Sources stay yours. Interviews stay searchable.

Picture the file cabinet in the corner of a beat reporter's office. Every tape, every notebook, every printout filed by year, by source, by story. The digital version of that cabinet is what Korely is for you. Recordings drop in, transcripts get written, the cabinet stays in your office.

Concretely: record interviews on your phone, drop the audio file into Korely. The transcription pipeline runs locally on Free (Whisper on your CPU), or through Deepgram with speaker diarization on Pro. The transcript lives in a Markdown note alongside the audio file in the attachments/ folder of your vault.

Three months later you search "the source who mentioned the shell company in the Cayman Islands" and the right interview surfaces, without scrubbing through five hours of audio.

Picture the detective's whiteboard in every crime drama. Photos of people, red string between them whenever two names appear in the same case file. The entity graph is that whiteboard, except the strings appear on their own as you write.

Concretely: as each note is saved, Korely extracts names, organisations, and places from the text. Open a person, see every note where they appear and every other person they share a note with. The shape of an investigation becomes visible. The recurring shell company. The law firm that keeps appearing across unrelated stories. The fact that two sources you thought were independent share a connection you would have missed otherwise.

No manual tagging. No deciding in advance what to index. You write your notes, the graph keeps up.

Picture a corkboard above your desk with three questions a working reporter answers every week. Who holds the data on my sources? Who decides when it gets shared? Who knows when someone has asked for it? Korely is built so the answer to all three is "you", and three concrete things follow.

• The notes live on your disk. Turn on the disk encryption your laptop already has, and the vault inherits it. No SaaS provider has a copy to leak. On Pro, the optional cloud copy is also encrypted in transit and at rest, scoped to your account: your password is the key, the cloud is the cabinet, the data inside is unreadable to anyone without the key.
• You decide what gets shared, line by line. Sharing is an explicit action: copy a single note into whatever secure channel you already use with your editor, send a Markdown file directly, paste an excerpt into a draft. Nothing is published or synced by default.
• You see every legal request before it is answered. Without a SaaS provider in the middle, a subpoena has to land on you directly rather than on a third party under a gag order. You and your editor and your lawyer have the chance to invoke shield law protections before anything is handed over.

Worth saying plainly so the framing stays honest: this design does not make subpoena risk vanish. It shifts it. You are still the holder of the notes, and a warrant against you personally still applies. The change is that the common path where a cloud provider is compelled to hand over data while you are gagged from knowing is closed off when there is no provider in the chain.