Simcha Brodsky on Building OSINT613, The Intelligence Infrastructure Behind the Headlines, and the Future of Open Source Reporting
…Work very hard, pick a lane, and do something you enjoy. This project only succeeded because Jay loves the news. He is obsessed with finding the truth and uncovering hidden narratives. Without that passion, none of this works. No one is willing to put in the hours he has if they are not genuinely in love with the work. In the beginning, it does not pay. Eventually it does. But early on, if you are not willing to sweat for what you love, it will fail. My best advice is to do something you love…
When a war breaks out and people don’t know who to trust, they go somewhere. For nearly 1.4 million people, that somewhere became OSINT613.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Simcha Brodsky, Chief Operating Officer of Open Source Intel, a multi-platform news and intelligence operation running simultaneously out of the United States and Israel. What started as one person watching a war unfold from his backyard near the Lebanese border has quietly become one of the most followed and cited independent intelligence platforms on the internet.
Simcha did not come from media. Before he was coordinating researchers, managing intelligence pipelines, and overseeing a round-the-clock editorial operation, he was a life coach, a student of neuro-linguistic programming, and a DJ performing under the name BROSKY.
“I am a late bloomer,” Brodsky says, without any trace of embarrassment. After the attacks of October 7th, he and OSINT613 founder Jay saw something the rest of the media world was slow to recognize: people were desperate for reliable information, and almost nobody was providing it cleanly. Jay was already embedded in northern Israel, watching events from inside the region in real time. Simcha stepped in to help build the infrastructure behind what Jay had started.
The growth that followed was not the result of a strategy. It was the result of showing up every day and getting it right. “Suddenly everybody became interested in politics and news. People became more divided than ever,” Brodsky reflects. The audience came because they needed somewhere to go.
There were moments along the way that made the scale of it impossible to ignore. After a United States strike on the Fordow nuclear facility, Brodsky woke up to find the President of the United States had reposted their update. “That was another verifier of just how big this project has the ability to be.”
The audience OSINT613 has built is not just large. It is specific. Jared Kushner follows. Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump follow. Secretary of State Marco Rubio follows. Senator John Cornyn, Congressman Brian Mast, and General Michael Flynn follow. Ben Shapiro, Megyn Kelly, Dinesh D’Souza, and Sebastian Gorka follow. Bret Baier, Jake Tapper, and Brian Kilmeade are there. Conor McGregor follows. Piers Morgan follows. Bill Ackman follows. Michael Dell follows. The Embassy of Israel to the United States follows. The list is long.
OSINT613 has also been cited directly by members of Congress and senators on the record. Elon Musk has quoted the platform. At a certain point, the reach speaks for itself.
What most people scrolling through the feed never see is what is running underneath it.
OSINT613 is not one person refreshing a screen. It is a structured operation with dedicated teams across research, writing, video production, and on-the-ground sourcing. It runs 24 hours a day, pausing only for the Jewish Sabbath. Behind each post is a workflow built on military flight tracking, maritime vessel monitoring, satellite imagery analysis, and human intelligence from contacts inside active conflict zones. When OSINT613 calls jet activity in Iraq as a signal of an imminent strike on Iran, that does not come from a wire service. It came from their own tracking infrastructure.
The two failure modes in this space are well known. Move too slow and you lose relevance. Move too fast and you lose trust. Most accounts end up at one extreme or the other. OSINT613 drives straight down the middle. When a story is confirmed, it goes out with full attribution. When it is still developing, the audience is told that directly. If the team gets something wrong, they say so publicly. No spin. Just a correction.
The video operation has been expanding steadily. A nine-person team of animators, scriptwriters, and researchers is producing documentary-style content for audiences who do not consume news through text feeds. The website, osint613.com, now gives the platform infrastructure that lives outside social media entirely. Paying subscribers get access to intelligence drops that never hit the public feed: early calls on developing situations, sourced analysis, and reporting that the open timeline does not carry. The team has also built proprietary systems to manage the pace and volume of their workflow. Not because they wanted to announce it. Because the off-the-shelf tools could not keep up.
