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Radical 90s Wizard posted:Moses have they tried a classic Cold War honeypot on you yet? Not yet, I'd be so hyper-vigilant I'd probably flee down the street if a moderately attractive woman spoke to me. Nuclear Tourist posted:Didn't RT run a literal smear camping against you back when you pointed out that it was a Russian SAM that shot down MH17? Yeah, they did a lot of coverage of me, including sending someone to my home town to track me down. They went to my accountant and asked their receptionist if they knew me, like she would know; then my office, even though they had already asked me if I was in and I told them I wasn't, then went to a my old home I hadn't lived in for 8 years and doorstepped my mother. Then they edited it to make it look like I was hiding from them, when in fact I was in meetings the entire day in London. That's just part of it, we've targeted by multiple groups of Russian government backed hackers, attacked in the Russian media, had the Russian MOD and foreign ministry attack our work, Russian troll factories run campaigns against us, etc etc. There's a feature length documentary I'm currently being filmed for that should be out by the end of the year, The Bellingcat Method, which may cover this, plus all the stuff I don't talk about in public much as it attracts loony trolls, like my work with the ICC and MH17 stuff. I at least get paid well now.
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Jan 31, 2018 00:36
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Here's the video I mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqDvTgbgmjg This is another video they published on Sept 28th 2016. That was a significant date because the joint investigation team (JIT) investigating MH17 gave a press conference on what they believed happened, their first official statement of that type since the investigation started. What they presented was pretty much exactly what we'd been saying for the last two years, which is probably why RT was trying to attack me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3lwPS_1E2w For some context, the first clip is Yasmin Green from Google Ideas/Jigsaw introducing me at their Conflict in the Connected World summit in New York in 2014, they cut off the bit where she says something along the lines of "despite this, he's made amazing discoveries about the conflict in Syria and use of chemical weapons". The bit where I'm giving a presentation and I say something is unclear, therefore Russia did it, *applause*, is edited from a much longer presentation where I start with it being vague, then spend several minutes showing more and more examples of how we can be sure of the location, and the applause is from about 10 minutes after that. Then the "anti-Bellingcat" report they cite is a) provably wrong on every point it makes, b) written by someone who works for pro-Ukrainian separatists blog who is personal friends with some of the MH17 suspects and works in the PR department of a Vladimir Putin founded think-tank. The kicker is I complained to OFCOM, the UK TV regulator about it, and they decided that it's actually not violating any rules, even with all that dodgy edited footage.
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Jan 31, 2018 09:32
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I also get Syria poo poo talking me at the UN General Assembly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eZp3p4Yggs Meanwhile, Russia is dicking about with aircraft: https://twitter.com/AmichaiStein1/status/958749502160195585
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Jan 31, 2018 18:34
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Our latest open source investigation technique, using blood stains on satellite imagery to geolocate mass executions: https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/960979000733716480 https://twitter.com/iBRABO_com/status/955880592993935360 I think Bellingcat may have been the first group to do this with the Werfalli executions in Libya.
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Feb 8, 2018 11:52
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The most satisfying thing about the work we do is how many organisations are now interested in applying open source investigation to their own work. I've met with all sort of justice and accountability organisations, international courts, police from across the world, NGOs, and universities who want to do this kind of work and apply it to their own fields of interest. Our big project at the moment is working with the Syrian Archive on archiving content from the Syrian conflict, and making it searchable by organisations like the ICC and IIIM on Syria to aid their investigations, as we can't rely on social media companies keeping that content online. Only last year we saw half a million YouTube videos from groups in Syria deleted as YouTube tried to get rid of extremist content and ended up with lots of false positives. We were able to get the vast majority restored, but we still realised we have think seriously about how this material is preserved long term. Our next step is to implement it with other organisations, then implement it with another conflict, likely Yemen. While everyone was busy funding on the ground documentation in Syria, no-one really thought seriously about how that material could be archived and made useful for international bodies like the ICC, so we're trying to solve that problem now, so it can be applied to future conflicts without having to take 6 years of war to figure this stuff out. I'd like to discuss this stuff in more detail, but I've so many loony trolls who have obsessed over me for the last 6 years who end up harassing any organisation I work with I tend not to do that online. The Bellingcat team are currently being filmed for a feature length documentary coming out at the end of the year, so there will be lots of stuff I haven't talked about yet in there, and they'll have been filming us for 2 years by the time its out, so there should be at least something interesting in there. Anyway, actual content for this thread. We've started doing projects with Forensic Architecture, where they take material we've gathered and turn it into 3D models to explain the evidence. This is probably the best way to display all the information we piece together about incidents, making it much more accessible than photos and maps with coloured boxes all over them. The following video is based on work I did investigating the bombing of M2 hospital in Aleppo for the Atlantic Council report Breaking Aleppo. I had received dozens of photos and videos of the hospital, both inside and outside, from about a dozen different incidents of the hospital being damaged by bombing. The problem was, how could we prove the photos and videos inside the hospital were actually taken in M2 hospital? When a video or photograph is taken outside we can use satellite imagery or other images to geolocate it, but inside a building that is impossible, unless there's an view through a window, . What I did is I took all those images and videos from the inside of the hospital, and started to piece them all together like a jigsaw puzzle, so I could show all the pieces were connected, and some of those pieces led to views of the outside of the building which could be geolocated, so even though 99% of the images couldn't geolocated by themselves, the 1% of geolocated images I could prove were connected to the other 99% confirmed the images were from M2 hospital: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CJ-KKLzyBU We also examined the bombing of Al Jinah mosque in Syria, which was blamed on US forces, who at first claimed they hadn't bombed a mosque, but an senior Al Qaeda meeting. We worked with Human Rights Watch and Forensic Architecture on this one, and there were two key things we had to establish. One, that it was a functioning mosque, and two, the part of the building bombed was part of the mosque building, not a separate structure on the side of a mosque. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOyihqEOfYA After we released our reports the Pentagon did finally admit it was a mosque, but stuck with their story it was an Al-Qaeda meeting, and only one civilian died, even though our research didn't find a single piece of evidence to show Al-Qaeda was anywhere near it, and there were many more civilians killed. They gave a slightly maddening press conference about it, which AirWars transcribed. It should be noted that if it wasn't for the AirWars transcription we wouldn't have known anything the was said in that press conference, because it was barely reported and nothing was released to the media about what was discussed.
