The Evolution of Michael Petrie’s OSINT-Driven Investigations

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1994: Early PI Work & OSINT Awakening
  • At 22, Petrie began his career as a private investigator, relying on traditional surveillance techniques—stakeouts, tailing suspects, and field investigations.  Unlike the old-school PIs, he explored early internet tools: Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), Usenet threads, and rudimentary search engines.
  • Key Case: A claimant feigning a debilitating back injury was exposed through a staged karate class, captured via a hidden VHS camcorder.
  • Insight Gained: The internet and emerging OSINT techniques could transform investigations, amplifying reach and efficiency.
2007: Digital Prowess & Early Social Media OSINT
  • As internet capabilities expanded, Petrie refined his digital investigative skills, integrating online research into traditional PI work.
  • Key Case: Tracked a missing teen within 17 minutes by analyzing MySpace profiles, comment threads, and tagged photos—demonstrating the power of early social media OSINT.
  • Impact: The teen was found safe; years later, he is a family man, a testament to the power of digital investigations.
  • Innovation: Launched his first social media investigative platform, integrating web crawling, metadata scraping, and human analysis.
2014: Founding Social Detection & OSINT Evolution
  • Advances in machine learning, APIs, and geolocation data fueled the expansion of Petrie’s investigative technology.
  • Breakthrough: Social Detection leveraged natural language processing, cloud computing, and evolving OSINT frameworks to revolutionize digital investigations.
  • Legacy: What began with a camcorder and dial-up modem transformed into a sophisticated OSINT-driven investigative platform, reshaping the field with each new technological leap.

Why Cyphr?

As a base literal meaning, a cipher (or cypher) is an approach (often an algorithm) for encrypting or decrypting something through a series of specific sequences.

In the realm of secret communication and information security, the use of ciphers played a crucial role throughout history. These cryptographic techniques were (and still are) employed to conceal the meaning of messages, protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access help to serve the purpose of obscuring communication.

Cyphers were at the core of many unique means to facilitate communications, and enable transformative progress, communicate in sophisticated yet private means – and shaped the historical landscape, industrial nations and powerbases of economies, armies, governments and more.

Cryptography is a fundamental building block of information transmission in a secure, codified manner with an intent to deceive, or conceal – a fundamental ground for competition, security, privacy and understanding information risk management.

Cyphr understands the psychology, technology, methodology and strategy to ‘find what was not meant to be found’ and ‘solve what may not be self-evident to the eye’ and the strategy to find truth in the informational chaos

…our purpose

…our accepted challenge

…it why we created:

CYPHR