OSINT is increasingly accepted as evidence in court. Where police once held the monopoly on investigating, internet has opened up this possibility to many other interested parties. Civilians have the internet to use their voice and skills, enabling them to access data about crimes once only available to the police.

Here's a list of research papers on OSINT for crime investigation and what could be the impacts:

1. ‘Uppity civilians’ and ‘cyber-vigilantes’: The role of the general public in policing cyber-crime - https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895812448086

This research has been referred to as civilian policing or civilian criminal investigations, defined as ‘forms of online collective action aimed at pooling resources in order to investigate online crime'. Civilian policing of the internet is both relevant and prevalent in today’s society.

2. Open Sourcing Evidence From The Internet: The Protection of Privacy in Civilian Criminal Investigations Using OSINT - https://amsterdamlawforum.org/articles/abstract/10.37974/ALF.353/

This thesis argues that current regulations are not yet adapted to the privacy challenges posed by OSINT, and aims to give coherent recommendations on a possible legal framework to protect privacy in civilian criminal investigations by means of OSINT.

3. Open-source intelligence and privacy by design - https://www.cs.ru.nl/~jhh/publications/osint-pbd.pdf

Use of OSINT by state authorities could pose privacy challenges, but less attention has been given to the potentially problematic privacy concerns posed by civilian criminal investigations by means of OSINT

4. Digilantism: An Analysis of Crowdsourcing and the Boston Marathon Bombings - https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article/57/2/341/2623876

This paper explores the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing incident and how members of the general public, through the online community Reddit, attempted to provide assistance to law enforcement through conducting their own parallel investigations.

5. On The Internet Nobody can See Your Cape: The Ethics of Online Vigilantism - https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/8766

The discussion of vigilantism has been most active in the legal discourse. However, a major problem is that, for the most part, online activity would not fit easily into the existing terminology. This paper will open up the discussion and merge the theoretical, social and technical discussion on vigilantism by drawing on its modern forms.

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