The threat of AI-generated disinformation is one Brodsky takes seriously and does not dramatize. For now, a trained eye and a stack of verification tools are doing the job. “AI still smells like AI,” he says. He recently spotted a fabricated image of Israeli soldiers in Lebanon almost instantly. The uniform insignia was wrong. The television in the background was the wrong proportions. The artifacts were there if you knew what to look for. He is clear-eyed about what comes next. “This is the worst the technology will ever be.” He is already thinking about what the response to that needs to look like.
Through all of it, the editorial line has stayed consistent. The feed runs at roughly 75 to 90 percent hard facts. Opinion stays under 10 percent. Prediction under 5. The audience is trusted to draw its own conclusions once it has the truth in front of it. “If you are willing to take in the truth and be unbiased, it will lead you down a certain path.” That is the whole premise. They give people the information. The rest is up to them.
Yitzi: Simcha Brodsky, it’s very nice to meet you. Before we dive in and talk about your amazing work, our readers would love to learn about your personal origin story. Can you share with us the story of your childhood and how you grew up, and particularly the seeds and genesis for all the amazing work that has come since then?
Simcha: Wow, that is a big question. For OSINT613, I am a late bloomer. Jay, the founder of OSINT613, and I go back several years. We met a long time ago. Jay started this project after October 7th when there was a huge necessity for reliable news in one place. He is based in northern Israel, near the border with Lebanon, so he was watching events unfold from inside the region from the very beginning. I had come from a background of music, but after such a massive shift in the world, suddenly everybody became interested in politics and news. People became more divided than ever. I just remember growing up, Republicans and Democrats all hung out together. There was no problem; nobody cared who you voted for. It was always considered a private issue. After October 7th, everybody became divided. Just like Jay, I saw a necessity for reliable information and a need to support the mission and the infrastructure behind it. Here we are today.
Yitzi: Your team is doing incredible work and you have accomplished great things. Can you share one or two stories about your reporting that stand out in your mind?
Simcha: I remember when I decided to make the jump into media. The account had about 85,000 or 90,000 followers, and we decided we were going to start producing videos every day. I was sitting by a pool with my feet in the water, filming a very funny introductory video for all of the upcoming content. That will always be memorable because that was the moment we realized this was going to be something really big. Here we are at 1.4 million followers in such a short span of time. The other major moment was after the US struck the Fordow nuclear facility. I woke up to see Donald Trump having posted that image stating Fordow is gone. Realizing the President of the United States just reposted Open Source Intel was a massive moment. That was another verifier of just how big this project has the ability to be.
Yitzi: You mentioned trial and error, and there is a saying that sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Do you have a story about a humorous mistake you made in the beginning?
Simcha: It seems every day we make plenty of mistakes. We make mistakes in how we run the business, mistakes in creating a piece of content and having to redo it, and mistakes in how we negotiate deals. It happens every day. The goal is to make everything humorous and not to take it too seriously.
Yitzi: Do you have a story where you or your team got a “no” to an opportunity, but it led to an even better opportunity or greater success?
Simcha: I trust in God, and I truly believe that even if we do not see it as a team yet, all of the rejections we have ever received will lead somewhere much better for us. We get “no”s all the time. We get a lot of “yes”es too, but we get a lot of “no”s, and sometimes they are disappointing. This includes deals we are trying to chase down, or starting a certain project and realizing it takes much longer than we thought. At the end of the day, with faith in God, every “no” is a “yes” down the line. To add to your quote, I heard this from my barber many years ago: rejection is God’s protection.
Yitzi: Open Source Intelligence OSINT613 has an incredible reputation, and you probably have tens of thousands of competitors. Something about your reporting stands out and makes it very trusted and reliable. From your perspective, what does your team do that others do not do?
Simcha: These are the questions I like because they push on what makes OSINT613 very special. People sometimes assume this is a copy-paste operation. It is not. We have 24-hour coverage, pausing only for Shabbat. We have a dedicated research team, multiple writers and contributors, a newsletter, a website, and recently we introduced exclusive intelligence drops available to subscribers. On the intelligence side, we monitor military flight tracking, maritime vessel movements, and satellite imagery. We have reporters and sources on the ground. When we reported jet activity in Iraq indicating an imminent strike on Iran, that was not picked up from a wire service. That was our own tracking and source network. We also built proprietary systems to manage the pace and volume of our workflow. The two failure modes in this space are well known. Move too slow and you lose relevance. Move too fast and you lose trust. Most accounts end up at one extreme or the other. The magic Open Source Intel has is the perfect balance. We let the audience know if a story is verified or unverified, and we disclose where the information came from. People have come to trust that, and the numbers reflect it.
