Once upon a time — which is to say, roughly Six years ago — I ran a lovely little OSINT competition. It was a charming affair. Weekly challenges. Cryptic images. Digital breadcrumbs scattered across the internet like cyber confetti. And the participants? Oh, the participants! Clever souls armed with nothing more than a browser, a few plugins, and enough curiosity to outwit even the most secretive cat.
But like all good things, it came to an end. Not with a bang. Not even with a breach. But with the quiet hum of artificial intelligence… and Google Lens.
Let me back up.
OSINT: The Gentleman’s Game of Cyber Sleuthing
For the uninitiated, OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) is essentially the art of gathering publicly available information and turning it into something useful — whether you’re tracking down a threat actor, verifying facts, or just trying to prove that your mate’s holiday “candid” was staged.
In the glory days of my OSINT competition, I would post a cropped image — a distant skyline, an obscure mural, perhaps a shopfront in some dusty back street of leafy Surrey. The challenge was simple: tell me where this is. But the work was anything but. People dug deep. Street view. Flight logs. Architecture forums. One participant once traced a location by the road markings and make of car.
It was beautiful. It was human. It was delightfully nerdy.
Then Came the Robots
And then, the tools got too good. In walks Google Lens with the digital subtlety of a bull in a server farm.
You see, Google Lens doesn’t just help you identify plants (useful), shoes (dangerous), or paintings (pretentious). It now makes geolocating an image so easy, it might as well whisper the GPS coordinates into your ear.
The kind of challenge that once required a bit of digital grit — maybe a reverse image search, cross-referencing terrain with tourist blogs, checking historical weather patterns — is now solved in 3.6 seconds with a phone camera and an internet connection. Snap. Enhance. Done.
I tested it myself. One of my favourite challenge images — a cropped shot of a nondescript café in Morocco, heavily filtered and rotated — was no match. Google Lens nailed it before I’d even lifted my second coffee.
It’s Not Cheating. It’s Just… Progress?
Now, I don’t blame the tools. They’re brilliant, really. If I were actively doing recon, OSINT, or even just trying to remember where I saw that obscure-looking tower in a Bond film, I’d be thrilled. But in a competitive context, where the joy was in the sleuthing, it’s a bit like showing up to a chess match with a supercomputer tucked under your arm.
And so, I retired the competition. Not out of bitterness, but out of a kind of respect for what it used to be. It’s like retiring a vintage car not because it’s broken, but because the roads are now ruled by self-driving Teslas doing 0–60 in a blink.
OSINT Today: Adapt or Be Googled
This isn’t to say OSINT is dead — far from it. It’s evolving. The bar is higher. The tools are smarter. The humans behind the searches now have to ask: how do I verify the tool? What’s my source’s source? Is this image real, or AI-generated nonsense from the uncanny valley?
Modern OSINT isn’t just about finding. It’s about thinking critically about what’s found. And no AI — not even Google Lens — is brilliant at context.
So, while I no longer run the old-school “Where’s this photo from?” comp, I still tip my hat to the community. You inspired me. You outsmarted me. You made the internet feel like a mystery novel we were all solving together.
And to those who still play the game — may your EXIF data be rich, your false positives be few, and your Lens-free eyes ever sharp.