OSINT

Twitter and other apps are bringing truth as well as useful intelligence to the defense of Ukraine. OSINT is short for open-source intelligence.

In the footage, he found a landmark — an Orthodox church with four golden domes. He located it in Irpin, using Google Maps and a file photograph from the Associated Press to generate its precise coordinates. A scan of Discord, Reddit, and Twitter revealed chatter from witnesses of the bombing. Twelve minutes after spotting the footage, he felt confident the video was real, and posted the work on his Twitter account.

Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, said in an interview with The Washington Post that the community’s work is crucial for his country — so much so that a Ukrainian government app, called Diia, now allows citizens to field geotagged pictures and videos of Russian troop movements.

Much of the work could be more impactful in the long term. Activists, scholars and media professionals are using their data to create a verified timeline of conflict that could impact how countries are held accountable for war crimes.

This reached a turning point in 2014, when open source intelligence was used to track Russia’s invasion of Crimea, and provide evidence of the country’s involvement in shooting down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, research scholars noted. Last year, during the Jan 6. insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, hobbyists disseminated intelligence online that federal agencies relied on to find rioters.

The core of this sleuthing is geolocation, due to its ease and impact. When a video or image of conflict surfaces, hobbyists scan the footage for landmarks or other clues, trying to pinpoint its location to verify its accuracy or debunk it as a propaganda attempt.

But they have grown more savvy, and the war in Ukraine has shown the breadth of intelligence hobbyists can gather through simple means. Some specialize in flight tracking and are able to show which military aircraft are flying near Ukrainian airspace at any time. Others use NASA’s database of fires to track “thermal anomalies” in Ukraine, to help back up claims of new fighting or shelling in a region.

Last week, his organization released a platform to document potential war crimes in real time. Through the work of open source hobbyists and others, Bellingcat has gathered over 400 verified, geolocated, and tagged incidents of potential war crimes in Ukraine, ranging from hospital bombings, neighborhood strikes and other attacks that have killed or injured civilians.

Ukraine, Higgins said, will “be seen as the first conflict where [open source] information was gathered by an online community and turned into useful information that was used for accountability.”