Open-Source Intelligence: How Bellingcat Uses Data Gathered by Authoritarian Governments (cnn.com) 52
CNN profiles Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based investigative group specializing in "open-source intelligence". And investigator Christo Grozev tells CNN that authoritarian governments make their work easier, because "they love to gather data, comprehensive data, on ... what they consider to be their subjects, and therefore there's a lot of centralized data."
"And second, there's a lot of petty corruption ... within the law enforcement system, and this data market thrives on that." Billions have been spent on creating sophisticated encrypted communications for the military in Russia. But most of that money has been stolen in corrupt kickbacks, and the result is they didn't have that functioning system... It is shocking how incompetent they are. But it was to be expected, because it's a reflection of 23 years of corrupt government.
Interestingly there's apparently less corruption in China — though more whistleblowers. But Bellingcat's first investigation involved the 2014 downing of a Boeing 777 over eastern Ukraine that killed 283 passengers. (The Dutch Safety Board later concluded it was downed by a surface-to-air missile launched from pro-Russian separatist-controlled territory in Ukraine.) "At that time, a lot of public data was available on Russian soldiers, Russian spies, and so on and so forth — because they still hadn't caught up with the times, so they kept a lot of digital traces, social media, posting selfies in front of weapons that shoot down airliners. That's where we kind of perfected the art of reconstructing a crime based on digital breadcrumbs..."
"By 2016, it was no longer possible to find soldiers leaving status selfies on the internet because a new law had been passed in Russia, for example, banning the use of mobile phones by secret services and by soldiers. So we had to develop a new way to get data on government crime. We found our way into this gray market of data in Russia, which is comprised of many, many gigabytes of leaked databases, car registration databases, passport databases. Most of these are available for free, completely freely downloadable from torrent sites or from forums and the internet." And for some of them, they're more current. You actually can buy the data through a broker, so we decided that in cases when we have a strong enough hypothesis that a government has committed the crime, we should probably drop our ethical boundaries from using such data — as long as it is verifiable, as long as it is not coming from one source only but corroborated by at least two or three other sources of data. That's how we develop it. And the first big use case for this approach was the ... poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018 (in the United Kingdom), when we used this combination of open source and data bought from the gray market in Russia to piece together who exactly the two poisoners were. And that worked tremendously....
It has been what I best describe as a multilevel computer game.... [W]hen we first learned that we can get private data, passport files and residence files on Russian spies who go around killing people, they closed the files on those people. So every spy suddenly had a missing passport file in the central password database. But that opened up a completely new way for us to identify spies, because we were just able to compare older versions of the database to newer versions. So that allowed us to find a bad group of spies that we didn't even know existed before.
The Russian government did realize that that's maybe a bad idea to hide them from us, so they reopened those files but just started poisoning data. They started changing the photographs of some of these people to similar looking, like lookalikes of the people, so that they confused us or embarrass us if we publish a finding but it's for the wrong guy. And then we'll learn how to beat that.
When asked about having dropped some ethical boundaries about data use, Grozev replies "everything changes. Therefore, the rules of journalism should change with the changing times." "And it's not common that journalism was investigating governments conducting government-sanctioned crimes, but now it's happening." With a country's ruler proclaiming perpetual supreme power, "This is not a model that traditional journalism can investigate properly. It's not even a model that traditional law enforcement can investigate properly." I'll give an example. When the British police asked, by international agreement, for cooperation from the Russian government to provide evidence on who exactly these guys were who were hanging around the Skripals' house in 2018, they got completely fraudulent, fake data from the Russian government....
So the only way to counter that as a journalist is to get the data that the Russian government is refusing to hand over. And if this is the only way to get it, and if you can be sure that you can prove that this is valid data and authentic data — I think it is incumbent on journalists to find the truth. And especially when law enforcement refuses to find the truth because of honoring the sovereign system of respecting other governments.
It was Bellingcat that identified the spies who's poisoned Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny. CNN suggests that for more details on their investigation, and "to understand Vladimir Putin's stranglehold on power in Russia, watch the new film Navalny which premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on CNN."
The movie's tagline? "Poison always leaves a trail."
