I’ve been dabbling in OSINT (open source intelligence) for years. Not professionally. I’ve just always been fascinated by how much public information exists, what it means for our privacy and security, and the idea that regular people should have access to the same investigative tools as journalists, law firms, and government agencies.

Automated OSINT Vision

I’ve been trying to build something like this for years. An application that could simplify common OSINT tasks, run lookups across multiple sources, and package results into something usable. At first it was just for me. Then I started to see how useful it could be across industries such as HR, legal, real estate, personal safety, political research, journalism and more.

I’d also spent years building a catalog of OSINT resources, specialty databases, and investigative tools that I knew could set a platform apart if I could ever find the right way to organize and deploy them.

Then there was the vision. I grew up on sci-fi computers. I’ve played Watchdogs. I’ve seen every episode of Person of Interest. I believed those kinds of tools, a real intelligence platform you could actually operate was build-able with the right stack. I tired to do it with GPTs, other automation and agentic platforms, but none were up to the task in a way that made sense.

The Privacy Angle

And finally, and maybe most importantly, I’m obsessed with the idea of running my own AI models and agents on my own hardware. Staying in control of my own data. Keeping my investigations, my sources, and my work off someone else’s servers. In a world where every AI tool wants to be cloud-connected and subscription-gated, local AI isn’t just a technical preference. It’s a privacy stance.

When 🦞 OpenClaw came along I immediately knew that it was the platform I’d been waiting for to build this.