OSINT: "Brown Moses" & Bellingcat (merged thread)

[Firn]

The flood of open-source data and information, reporting and propaganda streaming out of Eastern Ukraine did enable outsiders to get surprisingly quickly a good understanding or what might have happened. It does obviously not replace traditional or other means of gathering information to understand events but it does in many cases greatly aid them.



The geo-location of digital media like tweets, pictures, videos is greatly speeding up research and makes it far more accurate. Fascinating stuff. In this specific case the close links between Russian news outlets and Russian organizations in Eastern Ukraine and the Russian propaganda overdrive made many events quite visible. Girkins bragging about a downed aircraft, rebel boasting of Buk launchers, videos of said launchers, quick propaganda spread by Russia media and so forth all left leads pointing towards a highly likely chain of events.



Brown Moses is of course also involved.

In the great scheme of things OSINT will become increasingly important for all the interested actors.

[davidbfpo]

Earlier this week there was a conference on open sources, Investigathon, even Google participated, as did Brown Moses.

The Google PPT is huge and took a long time to download, IIRC 130 plus slides and it defeated my understanding:http://dmrussell.net/presentations/I...thon-final.pdf

This article follows MH17:http://gigaom.com/2014/07/18/want-to...you-can-do-it/

Brown Moses has started a new website, but you need to donate to get access:https://bellingcat.com/

[Firn]

Quite a presentation, I don't think I will work through that.

The amount of digital material flowing out of war zones through various by many entities is indeed vast and varied. Without getting into the technical aspects it is in my opinion key to look at the big picture. Lets take first into account the following global trends:

1) An ever increasing amount of objects able to capture various data*
2) An increasingly wide and deep capability of long-range communication
3) An ever increasing importance of social media and data sharing

Even if it a simplistic take those overall trends will provide a increasing detailed, rich and robust base for OSINT. There is no doubt that parties will try to opress and counteract when it isn't in their interest but this can only achieved partly. Interestingly propaganda videos and dispatches have in many occasions revealed informations which backfired or harmed the producer's cause.

It is clear that not only media but various services, likely led by the US, have long started to make use of the recent waves of OSINT. The US has of course the advantage that the data of the most important software companies is on home soil and that it is present in different forms almost worldwide. The Ukrainians have been clearly saving lots of stuff coming over the social media so that the deleting stuff wasn't quite successful. Some cases in the Donbas like the famous seperatist Buk with three missile moving east have also shown that it is difficult to understand from the outside where to draw the line between OSINT and 'normal' covert observation. Was it filmed by a civilian, agent or infiltrated soldier? If it was the former was it first posted on YT or sent to a Ukrainian civil group or directly to the government?

Lots of question but there is little doubt that we will see the importance of OSINT growing.


*Smartphones, CCTV, dash-board cameras, and normal ones have been used to cite a few.

[davidbfpo]

An interesting account of the open sources used to identify a photo of a mobile SAM-11 aka Buk:

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

[Firn]

Open source and the MH17 shootdown links fine articles (some already posted) and has an interesting podcast with sometimes surprising background on some of the work. Overall good stuff.

Had also to laugh at how the trolls, in this 'Kremlin' ones, operated because it felt so familiar. Lie, busted, new lie, busted, new lie and so forth.

[Firn]

Bellingcat, his website got now £48,388 pledged of the £47,000 goal. I was one of them. It is of course not an investment for any monetary return but a support for high quality open research.

[davidbfpo]

Bellingcat now offers open, public access - having raised funds - and in a case study (one of four) offers guidance on verifying film footage in:https://bellingcat.com/category/resources/case-studies/