x2, Admiralty, PHIA Every mature intelligence organisation has a scheme for saying how much it trusts a source, how much it believes a piece of information, and how likely it thinks a judgement is. The schemes look similar and are not interchangeable. This explainer sets out the UK police 5x5x5 and […]
Show your working: notes and evidence capture in OSINT A finding you cannot show your working for is an anecdote. This guide covers why OSINT analysts keep a research log, what to record, and how to capture, archive and hash what you find, with a fictional log extract. Photo: Yen Vu / Unsplash What it […]
Is this source any good? Five checks for OSINT beginners Finding information is the easy bit. Deciding whether to believe it is where beginners come unstuck. A five-question checklist, how fact checkers read “sideways”, the grading scales used by UK policing and NATO, and a fictional viral rumour traced back to where it started. Photo: […]
Reverse image search basics: why one engine is never enough A photo turns up captioned “happening now”. Reverse image search is how you find out whether it is new, old or borrowed. We cover what the main free engines do in 2026, and how to walk a fictional “breaking news” photo back to the earliest […]
Search operators 101: the handful every OSINT beginner needs Search operators are short commands that tell a search engine exactly what you want. Six of them do most of a beginner’s work, and Google documents all six. We show each one in use and flag the operators old cheat sheets still promise, then walk through […]
Boolean searching for OSINT: turn a question into a query Boolean search tells a search engine which words must appear, which are alternatives and which to leave out. Each platform speaks its own dialect, so a query that works on Bing can fail on Google or X. Photo: Daniel Forsman / Unsplash What it is […]
