2025 Year in Review
Bullshit Hunting Wrapped
2025, eh? We built shit, tore some of it down, blew up some narratives, and, most importantly, kept asking the questions Bullshit Hunting was founded on.
Before we close the book on the year, we’re looking back at the articles that resonated most. What you shared, debated, bookmarked, and came back to again. Below, we’ve compiled the top article of the year for each of our beloved contributors.
Another year of hunting. Thanks for reading.
A Free OSINT Lesson: Being a Defense Attorney is Hard
To be a lawyer, you need to be a nerd. Lawyers nerd out on legal shit. Statutes, case law, and using phrases like “boiler plate” or “fruit of the poison tree.”
You know him, you love him. MJ Banias takes readers inside a real-world legal investigation to show how OSINT can make or break a defense case. The piece follows a deep dive into a decade-old dump of police surveillance video that came with no organization, proprietary formats, and no instructions. Basically, a nightmare for under-resourced defense attorneys who don’t live in digital file formats. You probably loved this one cause he did his thing with photos and videos, and we love a picture book.
Can I be real with you for a second?
Today, the sky is gray. The air is starting to smell a little bit like mud; a thaw. The ground is a tease. The weather is a lie. Winter will get one last swipe at us before we get a good look at anything that really feels like spring, whatever the calendar says.
Drawing from courtroom reality, Some Lawyer breaks down how authentication actually works in practice. From the old-school simplicity of a witness confirming a photo they took to the modern complexity of proving social media screenshots and digital records are genuine. It’s a clear, accessible explanation of why evidence matters and how technology has made proving authenticity both more essential and more complicated.
Also, this year, Some Lawyer brought us the incredible series on Commonwealth v. Russ. These deep dives are a labour of love that cannot be overstated, and getting to host this series and its colourful storytelling was one of our personal favs of the year.
In this essay, Kennedy Chappell turns the lens inward, and outward, on how patterns emerge online much like a mysterious van looping the same streets every day. What begins as a personal story from a tiny, isolated town becomes a metaphor for internet sleuthing: noticing repetition, tracking the same usernames or narratives that show up everywhere, and learning to distinguish true signal from noise.
Surveilling the State: Open Police Records
The Canadian prairie provinces are home to the bulk of the team at Permanent Record Research—namely Saskatchewan and Manitoba. These two-bald-ass-bare provinces also have the dubious distinction of reliably topping the Canadian leaderboard in domestic and intimate partner violence rates.
In this powerful, data-driven piece, Justin Seitz shows how open police records can be used to expose patterns of domestic and intimate partner violence, and the systemic failures that often follow. Drawing on real datasets from Oklahoma, the article walks through how civil society researchers can use publicly available “calls for service” data to challenge narratives in court and uncover what official records alone might obscure.
This year, we also introduced some new content for our paid subscribers that we hope you’ve enjoyed.
Accounts Vary brought you through three four-part fictional audio stories. The series was intended to bring investigative tradecraft into compelling horror stories for your listening pleasure. They were built around real investigative techniques, OSINT tools, public records, and sleuthing skills, twisted through the lens of campfire tales.
The first chapter of each story is live and free.
High Spirits is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Think campfire stories, but indoors, imbibed, and with two investigators who simply love to talk esoteric bullshit. In this premium series, Justin and Kennedy trade ghost stories and chaos. Consider it Bullshit Hunting’s smokiest, spookiest after-hours special.
Thanks again for another year, bullshitters. We hope you’ve enjoyed as much as we have.