That's extraordinarily well-written for HuffPo.
That's extraordinarily well-written for HuffPo.
A scrimmage in a Border Station
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail
http://i.imgur.com/IPT1uLH.jpg
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:The extent of potential open source footage, first some context: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.Link:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...-his-sofa.htmlIn 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.
davidbfpo
His results have certainly been very impressive. Some months ago I did watch some videos of that tragic and brutal civil war and was surprised by it's youtubezation. The flood of digital data over the net seems to have pushed the importance of that OSINT thing into new dimensions...
... "We need officers capable of following systematically the path of logical argument to its conclusion, with disciplined intellect, strong in character and nerve to execute what the intellect dictates"
General Ludwig Beck (1880-1944);
Speech at the Kriegsakademie, 1935
Brown Moses himself
A very short film clip as he speaks to a Google audience:http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/a...ter-ban-turkey
davidbfpo
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.
Last edited by Firn; 07-18-2014 at 12:34 PM.
... "We need officers capable of following systematically the path of logical argument to its conclusion, with disciplined intellect, strong in character and nerve to execute what the intellect dictates"
General Ludwig Beck (1880-1944);
Speech at the Kriegsakademie, 1935
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/
davidbfpo
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.
Last edited by Firn; 07-19-2014 at 12:38 PM.
... "We need officers capable of following systematically the path of logical argument to its conclusion, with disciplined intellect, strong in character and nerve to execute what the intellect dictates"
General Ludwig Beck (1880-1944);
Speech at the Kriegsakademie, 1935
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