"And second, there's a lot of petty corruption ... within the law enforcement system, and this data market thrives on that." Billions have been spent on creating sophisticated encrypted communications for the military in Russia. But most of that money has been stolen in corrupt kickbacks, and the result is they didn't have that functioning system... It is shocking how incompetent they are. But it was to be expected, because it's a reflection of 23 years of corrupt government.
Interestingly there's apparently less corruption in China — though more whistleblowers. But Bellingcat's first investigation involved the 2014 downing of a Boeing 777 over eastern Ukraine that killed 283 passengers. (The Dutch Safety Board later concluded it was downed by a surface-to-air missile launched from pro-Russian separatist-controlled territory in Ukraine.) "At that time, a lot of public data was available on Russian soldiers, Russian spies, and so on and so forth — because they still hadn't caught up with the times, so they kept a lot of digital traces, social media, posting selfies in front of weapons that shoot down airliners. That's where we kind of perfected the art of reconstructing a crime based on digital breadcrumbs..."
"By 2016, it was no longer possible to find soldiers leaving status selfies on the internet because a new law had been passed in Russia, for example, banning the use of mobile phones by secret services and by soldiers. So we had to develop a new way to get data on government crime. We found our way into this gray market of data in Russia, which is comprised of many, many gigabytes of leaked databases, car registration databases, passport databases. Most of these are available for free, completely freely downloadable from torrent sites or from forums and the internet." And for some of them, they're more current. You actually can buy the data through a broker, so we decided that in cases when we have a strong enough hypothesis that a government has committed the crime, we should probably drop our ethical boundaries from using such data — as long as it is verifiable, as long as it is not coming from one source only but corroborated by at least two or three other sources of data. That's how we develop it. And the first big use case for this approach was the ... poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018 (in the United Kingdom), when we used this combination of open source and data bought from the gray market in Russia to piece together who exactly the two poisoners were. And that worked tremendously....
It has been what I best describe as a multilevel computer game.... [W]hen we first learned that we can get private data, passport files and residence files on Russian spies who go around killing people, they closed the files on those people. So every spy suddenly had a missing passport file in the central password database. But that opened up a completely new way for us to identify spies, because we were just able to compare older versions of the database to newer versions. So that allowed us to find a bad group of spies that we didn't even know existed before.
The Russian government did realize that that's maybe a bad idea to hide them from us, so they reopened those files but just started poisoning data. They started changing the photographs of some of these people to similar looking, like lookalikes of the people, so that they confused us or embarrass us if we publish a finding but it's for the wrong guy. And then we'll learn how to beat that.
When asked about having dropped some ethical boundaries about data use, Grozev replies "everything changes. Therefore, the rules of journalism should change with the changing times." "And it's not common that journalism was investigating governments conducting government-sanctioned crimes, but now it's happening." With a country's ruler proclaiming perpetual supreme power, "This is not a model that traditional journalism can investigate properly. It's not even a model that traditional law enforcement can investigate properly." I'll give an example. When the British police asked, by international agreement, for cooperation from the Russian government to provide evidence on who exactly these guys were who were hanging around the Skripals' house in 2018, they got completely fraudulent, fake data from the Russian government....
So the only way to counter that as a journalist is to get the data that the Russian government is refusing to hand over. And if this is the only way to get it, and if you can be sure that you can prove that this is valid data and authentic data — I think it is incumbent on journalists to find the truth. And especially when law enforcement refuses to find the truth because of honoring the sovereign system of respecting other governments.
It was Bellingcat that identified the spies who's poisoned Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny. CNN suggests that for more details on their investigation, and "to understand Vladimir Putin's stranglehold on power in Russia, watch the new film Navalny which premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on CNN."
The movie's tagline? "Poison always leaves a trail."
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Be sure your masters pay in something other than rubles. The word is they are hard to convert to real currency.
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Because we totally judge such things by number of people and not economic capacity.
Did Dumpeacho have explosive diarrhea again? (Score:2)
Cause one would expect a buttplug like you to be far deeper and firmer up his rectum, not flopping about in the light of day.
Back you go where you belong... go now... no one wants you. Here or elsewhere.
Back up the fart canal. Off you go.