Yitzi: There are those out there who say Open Source Intel is simply a news aggregator, simply collecting information from other sources. Is that accurate?
Simcha: It is worth pointing out that most news stations are also aggregators. They rely on wire services, stringers, and third-party sources. The question has never been whether you aggregate. The question is what you do with the information once you have it. We monitor thousands of different sources to bring one verified stream to the people. There are many different forms of intelligence collection: geospatial intelligence, signals intelligence, human intelligence, open-source intelligence, and others. We monitor the news and the airwaves for verified information, cut through the noise, push away irrelevant content, and feed the essential information to people on a silver platter. On top of that, we do our own proprietary reporting. We have sources on the ground and spend a serious amount of time on our original analysis. If that is aggregation, then so is every major newspaper in the world. I would reframe the term as the skill of cutting through the noise and compiling only the information we believe people actually need. That is what makes us impactful.
Yitzi: There is always a tension between speed and accuracy. How does your team balance the two?
Simcha: If a piece of news is not imperative to release immediately, you take as much time as you need to verify it. Every story that crosses our desk goes through a review process. We have a team specifically responsible for verification. When something is confirmed, it goes out with full attribution. When something is still developing and the sourcing is not yet solid, we make that clear to the audience. We let people know what we have seen and what stage the reporting is at. Making that distinction removes the concern entirely. People in the comments debate, pull the news apart, put it back together, and find their way to the truth. That is the beauty of open source intelligence and the community behind it.
Yitzi: Do you use any specific tools to determine if a video or image is AI-generated?
Simcha: There are quite a few tools for this. Several open source investigation organizations have released tools, such as Python scripts, that analyze videos and generate an authenticity score. There are many free tools online, and generally, I have found it best to use multiple tools and average out their scores. It has been becoming increasingly difficult. Mainstream AI generation software includes watermarks as a security feature, making those outputs easier to identify. In general, if you average out scores from multiple tools, you will get a pretty decent idea of what is real and what is not.
Yitzi: Do you find yourself doing that frequently?
Simcha: Not yet. To be honest, I feel like AI still smells like AI, at least for certain types of media. When it comes to war imagery, there are simply too many complex factors. Recently, an AI image circulated showing Israeli soldiers in Lebanon supposedly raiding a house and stealing belongings. If you are not a military expert and just glance at the photo, it looks very legitimate. However, there were many immediate tells. When Jay sent it to me, I looked at it and immediately knew it was AI. The TV was too wide and too short, and the patch on the soldier’s uniform was not a real military insignia. There were obvious rendering artifacts, and the uniform itself was off. When you look at these types of images constantly, you can spot the inconsistencies. But keep in mind, this is the worst the technology will ever be. In the future, we are going to have a much bigger problem. Mainstream subscription models are watermarked if you know where to look, but open source models stored locally on a user’s system will be much harder to track. We are going to need strong software to counter that.
Yitzi: Generally speaking, what percentage of your reporting is fact, opinion, and prediction?
Simcha: In terms of prediction, I would say it is under 5%. In terms of facts, it is somewhere between 75% and 90%. The remaining 10% would be opinion. A lot of times we will add a little bit of commentary here and there, but for the most part, we trust our audience to put the narrative together once they ingest the truth. They are able to formulate their own opinions. If you are willing to take in the truth and be unbiased, it will lead you down a certain path.
Yitzi: Regarding the opinion part, would you say it is more aligned with a conservative or liberal perspective?
Simcha: We are very much proponents of Western values, American values, democratic values, and religious values. We are God-fearing people. Inherently, you could say we lean at least center. However, in terms of our reporting, we try very hard to ensure that our personal leanings never affect the actual information. While we let our personality shine through in our business, it should never affect how people ingest the news. We are anti-terror. We are pro-democracy, pro-freedom, and pro-America. Those are our values.
