Every investigation goes through the same process. It’s slower than posting, and that’s the point.
1. Claim. We write down the specific factual claim we’re testing, in one sentence, before we start looking. Vague questions produce motivated answers.
2. Collection. We gather primary material — filings, records, imagery, video, archives — and preserve it. Every URL is archived on capture. Every file keeps its original with hashes recorded, and we work on copies.
3. Verification. Depending on the material: geolocation against satellite and street-level imagery; chronolocation from shadows, weather records, and vegetation; reverse image search for prior appearances; metadata analysis where metadata survives; corporate and court record checks against official registries; flight and vessel tracking against multiple providers.
We record what we tried and failed to confirm as carefully as what we confirmed.
4. Independence check. For every corroborating source we ask where it originally came from. Sources that share an origin count once.
5. Right of reply. Named subjects are contacted with the specific allegations.
6. Review. A second editor reads the piece against the evidence pack, checking every source resolves and every claim sits at or below what its sources support. Anything naming a living person needs two editors.
7. Publication. With grades, sources, archive links, and the date of last update.
8. Correction. If we’re wrong, we fix it in public. See the corrections policy.
Reproducing our work
Our guides document the methods above in detail. If you can’t reproduce a finding from what we published, that’s a failure on our side — tell us and we’ll publish more of the working.