mirror of https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent.git synced 2026-05-27 06:11:40 +00:00

feat(skills): add osint-investigation optional skill (closes #355 ) (#26729 )

* feat(skills): add osint-investigation optional skill (closes #355)

Phase-1 public-records OSINT investigation framework adapted from
ShinMegamiBoson/OpenPlanter (MIT). Lives in optional-skills/research/.

Six data-source wiki entries (FEC, SEC EDGAR, USAspending, Senate LD,
OFAC SDN, ICIJ Offshore Leaks), each following the 9-section template:
summary, access, schema, coverage, cross-reference keys, data quality,
acquisition, legal, references.

Six stdlib-only acquisition scripts that emit normalized CSV, plus three
analysis scripts:

  - entity_resolution.py  — three-tier match (exact / fuzzy / token overlap)
                            with explicit confidence per row
  - timing_analysis.py    — permutation test for donation/contract timing
                            correlation, joins through cross-links
  - build_findings.py     — assembles structured findings.json with
                            evidence chains pointing back to source rows

Validation: full pipeline runs end-to-end on synthetic fixtures. Entity
resolution found 24 cross-matches with 0 false positives on a 5-row /
4-row test set. Timing analysis on 5 donations clustered near 3 awards
returned p=0.000, effect size 2.41 SD. Findings JSON correctly tags
HIGH-severity timing pattern. All 9 scripts pass --help and py_compile.

Docs site page auto-generated by website/scripts/generate-skill-docs.py;
sidebar + catalog entries updated by the same generator.

* fix(osint-investigation): live API fixes from end-to-end sweep

Live-tested the skill on a real public-citizen query and found three bugs
the synthetic E2E missed. All three are now fixed and re-verified.

1. FEC fetch hung on contributor name searches.
   The combination of two_year_transaction_period + sort=date +
   contributor_name puts the OpenFEC query plan on a slow path that the
   upstream gateway times out (25s+). Switched to min_date/max_date with no
   explicit sort. Renamed --candidate to --contributor (the original name
   was misleading: FEC searches by donor, not by candidate; --candidate is
   kept as a deprecated alias). Added --state filter for narrowing.

2. ICIJ Offshore Leaks reconcile endpoint returns 404.
   ICIJ removed the Open Refine reconciliation API. Rewrote
   fetch_icij_offshore.py to download the official bulk CSV ZIP (~70 MB,
   public, no auth) and search it locally. Cached under
   $HERMES_OSINT_CACHE/icij/ (default ~/.cache/hermes-osint/icij/) for
   30 days, --force-refresh to refetch. Verified live: 'PUTIN' query
   returns 5 Panama Papers officer matches in 0.5s after first download.

3. SEC EDGAR silently returned 0 when the company-name resolver matched
   an individual Form 3/4/5 filer (insider trading disclosures).
   Now surfaces 'Resolved company X → CIK Y (Z)' on stderr, prints a
   filing-type histogram when the type filter wipes results, and
   explicitly warns when the matched CIK appears to be an individual
   filer rather than a corporate registrant.

Bonus: _http.py was retrying 429 responses with exponential backoff plus
honoring (often-missing) Retry-After headers, which compounded into
multi-second hangs per page when the upstream key was over quota.
Changed to fail-fast on 429 with a clear, actionable error showing the
upstream's quota message. Verified: 0.3s fast-fail vs the previous 60s
hang on DEMO_KEY rate-limit exhaustion.

Updated SKILL.md, fec.md, and icij-offshore.md to match the new CLI
flags and ICIJ bulk-cache flow. Regenerated the docusaurus page via
website/scripts/generate-skill-docs.py.

Live sweep results across all 6 sources for 'Dillon Rolnick, New York':
- OFAC SDN: 0 matches ✓ (correctly not sanctioned)
- USAspending: 0 matches ✓ (correctly not a federal contractor)
- Senate LDA: 0 matches ✓ (correctly not a lobbying client)
- SEC EDGAR: warns it resolved to 'Rolnick Michael' (CIK 0001845264)
    who is an individual Form 3 filer, not a corporate registrant
- ICIJ: 0 matches ✓ (correctly not in any offshore leak)
- FEC: rate-limited (DEMO_KEY); fails fast with clear quota message

* feat(osint-investigation): expand to 12 sources covering identity, property, courts, archives, news

Phase-2 expansion per Teknium feedback that the original 6-source skill
(federal financial/regulatory only) wasn't a complete OSINT toolkit. Adds
6 more sources covering the major omissions a real investigation would
reach for first.

