Two OSINT investigations I was pursuing on Google Maps brought me unexpectedly face-to-face with places where historical events changed the world. Since seeing the locations on the map, I have never been the same.
I have solved a lot of CTF challenges over the past 15 years. Some were frustrating, some were clever, and some gave me that wonderful moment every investigator knows, when one small clue finally unlocks everything.
But two specific CTF challenges affected me in a way I never expected.
I don’t remember them because of the flags I earned or the points they were worth.
I remember them because, for a few moments, I forgot I was playing a CTF at all.
A few years ago I was participating in an OSMOSIS CTF. The challenge was to identify a place. I found myself studying an image of an X painted on concrete.
There was nothing remarkable about it. It was simply another clue to investigate. I examined the surroundings, searched for context and tried to determine why that particular mark mattered.
Eventually, I found it.
The X marked the exact spot where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
I just stared at it. And stared. And started to cry.
Like millions of people, I knew the history. I had seen Dealey Plaza in photographs and watched the terrible seconds of the motorcade footage that have become part of our collective memory.
But I had never looked at that X this way. Close up. Haunting.
I hadn’t searched for Kennedy. I hadn’t opened a history book or gone looking for Dealey Plaza.
I had followed evidence.
And the evidence had brought me there.
Suddenly this wasn’t an image I needed to geolocate so I could capture a flag. It was a patch of pavement where a human being had lost his life and where history had changed in seconds.
An ordinary painted X saying something almost unbearable:
Here is where President Kennedy last sat in a motorcade when a bullet tore through his head.
Another more recent CTF took me virtually through Paris.
Once again, I was doing what OSINT investigators do. Following clues. Examining streets. Looking at buildings, looking up at windows and Parisian architecture, signs and landmarks. Trying to understand where I was.
And then I went down an unknown street. No trees. All pavement. Lonely. And there I came upon a memorial to the victims of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre.
Again, I stopped and stared. I think I even said aloud “holy crap”.
The goal of the CTF challenge seemed to disappear.
There was no leaderboard in that moment. No flag I particularly cared about finding. No clever investigative technique I was congratulating myself for using.
There was simply the realization:
People died here. They were slaughtered like pigs. Now garbage cans replace where their bodies once laid.
On the same street as the former Charlie Hebdo office is a wall mural memorializing those who were killed
That virtual and visual experience has stayed with me because it revealed something about OSINT I had never really considered before.
We talk constantly about tools, techniques, pivots, verification, geolocation, metadata and methodology. We should. Those are the mechanics of our work, and learning to use them well matters enormously.
But OSINT can also do something much more profound.
It can collapse the distance between us and events we have come to think of simply as “history.”
History can become abstract with time. Dates. Headlines. Archival photographs. Documentary footage.
But start investigating a place closely enough and the abstraction begins to disappear.
History has streets. It has buildings. It has windows and doorways and intersections.
It has coordinates.
Sometimes it has an X painted on the pavement.
Sometimes it has a memorial.
And behind every one of those things are human beings.
Perhaps that is one of the quiet responsibilities that comes with doing this work.
We can become very good at finding things. We can identify locations from fragments, reconstruct events from scattered information and follow digital trails across the world without ever leaving our desks.
But we should never become so absorbed in the hunt that we forget what we have actually found.
I began both of those investigations trying to solve a puzzle.
I ended them thinking about people I had never known.
I have forgotten plenty of CTF flags over the years.
I don’t think I will ever forget those two.