The Butterfly Bureau’s OSINT Tradecraft section is where investigative skills meet real world application. This category focuses on the tools, techniques, and methodologies used by open source intelligence researchers, journalists, digital investigators, and citizen sleuths to uncover information hidden in plain sight.
The internet remembers everything, except apparently the privacy settings you changed six months ago. Your digital footprint includes accounts, photographs, public records, location history, advertising profiles, breached passwords, shopping activity, old usernames, forgotten apps, and information purchased by data brokers. Some of it was shared willingly. Some of it was collected quietly. Some of it …
Government agencies collect phones, computers, DNA samples, financial records, surveillance footage, documents, fingerprints, weapons, photographs, and entire storage devices. The existence of an evidence receipt proves that an item entered government custody. It does not prove that anyone examined it. That distinction matters. Evidence can be photographed, packaged, numbered, stored, transferred, rejected by a laboratory, …
An investigator collects an interview, photograph, recording, financial record, forensic result, or digital extraction. The evidence enters an agency file. Then, somewhere between collection and prosecution, it stops moving. Sometimes the explanation is ordinary. The evidence was duplicative, unrelated, legally unusable, transferred elsewhere, or received after a decision was made. Sometimes an agent failed to …
A witness changes her story. An informant withdraws an accusation. A cooperating defendant admits that his first account was incomplete. Suddenly, the government must decide whether it has received a meaningful correction, a frightened retreat, a tactical lie, or evidence that its case has been wobbling around in borrowed heels. A witness recantation does not …
Federal investigations do not always advance through subpoenas, raids, and dramatic courthouse entrances. Sometimes an attorney calls a prosecutor and says, in careful lawyer language, “My client may know something useful, but we would prefer not to stroll blindly into criminal exposure.” That conversation may lead to an attorney proffer, a client proffer session, a …
A heavily redacted federal file can look like the government handed a black marker to an anxious raccoon. Names vanish. Entire paragraphs disappear. Exemption codes multiply. Page counts change between releases. One agency conceals information that another agency quietly publishes six months later. The black boxes are not the evidence. However, their placement, size, legal …
Before you send an agency another broad request for “all records about” a scandal, look at what other people have already asked for. A Freedom of Information Act request log can reveal useful search terms, agency offices, dates, tracking numbers and records someone else pursued. The agency’s reading room may even have the released material …
A government document can vanish from a public archive, disappear from a Freedom of Information Act production, or become mysteriously unfamiliar to the agency that once quoted it. That does not necessarily mean someone destroyed it. It does mean the document left traces, and those traces can be investigated. Documents create administrative footprints. They are …
A missing government email does not always disappear without leaving a trace. It may survive inside a reply, forwarded message, calendar invitation, attachment inventory, mobile device export, case file, routing record, litigation exhibit, or the mailbox of another participant. That does not mean every deleted message can be recovered. It means researchers can often reconstruct …
Physical evidence does not explain its own history. A seized telephone cannot tell you who collected it, where it was stored, whether a laboratory examined it, or why it later vanished from the public record. That history lives in evidence control records. Learning how to trace FBI evidence through evidence control records can help researchers …