Welcome to our very first DARC newsletter. We’re so glad you’re here.

You probably know this already, but here's a quick refresher before we dive in: We provide research and data solutions tailored to the unique needs of journalists, NGOS, and other investigative teams.

Powered by OpenAleph, our open-source search tool, we help make investigations faster, more efficient, and just plain easier. Think of us as your external research and data desk, reliable like an in-house team but with the convenience of a monthly subscription. Kind of like the Netflix of investigations?

Whether you’re chasing assets across borders, untangling messy leaks, or just need a second brain to wrestle with tricky data, we’re here for you. Plus, we run trainings on all of it too.

Thanks for joining us. Here’s what’s new.

🗞️ Announcements from Us

🔧 New OpenAleph Features

Since taking over the development of the open source search tool, we’ve been busy rolling out some new features we think you'll love:

• AI-Powered Transcriptions: Upload audio and video files and OpenAleph will now transcribe them using ✨AI✨, making your media fully searchable. If you're curious how we made this work, check out our blog post where we share all the trials and tribulations that went on behind the scenes.
• Putting a Face to the Name: You can now pull in photos for any entity from Wikidata by simply adding a Wikidata ID. We've been equating this feature to making a "baseball card" for any person, place, or thing. To get you started, we put together a quick tutorial on turning a list of icebreaker ships from Wikidata into photo-filled entities in OpenAleph.
• Smarter Location Insights: Physical mapping is now a thing! If an entity has a physical address, you can see it placed on a map and find other entities nearby, with distances included. It’s a new way to spot potential links between entities, beyond shared names or common associates.

📚 Datasets in the Shared Library

We’re also working with partners to build the biggest, baddest library of public and semi-public datasets out there. Our goal? Make data easy to access and share using a common schema called FollowTheMoney (FtM). That way, if we scrape all overseas entities that own property in the UK and their beneficial owners, and our friends at OpenSanctions do the same for a list of Hong Kong politicians, we can easily connect the dots — like checking whether any Hong Kong politicians own property in the UK through offshore entities — because we’ve both committed to the same schema.

The library is growing fast, and here are a few datasets already in there to whet your appetite:

• The EU Financial Transparency System (Beneficiaries of funding from the EU budget)
• Offshore Entities Owning Property in England and Wales
• Lobby Register of the German Bundestag
• Consolidated Sanctions List from OpenSanctions

We’d love for you to get involved! If you’re already scraping data that you want to share with the community, or you want to make a dataset searchable by funding a scraper, we’re here to make it happen. Just let us know.

🤝🏼 Cool Projects with Clients

We’ve got some exciting client projects in the works, but in the meantime, here are a couple recently published pieces we’re proud to have contributed to:

The Iguana Papers:The BBC and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) carried out a years-long investigation into Colombian state-owned oil company Ecopetrol after a whistleblower leaked hundreds of internal emails and documents. On publication day, they wanted to make many of these documents available, so we set up an OpenAleph instance optimized for high traffic, with extra security and caching layers, plus a failover replica in another data center to make sure there was zero chance that data wasn't being seen.

SOMO published a report warning proposed amendments to the EU's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive would severely weaken supply chain oversight. Analyzing 6,758 suppliers from seven major European supermarkets, the study found that proposed restrictions would exclude 94% of high-risk suppliers from scrutiny and shield 90% of companies from providing due diligence information through the "VSME shield" for smaller companies. This would particularly impact high-risk products like chocolate, bananas, and tea, where the most serious abuses occur in upper supply chain tiers rather than with direct suppliers. We helped SOMO source comprehensive supplier lists from major European supermarkets to enable this critical analysis.

📣 Join Us on darc.social

We’re big on community and want to create a place where investigators can geek out over the stuff they love most: OSINT research, building open source tools, and making data make sense. It’s a place to share tips, ask questions about your OpenAleph setup, and swap stories about how you cracked everyday investigative problems.

Come hang out with us at darc.social. Lurkers and contributors alike are welcome.

📖 Content We're Loving

• Alex has been diving into Tech Won’t Save Us podcast and recommends two standout episodes. One unpacks the roots of cyberlibertarianism and how early Internet pioneers who once shared political ground have since split ideologically. The other traces how conservative forces shaped Internet legislation to favor private profit over public interest. Both left Alex wondering what a better ideological foundation for the future of the Internet might look like.
• Karina's been loving Craig Silverman & Alexios Mantzarlis' new newsletter Indicator, which is the perfect mix of investigative journalism and practical tutorials to help journalists and researchers understand and investigate digital deception.
• Jan recently listened to an episode of the Ottoman History Podcast about how passports in the late Ottoman Empire turned into tools for state surveillance and identity control. It’s an interesting look at how some of today’s border control practices go way back.
• Grae has been reading Jamie Bartlett's The People Vs Tech: How the Internet is Killing Democracy (and how We Save It), which explores how our embrace of big tech is quietly dismantling the foundations of democracy.
• And Simon, well Simon's been busy reading OpenAleph's ingest-file source code.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading! Got questions or want to collaborate? Reach out any time.

The DARC Team 🖤