Prerequisites
None. This is a foundational tutorial.
01
Your research environment is part of your methodology
A clean research environment is not a luxury for well-resourced newsrooms. It is the baseline that makes every subsequent technique in this curriculum defensible. Every query you run, every profile you visit, every tool you open leaves a trace. The question is whether that trace leads back to you.
OSINT investigations fail at the attribution stage more often than at the collection stage. A subject who identifies your research browser, your employer's IP range, or a handle you reused from a personal account can anticipate your queries, change their behaviour, or identify you to hostile third parties. The environment you use to research is as much a part of your investigative method as the tools you run inside it.
This tutorial builds the minimum viable research environment: a VPN that does not log your traffic, browser profiles that hold no personal data and leave no cross-session fingerprint, and a set of research personas that are structurally separated from your real identity. These are not advanced tradecraft. They are the floor beneath everything else in the Methods curriculum.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this tutorial you will be able to:
Set up an isolated browser profile for investigative work that carries no personal data and leaves no persistent fingerprint
Configure a no-log VPN on your research device and verify that it is routing correctly before each session
Build a research persona that is structurally separated from your real identity and your publication's infrastructure
Apply the session-start checklist to confirm your environment is clean before opening any investigative tool
Identify the specific failure modes that collapse research environment isolation and the checks that catch them early
