OSINT: "Brown Moses" & Bellingcat (merged thread)
Moderator's Note
This thread today had two other related threads merged together. 'Brown Moses' work is the focus and is separate from a general open source intelligence thread (ends).
A true "armchair" expert, who from his home, has become a reputable source of information and intelligence, much of it visual - shown on YouTube. Profiled today in the New Yorker (behind a paywall), but the Huffington Post has a full article too:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/1...?utm_hp_ref=tw
A little background:
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From his living room, Higgins was racing to solve the same whodunit confronting world leaders amid claims that Assad had unleashed chemical weapons against rebel sympathizers in the suburbs of Damascus. Was Zamalka a victim of such an attack? If so, who was responsible for the deed?
On paper, Higgins -- a 34-year-old with a 2-year-old daughter -- brought no credentials for the job. He had no formal intelligence training or security clearance that gave him access to classified documents. He could not speak or read Arabic. He had never set foot in the Middle East...
Yes he has his critics and supporters - like this un-named CW expert:
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I think Eliot has done a lot more for Syria than the U.N.
Twitter shows 13k followers and 56k Tweets.
OSINT in a different way:
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When viewed in isolation, the micro-dispatches posted to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube tended to confuse and overwhelm anyone trying to make sense of events. But if you viewed such posts together, Higgins realized, the photos and videos could yield detailed accounts of events across the globe. The posts could be used to fact check claims, providing clues far beyond what cameramen had intended to show. Arguments could be won, myths disproved, rival commenters put in their place.
One wonders how OSINT and people like "Brown Moses" will fare when journalists and NGOs will have drones.
The blogger who tracks Syrian rockets from his sofa
A lengthy article from the Daily Telegraph, if you read the HuffPost piece possibly nothing new, but still of interest. A website is coming soon:
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It is called bellingcat.com, and a stable of about 15 contributors will write on subjects including Africa and the Middle East; they are partnering with Uncoverage, a crowd-funding site for investigative journalists.
The extent of potential open source footage, first some context:
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In 2007 Assad banned Facebook and YouTube, but after the current uprising began, in early 2011, and his grasp on the country started to weaken, he lifted the ban. The internet has since become a potent weapon for opponents of his regime.....After the Houla massacre Higgins realised that he could subscribe to every YouTube channel uploading footage from Syria, then aggregate the videos by region and organisation on his blog. He began by monitoring several dozen channels. Now he tracks 700.
Link:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...-his-sofa.html
MH17: find the SAM launcher
An interesting account of the open sources used to identify a photo of a mobile SAM-11 aka Buk:
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In the wake of the tragic events of July 17th a number of photographs and videos were posted online claiming to show the Buk missile launcher that has been alleged to have been involved in the downing of flight MH17 in locations that were claimed to be near the crash site. Over the last 48 hours, using a variety of open source investigation techniques, it has been possible to identify the precise location some of these images were taken, confirming key claims about the location of the Buk missile launcher.
Link:https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...t/posts/919158
OSINT: IDF hit Syrian CW a year ago
Another example of OSINT, notably satellite photos and videos, can help to explain events. 'Brown Moses' helped too:
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Today marks the first anniversary of one of the biggest air strikes that has been conducted inside Syria, and particularly in the country's third largest city's of Homs, on a strategic Syrian army arms depots. .....Many believed that the attack in Homs on Aug. 1st, 2013, was carried out by Syrian armed opposition groups, launching Grad rockets towards the strategic arms depots of the Syrian army, resulting in a massive explosion that rocked the entire city of Homs.
Today and after almost a year after that strike, a number of never released before satellite photos revealed for the first time that the target was not the arms depots, rather a secret underground chemical weapons storage facility south of Homs.
Link:http://www.businessinsider.com/israe...#ixzz398mH7FT0
Note this was a year ago today and citing in part the conclusion:
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This incident also suggests that Israel targeted the Syrian chemical weapons program at least once before the August 21st Sarin attacks in Damascus.
Bellingcat: Open-Source Intelligence vs. ISIS / ISIL
The Independent @Independent
A crowdfunded site may have just exposed Isis using Google Maps http://bit.ly/1qCJctb
Moderator adds: This website is partly founded by "Brown Moses", an open source SME and documented on a thread 'OSINT: "Brown Moses" better than the UN on Syria':http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ad.php?t=19471
Bellingcat: Open-Source Intelligence vs. ISIS / ISIL
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A group of crowd-funded citizen journalists seem to have located a training camp for the militant group ISIL using only online mapping services and some old-fashioned detective work. Bellingcat, which raised almost £51,000 ($85,000) to do its own unique form of journalism, was founded by Eliot Higgins, who became famous (and was profiled by the New Yorker) for proving Syria was using chemical weapons from his bedroom in Leicester, England using only images and videos available online. His team includes a mix of bloggers, research analysts, and traditional reporters.
http://www.defenseone.com/technology...g-camps/92267/
Video Presentation – OSI in Conflict Zones
A twenty-five minute video, mainly PPT, which explains how Brown Moses works:https://bellingcat.com/resources/art...onflict-zones/
What can we learn from Bellingcat?
An exploration of Bellingcat in 'The Spectator' alas behind a paywall, which considers the allegations made it is a servant of the UK / US agencies. It ends with this:
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The real secret of Bellingcat is that they have stumbled upon a disturbing truth: that it has become impossible to tell analogue lies in a digital world. In an age where almost all personal data is searchable and every event photographed, the most secret information is often hiding in plain sight. All you need to know is where to look for it — even if that means delving into the internet’s darkest corners.
Link:https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/10/...spy-agencies/?
Third Suspect in Skripal Poisoning Id'd as Denis Sergeev, High-Ranking GRU Officer
The latest Bellingcat update on the Skirpal attack in the UK; another apart will follow. A glimpse into "escape and evade":
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It is unclear what Fedotov’s role may have been, if any, in the preparation and execution of the poisoning operation. We could also not establish if he traveled to Salisbury on any of the days he was in the UK. He had booked a return flight on Aeroflot’s SU 2579 from Heathrow to Moscow in the afternoon of March 4, the day on which Sergey and Yuliya Skripal collapsed unconscious. However, he never boarded that flight. PNR records seen by Bellingcat and its investigative partners show that despite checking in to that flight around noon on March 4, “Fedotov” was a last minute no-show. Instead, using transportation that has yet to be identified by us, he made his way to Rome, and boarded a flight at 15:30 that same day back to Moscow.
Link:https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-a...ge-1/#comments
