In this episode, Jake Creps digs into two very different kinds of persistence. First, the human sort: the reply guys, power users and lifelong obsessives who populate every forum on the internet and, in doing so, leave behind years of searchable posting history tied to a single identity. Jake covers what long-term post histories actually reveal about a person, where the high-value discussions live beyond Reddit, and a simple four-step workflow for working a username or topic from first search through to cross-referenced findings. Along the way he explains why old, lightly moderated forums and comment sections are often the richest material of all, and why username reuse makes pivoting between platforms so straightforward.
Then Jake turns to the machine sort of persistence, tackling the hardest part of building an OSINT tool: keeping it alive as sources and methods shift underneath you. He walks through a discovery pipeline built on GitHub search, Google dorks and browser extension source code, then explains how agentic AI can be used to fold capabilities from those projects into a tool of your own that keeps getting better over time. He closes on the uncomfortable question this raises for open source: what happens when anyone can harvest twenty or thirty projects into a single commercial product for the price of a monthly subscription. Also in this episode: a quick look at Leaker, a command-line tool that queries a dozen breach databases from a single search, plus the latest news and tools from the newsletter.
Highlights
💬 Why forum power users and reply guys are the most valuable posters in OSINT
🕰️ What years of post history reveals that a current profile never will
🔍 Where to look beyond Reddit: niche forums, comment sections and dusty old threads
🧭 A four-step workflow: search, track history, spot behavioural patterns, cross-reference
🔑 Why username reuse and point systems make cross-platform pivots easy
🗝️ A brief look at Leaker, a CLI tool that consolidates searches across 12 breach data providers
🤖 Building an OSINT tool that continuously improves itself using agentic AI
🌱 Using GitHub API, SERP APIs and CRX viewers to build a feed of tools to harvest from
⚖️ The ethical and existential questions this raises for open source projects
🗣️ Nearly 100,000 AI chats that users thought were private turned out to be anything but
🕵️ Bellingcat tracks down the crypto entrepreneur behind a forum trading stolen intimate images
🗺️ New tools: OSINT Mapping Tool, Mail Access and Search Phone
Links
Issue #114: https://osintnewsletter.com/p/114
Issue #115: https://osintnewsletter.com/p/115
Issue #116: https://osintnewsletter.com/p/116