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Feb 11, 2018 10:09
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Luceid posted:This is grim but, from the perspective of a spatial professional, really cool. Have you done much with spectral analysis for other projects, or just visual identification from satellite imagery? Just stuff from commercial images, we haven't got a massive budget, so it limits what we can do. Fortunately Planet Labs has given us a free account, so that's 3m resolution satellite imagery from pretty much the entire world on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times a day. That's good for looking at environmental damage on a large scale. Examples of that are our pieces on the damage from Hurricane Harvey and monitoring the Amulsar Armenian Gold Mine Project, which we believe is a massive environmental disaster waiting to happen. For higher resolution imagery Terraserver is pretty reasonable, it's about $299 a year, and usually had imagery that's pretty up to date, generally a month old, but sometime just a couple of weeks. The issue there is getting licensing to use the imagery is an extra cost, but all the imagery is from Digital Globe, and they've been very generous with allowing us to use image. We've also been giving some presentations at the satellite imagery events organisations like European Space Imagery runs, so instead of cash we get paid in satellite imagery credit. There's a good article here about commercial satellite imagery, lots of info on the various limitations set by governments. Some interesting things recently caught on satellite imagery: https://twitter.com/QalaatAlMudiq/status/960911834193817600 https://twitter.com/trbrtc/status/961918579410178048 https://twitter.com/QalaatAlMudiq/status/960911834193817600 Brown Moses fucked around with this message at 10:48 on Feb 13, 2018 |
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Feb 13, 2018 10:44
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God, that takes me back.
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Apr 13, 2018 22:11
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chitoryu12 posted:How long do you think it'll take for Damascus to get repopulated and rebuilt? Stalingrad was still mostly makeshift structures 5 years after the war ended, and that was with the aid of tens of thousands of German prisoners and the full economic resources of the Soviet Union. Keep in mind they've also built extensive tunnel networks, and there's a massive amount of UXO that needs cleaning up. It's a similar situation in Raqqa and Mosul at the moment, only a few days ago there was a report of an unexploded car bomb detonating as they were clearing rubble from a collapsed building. I've done workshops with Syrians from various parts of Syria who haven't been home in years, and sometimes they look at their old homes on satellite imagery to see what they look like now, and inevitably they're piles of rubble. For most of them it's the first time they've had chance to see what their homes are like now. Brown Moses fucked around with this message at 08:59 on May 15, 2018 |
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May 15, 2018 08:57
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Zeroisanumber posted:That sounds like torture. Yeah, I try to discourage that sort of thing once that pattern emerged. It's not just about their home, their entire neighbourhoods are destroyed, where they went to school, picked up their shopping, met their friends, all literally reduced to rubble.
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May 16, 2018 10:51
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The MH17 Joint Investigation Team had a press conference today where they presented a lot of open source evidence related to the origin of the missile launcher that shot it down. Bellingcat pretty much did this all already, but the JIT is a proper criminal investigation, so the fact they agree with our findings is significant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhyd875Qtlg
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May 24, 2018 17:24
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Yeah, I did a bit for World at One, which is a BBC show, so I guess NPR has it too. As I was doing that I was in a hotel being filmed by a documentary film crew who are doing a film on Bellingcat, called the Bellingcat Method.
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May 24, 2018 19:11
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Well the day after the Joint Investigation Team press conference on MH17 we followed it up by releasing our new report IDing one of the people involved with transporting the Buk that shot down MH17 as a senior GRU officer, who was also the defence minister of the South Ossestian separatists back in 2008. Both the Russian MoD and Foreign Ministry have responded by saying our work is based on fakes, so I emailed them yesterday asking for their evidence we're using fakes: https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1000339540433924096
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May 27, 2018 19:57
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mlmp08 posted:Do twitter-fights with the Russian government invalidate a life insurance policy? I'm actually applying for renewed life insurance soon and I have no idea exactly what I should tell them about all this.
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May 27, 2018 22:20
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