Opening the Indicator Lab pilot!
As of today every paid Indicator member can use the upcoming Lab tier's tools and benefits through early September. The Lab pairs access to a suite of AI-powered investigative tools with a monthly webinar, office hours where we can tinker together, and breakdowns of how we're using AI in our investigations.
Members get:
- OSINT Navigator: searches go from 50 to 200 per day, AI answers are grounded in the 13k+ tools AND the full Indicator archives to help you or your agent build the best methodology for your investigations.
- Data Navigator: 27 public-data sources as agent skills with the instructions and references needed to query complex APIs and return source-linked records. Includes access to our partner data providers.
- Skills Navigator: will be released later this month and include our expertise packaged as skills, including Craig's Digital Indicators Matrix.
- OSINT Tool Radar: a weekly update of new and updated tools that have been added to the Navigator database.
- Scoutpost Pro: access with 1,000 monthly credits to schedule monitors for pages, accounts, aircraft and vessels. When criteria are met, it sends you an alert, stores findings and archives pages.
- Spotlight: guides your agent to turn a lead into a structured case file with an approved methodology, sourced findings, adversarial fact-checks, and human review gates. It queries the Navigators databases directly.
- Mycroft: configures an open-source AI desktop application for researchers and journalists, with dozens of ready-made skills, reporting workflows and your searchable newsroom knowledge wiki. It also connects to everything above.
- Indicator Labs Desktop Application to install all the fullsuite easily via an onboarding page and automatically stay up to date with our latest developments.
The tier will include a monthly webinar and newsletter, as well as office hours every two weeks. The first office hours are next week on Friday and the monthly webinar will run on August 26 from 11:00–12:00 EDT. If you're a paid Indicator member you can register on the link
Making map video animations in code
Nearly 200 water conflicts were recorded across South Asia between 2020 and 2024.
I followed the river systems connecting China, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan to understand the rush to build mega-dams — and how control upstream becomes leverage downstream.
The result is The Battle for Asia's Rivers, built from maps, satellite imagery, public data, and a source-linked transparency page.
I packaged three animation skills so you can start building map stories in Remotion: map explainers, 3D flyovers, and chart animations.
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Sponsored by Remotion
This issue is sponsored by Remotion. I made every animation in the story in code with Remotion and Codex, using three animation skills for map explainers, chart sequences, and 3D flyovers. It completely removed the technical friction of creating ambitious, smooth animations — I love it!
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The stack
Data Navigator
Data Navigator is out. It extends OSINT Navigator with a catalogue of 28 databases that you — or your agents — can query inside an investigation.
The catalogue covers parliamentary and court records, company information, procurement, sanctions, and public registries. The point is to move from finding a database to pulling source-linked records without breaking the workflow.
THINKPOL and SimPPL have partnered with us on the launch and are making their data available to Indicator members through the end of September.
Spotlight
Spotlight now runs its full gated OSINT pipeline locally on Gemma4 12B — a roughly 7GB model that fits comfortably on a 32GB machine.
The blueprint covers the orchestrator, review gates, scraping, browser automation, and adversarial review. No per-token bills. No investigation data leaving the machine. Useful when the case is sensitive enough that the cloud is the wrong place to work.
Worth your time
Tools
eurlex-builder — Timo Seidl's pipeline turns EUR-Lex into research-ready datasets down to the article, paragraph, or point, with citations and amendments preserved as relations.
presscorner-builder — 130,544 European Commission press releases, speeches, and statements since 1985, plus earlier records back to 1975; filter the corpus and update it locally.
Crawl4AI — the primary open-source scraper behind Spotlight and Scoutpost, turning public pages into structured content agents can work with.
SearXNG — the self-hosted metasearch engine behind Spotlight's sovereign search path.
CTI Expert — a Claude Code OSINT and threat-intelligence skill with 67+ commands and 35 techniques, integrated into Spotlight.
— Tom