Visualizing the Invisible Networks of Money, Power and Influence.
Powerful algorithms, corporations, and governments are tracking your every movement and sharing your data. What if you had the same power to track them back?
Invisible Inquiry is an open-source investigative platform that gives the public intelligence-grade research capabilities — mapping the real connections between people, organizations, money, and events, and making those maps accessible to anyone.
The world's connected data is broken into a thousand pieces — scattered across articles, reports, court filings, books, and video. This project was built to bridge them all. A central, crowdsourceable database for public or private research that connects what headlines separate. No code. No clearance. Just the same caliber of tools that used to be reserved for analysts and institutions. It ingests nearly every major digital format — news articles, court records, FOIA documents, government PDFs, databases — and uses AI to extract structure, pre-catalog relationships, and link related information across sources. Chaos in, clarity out.
This isn't AI slop. It's not an LLM compiler. It's a neural network where humanity and AI meet to go deeper — replacing outdated investigative workflows with tools built for a new era of research. Our goal is to simplify the process and educate by example, building easy-to-follow narratives around the world's most complex stories, some spanning centuries.
What it tracks: People. Organizations. Money flows. Legislation. Events. Communications. Technology. Datasets. And more.
What it reveals: Dark money trails and political finance. Cause-and-effect chains across actors and outcomes. Geographic impact through pin maps, flight logs, and heat maps. Hierarchies of command, custody, and consequence. Timelines — condensed or expanded. Communities and relational networks. Degrees of separation. Macro-to-micro views, from global systems to individual actors. Narrative investigations structured as stories and chapters.
As we connect the world's data, we seek to empower researchers, journalists, and citizens with deeper insight — not from the headlines, but behind the story. Built for anyone who recognizes that in the pursuit of truth, everything connects.
Sousveillance: "Sous-" means "under" or "below." "Veillance" comes from "veiller," meaning "to watch."
Origin Story
My interest in investigative research started in 1998, when the U.S. bombed pharmaceutical facilities in Sudan. It raised a simple question: how are decisions like this connected to power, money, and institutions? That question never went away.
During Occupy Wall Street, I watched surveillance and algorithmic control move into public view. Phones were tracking us. Platforms were shaping behavior. I started asking: what would it look like to turn that technology around? That led me to design an early prototype of a data network tool. But the technology wasn't ready. So I shifted to other ambitious digital projects, some of which you may have seen (drewarnold.tv).
Over the past year, I've built a platform designed to map power structures in a way that's accessible, structured, and expandable. I've long wondered what it would look like if leaks, disclosures, investigative journalism, and historical research could live inside one connected system — instead of scattered across the internet.
This is my answer.
Public research is about to get a whole lot more powerful. Join me on this journey to unearth the deepest insights humanity has uncovered — yet never fully connected.
If you believe independent infrastructure for understanding power matters, I'm asking for your support to take this to the next stage — to help build a foundational model for investigative research, and to help keep it independent.