Yitzi: The conservative movement has split in some “interesting” directions. Do you have any thoughts on guiding it in a healthier direction?
Simcha: If you look at the different forces fighting against American and democratic values, they span from the extreme far left all the way to the far right. Interestingly, the far right and the far left tend to be influenced by the exact same sources. That is where they seem to shake hands. You have Tucker Carlson flying to Qatar, while the Qatari government gives millions of dollars to American universities to indoctrinate the left. There is a remarkable crossover between the two extremes. The individuals we appreciate most are those who have not necessarily chosen a side; they simply want the truth. Extremism starts when you declare “this is how it is” and completely close the door on further conversation. We see the extremes as the same. They are influenced by the same people, and the figures above them share the exact same goals of dividing and conquering.
Yitzi: Could you tell us about any of the exciting new initiatives your team is working on?
Simcha: We recently launched the first version of OSINT613.com, and we are now moving into phases 2 and 3, which include building proprietary open-source intelligence tools to help users better understand global events.
On the media side, we have a 9-person team of animators, scriptwriters, and researchers producing documentary-style videos. This is a full-scale production operation, and you will soon start seeing the results.
We are also expanding our network of writers, contributors, and on-the-ground reporters to deepen our coverage, with several strategic partnerships in the pipeline that we believe will significantly strengthen what we are building.
Yitzi: How is the website different from a WhatsApp group or a Twitter account?
Simcha: For the first version, the goal was to take our feed and bring it off of X, because not everybody uses social media or wants to consume their news there. We wanted to bring the experience of scrolling through a real-time intelligence feed to the regular web or an app. Beyond that, the plan is to build new layers on top, offering tools to organize and consume news in a more customizable, visual way. We want it to be what the people need it to be, and we will let the feedback guide what comes next.
Yitzi: Looking back to when you first started, can you share five things you have learned that would have been nice to know then?
Simcha: Most of the time, you have to do things yourself. There are very few people you can truly rely on, and you must be comfortable getting your hands dirty. You have to be ready for the long hours. When you put too much trust in people before they have earned it, it tends not to work out well. For something as special as OSINT613, you could not open a business handbook and find the roadmap. Everything seemed to follow an off-the-beaten path, and whenever we tried to do things the standard way, it failed. Respecting the magic of what got you here is what will take you to the next step. Balancing a well-structured business with the raw creative energy that drove initial growth is a constant challenge. That is a lesson we have learned many times across many different areas.
Yitzi: If someone asked you to share a few tips on how to be successful, what would you?
Simcha: Work very hard, pick a lane, and do something you enjoy. This project only succeeded because Jay loves the news. He is obsessed with finding the truth and uncovering hidden narratives. Without that passion, none of this works. No one is willing to put in the hours he has if they are not genuinely in love with the work. In the beginning, it does not pay. Eventually it does. But early on, if you are not willing to sweat for what you love, it will fail. My best advice is to do something you love.
Yitzi: If you could spread one idea or inspire one movement that would bring the most good to the most people, what would it be?
Simcha: First, I want to be clear: I am the COO. Jay is the brains, the visionary, and the creative force behind everything that makes Open Source Intel what it is. I am here to support that mission. If I had to start a movement, it would be this: encourage more people to support good missions rather than simply chasing influence for its own sake. Audit your intake. Understand whether you are being manipulated. Recognize that everyone is susceptible to influence. Before you go out trying to influence others, do a thorough audit of how you yourself are being influenced and where that influence originates. That is the movement I would want to start.
Yitzi: Simcha, how can our readers continue to follow your work?
Simcha: Check us out at osint613.com. Follow us on X at x.com/osint613. We have a WhatsApp group, and all links can be found through our website and social profiles. We send out a newsletter every day. If you subscribe on X, you get access to exclusive perks and proprietary reporting that others do not have.
Yitzi: Amazing. Simcha, I wish you continued success, blessings, and good health.
Simcha: Amen to that. Thank you so much.
Simcha Brodsky on Building OSINT613, The Intelligence Infrastructure Behind the Headlines, and the… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.