WIRED: Online Sleuths Untangle the Mystery of the Nord Stream Sabotage. ” Open source intelligence (OSINT) researchers are using public sources of data in their efforts to verify or debunk the snippets of information published about the Nord Stream explosions. They’re providing a glimpse of clarity to an incident that’s shrouded by secrecy and international politics.”
The Conversation: How to use free satellite data to monitor natural disasters and environmental changes . “I work with geospatial big data as a professor. Here’s a quick tour of where you can find satellite images, plus some free, fairly simple tools that anyone can use to create time-lapse animations from satellite images. For example, state and urban planners – or people considering a new home – can watch over time how rivers have moved, construction crept into wildland areas or a coastline eroded.”
OCCRP: How a Montenegrin Gang Used Open-Source Intelligence to Kill. “Hitmen working for a criminal group active in Montenegro and Serbia used open-source intelligence techniques, poring over apartment listing sites, satellite images, and tourist photos posted online, to track down and kill the leader of a rival clan as he hid out in Greece.”
Craig Silverman / Digital Investigations: Getting the most out of the Wayback Machine. “Roughly a year ago, the Wayback Machine Chrome extension got a major update. The new version has useful customization features and the ability to connect it to your personal Wayback Machine account, making it an even more essential tool for journalists and investigators.”
WIRED: How One Guy’s AI Tracked the Chinese Spy Balloon Across the US. “EARLIER THIS MONTH, entrepreneur Corey Jaskolski pulled out a pen and drew his best guess at what the surveillance balloon shot down by a US jet would have looked like from space. Then he fed the sketch and ‘a gob’ of recent satellite images from the area where the balloon was taken down into algorithms developed by his image and video detection startup Synthetatic, and waited. Within two minutes, he says, the algorithms found the 200-foot-tall balloon off the coast of South Carolina.”
Business Insider: A 17-year-old Seattle high schooler is tracking more than 150 private jets’ emissions. “Using [Jack] Sweeney’s Ground Control Registration Database — which was developed to famously track Elon Musk’s private jet — [Akash] Shendure identifies and compiles carbon emissions from the private jets of more than 150 wealthy Americans and their families.”
Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT: European forensic experts have published for the first time a practical guide for analyzing manipulated audio files. “This helpful guide describes technical procedures, necessary hardware and software, quality principles, and training recommendations, but also very practical approaches and methods for the forensic authenticity analysis of digital audio recordings.”
Business Insider: The college student who tracks Elon Musk’s private jet is launching his own flight-tracking website. “Jack Sweeney, the 20-year-old college student known for tracking Elon Musk’s private jet on social media, is launching his own jet-tracking website. Sweeney told Insider he decided to create the web-based public database after aviation data company JetNet announced last month that it had purchased ADS-B Exchange, a free website that tracks thousands of commercial aircraft around the world.”
Ars Technica: The flight tracker that powered @ElonJet has taken a left turn. “A major independent flight tracking platform, which has made enemies of the Saudi royal family and Elon Musk, has been sold to a subsidiary of a private equity firm. And its users are furious. ADS-B Exchange has made headlines in recent months for, as AFP put it, irking ‘billionaires and baddies.’ But in a Wednesday morning press release, aviation intelligence firm Jetnet announced it had acquired the scrappy open source operation for an undisclosed sum.”
Data Descriptor: An open database on global coal and metal mine production . “… presenting an open database on global coal and metal mine production on the level of individual mines. It is based on manually gathered information from more than 1900 freely available reports of mining companies, where every data point is linked to its source document, ensuring full transparency.”
The Hill: We need an open source intelligence center. “A government of multiple small efforts is insufficiently prepared to harness the current open source revolutionary potential. The volume and variety of open and commercial source materials, urgency of the geopolitical rivalry, and continued development of tools to exploit the data all necessitate a systematic effort to harness open and commercial source to support decision making. The answer, we believe, rests on standing up a standalone open source entity.”
Bellingcat: Octosuite: A New Tool to Conduct Open Source Investigations on GitHub. “Octosuite is an advanced GitHub framework written in Python that uses GitHub’s Public API to make the process of investigating accounts and repositories on the platform more efficient, while also creating a set of automated and easily reproducible queries.”
Associated Press: US spies lag rivals in seizing on data hiding in plain sight. “As alarms began to go off globally about a novel coronavirus spreading in China, officials in Washington turned to the intelligence agencies for insights about the threat the virus posed to America. But the most useful early warnings came not from spies or intercepts, according to a recent congressional review of classified reports from December 2019 and January 2020. Officials were instead relying on public reporting, diplomatic cables and analysis from medical experts — some examples of so-called open source intelligence, or OSINT.”
Washington Post: A Yorkie was dognapped. A man who hunted al-Qaeda came to the rescue.. “Most stolen dogs are never recovered, but what followed was an improbable effort to crack the identity of the dognapper. It brought together [Raquel] Witherspoon, neighbors, TV news, police and a former Marine Corps intelligence operator who offered skills he honed on the battlefields of Iraq to capture al-Qaeda fighters.” I didn’t know that Instagram trick. That’s a good one.
Inside AFP: Fighting disinformation: AFP shares tools in videos. “From finding the origin of a video online to using archives to identify old versions of web pages, reading foreign languages with a smartphone or using mapping tools, these videos demonstrate tools used by AFP journalists around the world in their investigations. A dozen videos are already available in English and French on AFP’s YouTube channels and on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, sharing key tips for online verification.” Every video I looked at was thoroughly capitioned.
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