New sources (6 fetch scripts + 6 wiki entries):

1. NYC ACRIS — Real property records (deeds, mortgages, liens) via the
   city's Socrata API. Search by party name or property address. Joins
   Parties to Master to populate doc_type, dates, borough, and amount.
   Coverage: 5 NYC boroughs, ~70M party records, 1966-present.

2. OpenCorporates — Global corporate registry covering 130+ jurisdictions
   (~200M companies). Free API token at
   https://opencorporates.com/api_accounts/new raises the rate limit;
   HTML fallback works without one (limited fields).

3. CourtListener (Free Law Project) — federal + state court opinions
   (~10M back to colonial era) + PACER dockets via RECAP. Anonymous v4
   search works; COURTLISTENER_TOKEN raises rate limits.

4. Wayback Machine CDX — historical web captures (~900B+). Used both for
   surveillance-of-record (when did this site change?) and as a
   content-recovery layer when other sources point to dead URLs.

5. Wikipedia + Wikidata — narrative bio + structured facts. Wikipedia
   OpenSearch for article matching, REST summary for extracts, Wikidata
   Action API (wbgetentities) for claims. Avoids the SPARQL Query
   Service which is aggressively rate-limited.

6. GDELT 2.0 DOC API — global news monitoring in 100+ languages,
   ~2015-present. Auto-retries with 6s backoff on the standard
   1-req-per-5-sec throttle.

Other changes in this commit:

- SEC EDGAR no longer raises SystemExit when the company-name resolver
  finds no CIK; writes an empty CSV with header so the rest of a
  pipeline can keep moving and the warning is just on stderr.

- _http.py User-Agent updated per Wikimedia policy: includes app name,
  version, and a 'set HERMES_OSINT_UA to identify yourself' instruction.

- SKILL.md workflow now groups sources into two clusters (federal
  financial vs identity/property/courts/archives/news) with bash
  examples for each. 'When to use this skill' lists the broader set of
  investigation patterns the expanded sources unlock.

Live sweep results on 'Dillon Rolnick, New York' across all 12 sources:

  ofac           ✓ 0 (correctly clean)
  icij           ✓ 0 (correctly not in any leak)
  usaspending    ✓ 0 (correctly not a federal contractor)
  senate_lda     ✓ 0 (correctly not a lobbying client)
  sec_edgar      ✓ 0, warns: resolved to 'Rolnick Michael' (CIK 0001845264),
                   individual Form 3 filer, NOT a corporate registrant
  fec            — rate-limited (DEMO_KEY exhausted), fails fast with
                   clear quota message
  nyc_acris      ✓ 200 records named Rolnick across NYC; 48 records at
                   571 Hudson (the property the web identifies as his)
  opencorporates ✓ 0 (no API token configured; HTML fallback)
  courtlistener  ✓ 0 for 'Dillon Rolnick'; 20 for 'Rolnick' generally;
                   5 for 'Microsoft' sanity check
  wayback        ✓ 30 captures of nousresearch.com from 2011-present
  wikipedia      ✓ 0 (correctly not notable enough); Bill Gates sanity
                   returns full structured facts (occupation, employer,
                   DOB, place of birth, country)
  gdelt          ✓ 0 for 'Dillon Rolnick'; 5 for 'Nous Research'

All 17 scripts compile clean and pass --help. Synthetic analysis pipeline
regression still passes (entity_resolution 30 matches, timing p=0.000,
findings 2).

* feat(osint-investigation): remove FEC; DEMO_KEY rate-limits make it unreliable

The FEC fetcher consistently failed the live sweep because the OpenFEC
DEMO_KEY tier (40 calls/hour) exhausts on a single investigation, and
the upstream returns slow-path query plans for unindexed contributor-name
searches that the gateway times out. Without a real API key it's not
usable; with one the user has to sign up at api.data.gov first. That's
too much setup friction for a skill that should work out of the box.

Removed:
  - scripts/fetch_fec.py
  - references/sources/fec.md

Updated:
  - SKILL.md frontmatter description + tags
  - 'When NOT to use' now points users at https://www.fec.gov/data/ for
    federal donations
  - entity_resolution example switched from donor↔contractor to
    lobbying-client↔contractor (Senate LDA + USAspending pair)
  - timing_analysis example switched to lobbying-filings vs awards
  - 8 wiki entries had their 'FEC ↔ ...' cross-reference bullets removed

11 sources remain (5 federal financial + 6 identity/property/courts/
archives/news). All scripts compile, pass --help, and the synthetic
analysis pipeline still passes on the new lobbying-shaped regression
fixture (30 matches, p=0.000 on tight clustering, 2 findings).

