Today marks one year of DARC 🎉

What started as an idea to make investigations more efficient and less painful has turned into a growing community of journalists, NGOs, and investigators doing incredible work with data every day. Over the past year, we’ve built tools, supported investigations, launched datasets and debugged more weird edge cases than we can count.

But more than anything, we’ve built this with you. The feedback, the questions, the collaborations, the curiosity, that’s what got us here. We wouldn’t be here without this community, and we’re really proud of what we’ve all created together.

So whether you’ve been with us since day one or just joined recently, thank you.

Now, let’s get into what’s new.

🗞️ Announcements from Us

🚀 We’re Growing (and So Is Everything Else)

It’s official: DARC is getting bigger.

As we’ve taken on more clients and spun up more OpenAleph instances, we’ve brought in extra hands to keep everything running smoothly behind the scenes. We’ve hired someone focused on the server side of things (aka the person making sure nothing catches fire), and we’ve also welcomed an intern who’s helping us expand our data library.

Which means one thing: the library of public datasets you can search on our OpenAleph instance (no login required), or have preloaded into your team’s instance, is only going to keep growing.

At this rate, it might be time to start thinking about a bigger office...

🔧 OpenAleph 5.2 Is Here

We’ve recently released OpenAleph 5.2, with a focus on two key improvements (and a lil design glow-up):

• Better email ingestion We’ve made email processing more reliable, with stronger attachment extraction, improved handling of messy threads, and better reconstruction of metadata. The goal is simple: less data loss and more complete, searchable evidence.
• Secure local translation You can now translate documents directly within OpenAleph using local, open source models. No external services needed. You can also enable translation during ingest for cross-language search, making it easier to find relevant material across languages.

🧭 A more relevant search.openaleph.org

If you’ve been on the homepage recently, you might’ve noticed things look a little different.

We’re now highlighting relevant public datasets directly on the homepage, keeping things fresh and aligned with what’s happening in the world. As we add relevant datasets, they’ll show up there, so you can always spot the latest additions.

🌎 DARC in the Wild

🎯 Cool Projects with Clients

We recently supported an investigation by the great Antoine Harari and Heidi.news into the acquisition of Sberbank Switzerland.

The reporting revealed how "serial entrepreneur" Abdallah Chatila raised roughly 140 million Swiss francs to acquire the bank and transform it into TradeXBank, backed by a complex and unusual mix of creditors, including offshore and Russia-linked funding.

We helped map out and analyze the network behind the deal, contributing to a story that raises serious questions about how regulators in Switzerland and the U.S. approved the transaction.

🌐 We Joined GODIN

We’re excited to share that we’ve joined the Global Open Data Integration Network (GODIN).

GODIN brings together organizations working to make open data more connected, usable, and impactful worldwide. It’s a pretty great group, and we’re proud to be part of a community alongside folks like the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF), Open Ownership, OpenSanctions, and others pushing this space forward.

🎤 Where to Find Us This Year

We’ll also be out and about this year, talking about what we’ve been building and catching up with people across the space.

You can find us at:

• The International Journalism Festival in Perugia
• DataHarvest
• Netzwerk Recherche

If you’re around at any of these, come say hi!

📣 Join Us on darc.social

If you haven’t already, come hang out with us on darc.social.

It’s where we announce new OpenAleph features, share tips, talk shop about OSINT and data workflows, and generally geek out about investigations.

Whether you want to lurk, ask questions, or share what you’re working on, you’re very welcome.

📖 Content We're Loving

• Alex finished Radical Attention by Julia Bell in one sitting, which explores how social media algorithms and adtech keep our attention fragmented, making memory harder to form, and turns to the work of Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt for a way out.
• Karina just subscribed, a little late to the game, to the Open Journalism newsletter, where data journalist Scott Klein rounds up new public repositories from news organizations to track what newsrooms are building and, more importantly, who is sharing their work with the open source community.
• Jan just read this bombshell report by our friends at Direkt36, which reveals that a child-pornography police raid in Hungary appears to have been a cover for a politically sensitive intelligence operation targeting the opposition Tisza Party.
• And Simon, well Simon's busy looking at block sizes of a ZFS filesystem.

Thanks again for being part of our first year.

Year two? We’ve got plans 😏