Benjamin Strick
Open-source investigator, adviser and educator working on conflict, human rights, information operations and geospatial analysis.
Benjamin Strick is an open-source investigator with a background in law, investigative journalism and the military. He works on conflict, influence operations, hidden networks and emerging threats, using open source data, satellite imagery, geospatial information and fundamental analysis techniques. The objective is always the same: establish what happened, where, when and who was involved, and build an investigation that holds up to scrutiny.
From 2021 to 2026 he was Director of Investigations at the Centre for Information Resilience, leading teams to support journalism, civil society, governments and accountability mechanisms through the Myanmar Witness, Sudan Witness and Eyes on Russia programmes, conflict documentation across Palestine, Lebanon and Israel, and collaborative mapping of the war in Ukraine. He built scaleable workflows for verifying and preserving large volumes of open-source material, and shaped CIR’s investigative tradecraft, evidence standards, training and investigator safety practice.
Before that he was a digital investigator with BBC Africa Eye, contributing to Anatomy of a Killing, Game of Drones, Ghost Ships and Sudan’s Livestream Massacre. He co-founded the Ocelli Project, which turned satellite evidence of destroyed settlements in Myanmar into a structured investigative system now used in accountability work, and was lead trainer and investigator on the EU Arms Project with Lighthouse Reports, tracing how EU-sold weapons ended up in human rights abuses, such as Italian armoured vehicles sold to Russia and deployed with militias in Syria.
He has stayed hands-on throughout, supporting investigative journalism with geolocation of footage, satellite imagery analysis of mass graves, debunking disinformation, rapid investigation of unfolding atrocities and identifying who runs an influence operation. He also builds the tooling, including geospatial analysis tools and archiving methods for fast-moving events.
He is a Bellingcat contributor, was named OSINT Champion of the Year in 2021, and authored the chapter on Tracking Human Rights Abuses through Online Open Source Research in Open Source Investigations in the Age of Google.
He teaches through free tutorials to more than 100,000 subscribers on YouTube and the monthly OSINT Field Notes newsletter, and has delivered masterclasses and keynotes including at the International Journalism Festival and GIJC, alongside Dataharvest and the NATO 2030 Youth Summit. A fuller list is on Press & Speaking.
Selected recognition
Award-recognised BBC Africa Eye investigations.
Webby-recognised open-source investigative work.
Champion of the Year 2021, for contribution to the field.
Listed among the UK’s open-technology influencers.