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Investigations
2 Active
001
Live · Updated 2024
Canadian Military Exports — Global Flow Map
A structural map of Canadian military exports 2021–2024. Four billion dollars in annual flows. Five corporate exporters. Five conflict zones with documented Canadian equipment. All data sourced from Global Affairs Canada annual reports and parliamentary filings.
Arms Trade Corporate Network Known Deployments
Dataset2021–2024 Destinations20 Countries SourceGAC · RCAM
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002
Live · 2010–2024
Québec Forest Fire Record — 15-Year Spatial Archive
7,931 fire incidents across boreal Québec mapped from three independent public sources. Ignition coordinates, burned area, and cause for every recorded fire 2010–2024. Sourced from SOPFEU, CWFIS, and NASA FIRMS thermal detection.
Environment Spatial Record SOPFEU · CWFIS · FIRMS
Fires7,931 Peak year2023 SourceNFDB · NASA
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Investigative Design Studio

All relevant
data is public.
Power operates
overtly.

Overt Lab assembles publicly available signals into spatial and structural evidence. We map systems of power — financial, military, extractive, infrastructural — and let people draw their own conclusions.

01 — Premise
Contemporary power does not hide. It files permits, publishes annual reports, registers subsidiaries, and tenders contracts. The record is public. The assembly is the work.
02 — Method
We collect, cross-reference, and spatialize data from government filings, corporate disclosures, international registers, and verified journalism. Nothing in our work is speculative.
03 — Position
Not accusatory. Not activist. Not sensational. We map structures and let people draw conclusions.
Methodology
01
Source Primacy
Every data point traces to a primary source — government filings, statutory reports, UN registers, corporate disclosures. Secondary sources are used only to interpret or contextualize primary data.
02
Structural Evidence
We document relationships between entities — financial, contractual, geographic, temporal. We do not speculate about intent. Structure is the evidence.
03
Spatial Reasoning
Data is rendered spatially wherever meaningful. Geography, network topology, and temporal sequence reveal patterns that tabular data obscures.
04
Open Sources Only
Overt Lab does not use leaked documents, anonymous sources, or non-public information. If it cannot be verified from public record, it does not appear in our work.
Contribute

Overt Lab is built on public record. If you have found relevant public data, filed access-to-information requests, or have expertise in a domain we are mapping, we want to hear from you.

Data Tips
Public documents, permit filings, corporate registry data, UN submissions, parliamentary records — anything sourced from public record is relevant.
ATIP / FOIA
Have you filed access-to-information requests that produced relevant records? We are interested in what the record shows.
Domain Expertise
Researchers, analysts, journalists, and practitioners with expertise in arms trade, extractive industries, infrastructure, or corporate networks.
Design + Dev
We build our tools in public. Designers and developers who want to contribute to the investigative tooling are welcome.
Contact us ↗