wtf is telegram-osint-toolkit?

Telegram OSINT Toolkit is a command line program written in Python for gathering information from Telegram, the messaging app. OSINT stands for open source intelligence, meaning information collected from publicly available sources rather than hacking or private access. The tool is built on top of Telethon, a library that lets Python programs act like a Telegram client, and it is meant for security researchers, journalists, and similar investigative work on public channels and groups, or on ones the user is otherwise authorized to access. The toolkit can search for keywords in a single channel or across many channels at once, using a plain text list of channel names. It can export the full contents of a chat to JSON, CSV, or a readable HTML report, optionally including downloaded media files and any links found in messages. It can list the members of a group and save that list to a file, pull profile information about a user or channel, and watch one or more channels continuously, sending an alert whenever a chosen keyword appears. Everything it collects, including view counts, forward counts, and reply counts, is stored in a local SQLite database file on the user's own computer, and the tool can report basic statistics about that stored data. To reduce the chance of being rate limited or blocked, the tool includes automatic handling for Telegram's flood control errors and supports routing its traffic through a SOCKS5 or HTTP proxy, including Tor. Setting it up requires a personal Telegram API ID and API hash, which are free to obtain from Telegram's own developer site, plus a handful of Python packages installed from a requirements file. The author's README includes an explicit notice that the tool should only be used on public channels or ones the user is authorized to access, in line with Telegram's terms of service and applicable law, and describes it as intended for defensive, research, and authorized intelligence purposes. It is released under the MIT license.