An open-source Palantir called Osiris hit Reddit this week, bundling real-time global aircraft tracking, satellite orbits, CCTV feeds, earthquake monitoring, and a full suite of browser-based OSINT reconnaissance tools — all MIT-licensed and deployable with one git clone.
The project, uploaded by user simplifaisoul on GitHub, has already racked up 269 stars and 50 forks since appearing on Reddit earlier this week. Its associated tweet from @Anubhavhing blew past 6,800 likes and 728,000 views, which tells you exactly how hungry people are for intelligence tools that don’t require a Palantir-sized contract.
🔍 THE BOTTOM LINE
Palantir charges governments millions for what one developer just released for free — and that gap is going to get a lot of attention from people with very different intentions.
What Osiris Actually Does
This isn’t a toy. The feature list reads like a spec sheet for a mid-tier intelligence operations centre:
Live tracking (10,000+ data points on a 3D globe):
- Commercial, military, and private aircraft via OpenSky Network
- 2,000+ satellites including ISS position
- 1,400+ worldwide CCTV camera feeds (TfL, WSDOT, Caltrans, NYC DOT, VicRoads)
- Real-time earthquakes M2.5+ via USGS
- Wildfire hotspots via NASA FIRMS
- Maritime port monitoring (39 global ports, 10 chokepoints)
- Solar weather and space data
Built-in OSINT tools (no installs needed):
- Nmap-style TCP port scanning from the browser
- DNS record lookup and enumeration
- WHOIS domain intelligence
- SSL/TLS certificate transparency
- BGP routing and ASN lookup
- Threat intelligence and IP reputation
Plus:
- 25+ live 24/7 news streams from global broadcasters
- 13 active conflict/tension zones with severity-coded markers
- GPU-accelerated rendering via WebGL (MapLibre GL)
- Day/night cycle, Framer Motion animations
- Keyboard shortcuts for layer toggling
All of it runs in a browser on Next.js 16 with TypeScript 5. The README explicitly says most features work without any API keys at all.
The Palantir Comparison Is Deliberate
The repo description calls itself an “Open Source Global Intelligence Platform — A Palantir Alternative.” That’s not a subtle comparison. Palantir’s Gotham platform is the gold standard for military and intelligence fusion — but it costs taxpayers tens of millions and requires sitting through sales pipeline that makes enterprise software look fast.
Osiris doesn’t replace Palantir’s data-crunching ontology engine or its AI/ML pipeline. What it does is democratise the visibility layer — the map, the data sources, the ability to ask “what’s happening right now over that patch of ocean?” without a security clearance.
That’s a fundamentally different kind of power than what Palantir sells, and it’s much more accessible.
What This Actually Means
There are two ways to read Osiris.
For legit OSINT researchers, journalists, and analysts: This is a gift. A single pane of glass pulling together flight data, satellite positions, CCTV feeds, and reconnaissance tools in a unified 3D interface — all open source, all self-hostable. That’s genuinely useful for journalism, humanitarian monitoring, and academic research.
For everyone else: The same tools that let a journalist track war crimes also let someone track your flight, look up your IP, and browse your city’s CCTV network. Osiris doesn’t add surveillance — it aggregates what’s already public — but it makes that aggregation trivially easy. The friction between “technically public data” and “actually usable intelligence” just dropped to zero.
The MIT license is a double-edged sword here. No restrictions on use means anyone can deploy it — journalists, activists, stalkers, state actors, curious teenagers.
The Development Story
The single developer behind simplifaisoul appears to have built this as a solo project. The commit history shows rapid, focused development — this wasn’t a corporate team, it was someone scratching an itch and sharing the result.
The live demo at osirisai.live loads a fully functional instance showing the globe with all layers. During testing, it loaded quickly and rendered smoothly — MapLibre GL with WebGL handles thousands of entities at 60fps as promised.
Performance optimisations in the README show real engineering discipline: 75% reduction in edge requests, aggressive polling relaxation (15-30 minute intervals for stable data), memory-cached static data, and duplicate request prevention. This wasn’t thrown together in a weekend.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is Osiris legal? Yes. All data sources are public APIs (OpenSky, USGS, NASA, public transport CCTV feeds). The OSINT tools (port scanning, DNS lookup) perform actions equivalent to what any individual could do from their own machine. However, using it for harassment, stalking, or unauthorised network probing may violate local laws.
Q: Can I run it myself?
git clone, npm install, npm run dev. No paid API keys required for most features. Optional keys enhance OpenSky data and satellite tracking.
Q: Is this actually as capable as Palantir? No — not in the ways that matter for military intelligence. Palantir’s value is in data fusion pipelines, ontology management, AI/ML integration, and closed-source threat intel feeds. Osiris replicates the visualisation and aggregation layer but not the analytical engine underneath.
Q: What does this mean for NZ? NZ has limited public CCTV networks compared to London or US cities, so the surveillance angle is less acute here. But the flight tracking and satellite visibility are global — NZ’s aviation patterns, maritime chokepoints, and satellite overflights are just as visible as anyone else’s.
Q: Could this be used for harm? Any tool can be. The concern is that Osiris reduces the effort to zero — you don’t need specialised knowledge or multiple subscriptions. The developer chose MIT license over AGPL, meaning there’s no requirement for derivative works to also be open source. That was a conscious choice.
🔍 THE BOTTOM LINE
Osiris is impressive engineering and a genuine contribution to the OSINT community. It’s also a perfect illustration of why the gap between “technically public data” and “actionable surveillance” keeps shrinking — not because of new surveillance, but because someone finally built the UI. The Pandora’s box of global intelligence tools just got a lot easier to open, and pretending that won’t change things is naive.
📰 SOURCES
- GitHub: simplifaisoul/osiris
- Live Demo: osirisai.live
- Tweet: @Anubhavhing on X
- GreenRocket launch page