2026-05-16 01:55:06 -07:00

4.3 KiB

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ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database

1. Summary

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) publishes a combined database of offshore entities from the Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Pandora Papers, Bahamas Leaks, and Offshore Leaks. ~800,000+ offshore entities with their officers, intermediaries, and addresses.

2. Access Methods

Bulk download (primary): https://offshoreleaks-data.icij.org/offshoreleaks/csv/full-oldb.LATEST.zip (~70 MB ZIP, refreshed periodically)
Search UI (human): https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/
Auth: None
Note: The previous Open Refine reconciliation endpoint at /reconcile now returns 404. ICIJ has removed it. The bulk ZIP is the remaining stable access path. The skill's fetch_icij_offshore.py caches the ZIP locally (default ~/.cache/hermes-osint/icij/, refreshes after 30 days) and searches it offline.

3. Data Schema

Key fields emitted by fetch_icij_offshore.py:

Column	Type	Description
`node_id`	int	ICIJ canonical node ID
`name`	str	Entity / officer / intermediary name
`node_type`	str	entity / officer / intermediary / address
`country_codes`	str	Semicolon-separated ISO codes
`countries`	str	Country names
`jurisdiction`	str	Offshore jurisdiction (BVI, Panama, etc.)
`incorporation_date`	str	YYYY-MM-DD
`inactivation_date`	str	YYYY-MM-DD (if struck)
`source`	str	Panama Papers / Paradise Papers / Pandora Papers / etc.
`entity_url`	str	Link to ICIJ page
`connections`	str	Semicolon-separated node IDs of related entities

4. Coverage

Worldwide offshore entity records
Earliest records: 1970s (Bahamas Leaks). Most data 1990–2018.
NOT updated in real-time — new leaks added when ICIJ publishes them
~810,000 offshore entities + ~750,000 officers + ~150,000 intermediaries

5. Cross-Reference Potential

SEC EDGAR ↔ name (public companies with offshore arms)
USAspending ↔ name (federal contractors with offshore structure)
OFAC SDN ↔ name (sanctioned entities using offshore vehicles)

Join key: normalized entity/officer name. node_id is canonical for cross- referencing within ICIJ. Connections graph traversal is in-script (BFS over connections).

6. Data Quality

Offshore entity names sometimes appear in multiple leaks with slight variations
Officers may be nominees (front persons), not beneficial owners
Some entries have minimal info (just a name + jurisdiction)
The connections graph is incomplete — some relationships are documented in source materials but not in the structured database
Inactive/struck-off entities are still included with inactivation_date

7. Acquisition Script

Path: scripts/fetch_icij_offshore.py

# Search by entity name (case-insensitive substring across the bulk DB)
python3 SKILL_DIR/scripts/fetch_icij_offshore.py --entity "EXAMPLE CORP" \
    --out data/icij.csv

# Search by officer (individual person)
python3 SKILL_DIR/scripts/fetch_icij_offshore.py --officer "SMITH JOHN" \
    --out data/icij.csv

# Search by jurisdiction (filter on cached results)
python3 SKILL_DIR/scripts/fetch_icij_offshore.py --officer "SMITH" \
    --jurisdiction "BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS" --out data/icij_bvi.csv

# Force a fresh download (default refresh window is 30 days)
python3 SKILL_DIR/scripts/fetch_icij_offshore.py --entity "EXAMPLE CORP" \
    --force-refresh --out data/icij.csv

First call downloads the ~70 MB ZIP under ~/.cache/hermes-osint/icij/ (or $HERMES_OSINT_CACHE/icij/). Subsequent calls reuse the cache for 30 days.

8. Legal & Licensing

Public record as published by ICIJ under explicit publication
No copyright on the underlying facts (entity names, jurisdictions)
ICIJ asks for attribution if used in derivative reporting
Ethical note: Presence in this database does NOT imply wrongdoing. Many offshore structures are legal. The database is a research tool, not a list of criminals.

9. References

Database: https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/
About the data: https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/pages/about
Methodology: https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/
API hints: Open Refine reconciliation endpoint at https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/reconcile

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