A Digital Investigator’s Free Toolkit 🔍
4 tools for online research
I’m inviting my most helpful colleagues to share useful tools and insights. Craig Silverman, who wrote today’s post, is one of the sharpest researchers I know. He and Alexios Mantzarlis are building a sharp new publication, Indicator, especially worth following if you’re interested in digital deception. - Jeremy
Craig: We’re all trying to make sense of a chaotic information environment awash in synthetic fakes, sophisticated scams, undisclosed ads, and unverified claims. It’s difficult to figure out what’s real, where it came from, and whether you can trust it.
I’m a journalist who’s spent more than 15 years investigating digital deception and teaching people how to spot it. Roughly a year ago I left a job at ProPublica to launch Indicator, an independent outlet that covers online deception and equips people with digital investigative tools and skills.
We all need to get sharper at finding and interrogating information, so here are four free tools I’d put in any curious person’s toolkit, and why each one earns its place.
1. The Wayback Machine browser extension: Save a page and view its history
Use it to: publicly archive a page, and see at a glance how often it’s been archived before, and how a page or site has changed over time (screenshot).
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is the biggest collection of webpage snapshots anywhere. But most people never use its best features. The free browser extension works with Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. It’s the best way to get the most out of the Wayback Machine.
First, you can save the page you’re on in the Internet Archive without having to copy the URL, navigate to archive.org, paste it in, and wait for it to capture. Just click the icon to open the extension, press “Save page now,” and the extension saves it to the archive.
The extension also offers a quick way to view historical versions of a page. Click “Oldest” and a new tab opens with the first capture of the page; or select “Newest” to see the most recent. The calendar icon will take you to the Wayback Machine’s full record of captures for the page.
The extension has a lot of customization options in Settings. Two of my favorites are in the Context menu (screenshot).
“Wayback Machine Count” shows how many times the current page has already been archived (screenshot).
If you find yourself on a dead site, “404 Not Found” instantly tells you if an archived version of the page is available.
Last thing: Go to archive.org and sign up for a free account. Then click the login icon on the extension (the arrow in the bottom right) and sign in. The pages you save with the extension will now be stored in your private archive on the site.
Wonder Tools subscribers can claim 20% off an Indicator Membership. It’s a great way to build your digital investigative skills. Get access to our investigative and research guides, original reporting, a monthly workshop, plus all recordings and increased access to OSINT Navigator (see below) to find the right tool for the job.
2. Ubikron: Preserve pages privately
Use it to: keep a private, timestamped trail of what you saw and when, organize screenshots by project, and make notes.
Web capture and archiving work on two levels.
The Wayback Machine is for public capture: saving a page so it’s part of a (mostly) permanent archive that anyone can find and link to.
Ubikron is for private capture. When you’re deep in research, you move fast: opening pages, following links, chasing breadcrumbs from one tab to the next. It can be hard to retrace your steps later if you weren’t recording where you went.
Ubikron is a continuous capture tool that you add as a Chrome extension. It automatically captures webpages as they load in your browser and stores them in folders in the cloud. You can stay in the flow of researching, confident it’s recording what you see.
To turn it on, click the extension icon in Chrome and flip on the “Navigation Recording” toggle:
You can also enable a hovering widget that allows you to quickly turn on and off recording (screenshot).
One important caveat: Ubikron grabs the top of the page as it first loads and does not automatically scroll down. So it doesn’t capture the full page as you navigate. But you can click the “Save MHTML/PDF” button to take a snapshot of exactly what’s in front of you.
You can also make a note as you capture a specific page or image within a page (screenshot).
To review your captures, click the red Ubikron icon in the center of the widget (or the extension icon). It opens a new tab where you can look over what you’ve saved. It also has a side panel (screenshot) where you can write notes and drag in screenshots.
Everything gets saved into a project folder you create. It’s also easy to switch between folders as you browse.
In the free version, your captures are stored on Ubikron’s servers. If you’re privacy-conscious, the paid version lets you run it on a server you control.
Sponsored Message
Masterclass
AI-powered coaching for every call. A new kind of meeting tool that transforms how you show up, lead, and influence at work.
Get real-time guidance during calls, feedback after every meeting, and progress tracking to build confidence and turn every call into an opportunity to lead.
3. Use Gemini to check if an image might be AI
Use it to: check a suspicious image, video, or audio file for an invisible watermark.
Synthetic images and videos are everywhere. If you suspect you’re looking at an AI-generated pic (or video), a reverse image search is a great first step. You should also run it through Gemini, Google’s chatbot. Upload a photo or a video screengrab and ask: “Is this AI?”
Important caveat: this doesn’t work on all synthetic media. It’s only useful if the content was created using Google or OpenAI’s generative tools.
I generally don’t recommend that people use synthetic media detection tools because of the risk of false positives/negatives. Here’s why this case is different. Google created watermarking technology called SynthID. It embeds invisible imprints into images, video, and audio made with Google AI models like Gemini and Nano Banana. OpenAI recently announced it will use SynthID for its images, too. The difference with SynthID is that it’s an invisible signal that’s embedded into the content at the point of creation. This increases, but doesn’t guarantee, the potential for detection.
As a test, I generated an image in Gemini, renamed the file, and removed the visible Gemini logo/watermark. Here’s the result (screenshot).
As of this writing, SynthID can only be detected in visual or audio content generated with Google’s tools, and for images generated by OpenAI tools. There are sites claiming they can remove SynthID watermarking, so don’t assume that the lack of SynthID means an image is authentic.
Warnings aside, it’s worth a shot. Gemini may also be able to detect if a file contains metadata that could assist with verification. (Metadata is information that’s embedded in the file itself.)
4. OSINT Navigator: Find investigative tools
Use it to: find the digital tools available for an investigative task.
My final recommendation is OSINT Navigator (OSINT = open-source intelligence), which we built with journalist and programmer Tom Vaillant. It’s free, and it’s the easiest way to discover useful OSINT tools.
Start by typing what you’re trying to do: “How do I find the owner of a website?”, “How do I investigate a social media profile?”, or “How do I trace a crypto wallet?” Navigator scans a dataset of more than 11,000 OSINT tools listed by 19 online toolkits.
Bellingcat, the nonprofit investigative outlet, maintains one such free toolkit; they and others let us check their lists every week and track what’s been added or removed. The result is, as far as we know, the largest database of OSINT tools. Ask Navigator a question and it returns tools recommended for your task.
You get 10 free searches a day if you sign up with your email.
I ran a query for “How do I track a ship’s location?” and it showed me an AI-generated summary (screenshot) that suggested five tools. Below that is more detail on those tools (screenshot).
If you’re starting an investigation and wondering what’s out there to help, it’s a good first stop. Over time, it can introduce you to the wider landscape of what’s available and who recommends it.
archive.is is also a very useful tool.