Re:You realize you quoted CNN right? (Score:5, Informative)
CNN sure can suck, anyone can admit that but they are still a giant, global and well funded journalism company with actual reporters on the scene of most major stories. We can shit on the mainstream media sources when they get shit wrong but that does not mean you can just discount everything they have to say all the time, especially when the aternative media 90% sucks just as bad or worse, rife with conspiracies, made up storis, misinformation and generally just re-packaging stories the mainstream reports on first because they don't have (and aren't willing to commit) the range to report these things themselves.
Bellingcat is actually one of the prime examples of an alternative media source that actually digs for stories the mainstream doesn't get to. We should be supporting them if we want more reliable alternative sources to the big news agencies.
Re:You realize you quoted CNN right? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You realize you quoted CNN right? (Score:5, Interesting)
That is far from the only way Bellingcat investigates though and they have a long history of placing conflict journalists on location (Like the aforementioned Christo Grozev on the ground in Ukraine).
Like any media org they can and shoud be scrutinized but thye have a pretty good track record at this point of stories that end up confirmed by more mainstream media sources like tying the Aleppo bombing to US supplied munitions, [bellingcat.com] Russian cluster munitions in Syria [archive.org], helping tie the FSB to the poisoning of Navalny. [bellingcat.com]
Again, we should all be critical of media sources but Bellingcat kicks up a lot of dirt governments would prefer to stay buried, as The Guardian stated "Bellingcat has frequently sparred with Russian military and diplomatic officials, who have claimed without evidence that Bellingcat fabricates evidence and is a front for foreign intelligence services". Russian media have said that Bellingcat is funded by the U.S. government to undermine Russia and other NATO adversaries".
Bellingcat makes their investigations very transparent, shouldn't we be supporting that type of thing? I don't think it's fair to write them off based on the idea they might be using methods you were taught could be inconsistent. They seem to put in the work you mention is needed.
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Bellingcat's methods are 2nd & 3rd-hand surveillance which can be easily falsified (& there are govt departments & PR agencies that make a living from doing this). The little I learned about historical methods in school told us to be very wary about such tenuous sources.
Sure, but staging is harder than it looks [bellingcat.com].
The nice thing about the truth is it tends to fit well with other things that are true. Just look at any war movie, regardless of budget and the filmmakers intent you'll see countless inaccuracies because it's impossibly to stage everything.
Have a fake victim? Well make sure that person isn't identifiable somewhere else on the Internet. Have a fake location? Make sure the buildings can't be located. Make sure the weather is right for that time and day.
Sure, Russians
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You have paradoxical ideas about mainstream. Every mainstream publisher, every nato state stands squarely behind Bellingcat. Does that sound 'alternative' to you?
Why does this CIA person love Bellingcat?
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020... [foreignpolicy.com]
Bellingcat is like the NED. Stuff the secret services wants to get out there without being openly associated with it. Bellingcat appears independent but they can be trusted to always choose the side of western powers. They are a front organization.
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So when Bellingcat documented that the US supplied munitions used to bomb a religious site, killing a few dozen civilians, that is the side the west wanted?
And I guess it would also be a pro-western take to point out how many airplanes used for drug smuggling by cartels are linked to the US?
And apparently it is very pro-western to document state violence against civilians in the US?
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Stuff like this does not work with 'counter examples'.Do I have to explain how it works? There is no need at all for a front organisation to be 100% aligned with your agenda, in fact it undercuts the appearance of independence. Alignment is a spectrum, it can mean having friendly journalists who reproduce your messages, can mean friendly management putting the right people where it matters to you. Bellingcat is closely aligned with NATO, is partisan(which can be honest), has a secret agenda(a lot less hones
You realize you aren't very smart? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is your war going badly Russian stooge?
Does CNN keep pointing out your lies?
That sure was a very stormy sea [cnn.com] that your flagship sunk in...
And only 1 dead... Easter miracle...
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LOL, you just quoted their article about sinking the Moskva ship, but NOWHERE does it say that it was a US joint operation. Not only that, but now everyone is wondering if Russia will use this event as their "Pearl Harbor". I.e the excuse needed to attack the US. You think the US is intervening because the Ukraine is doing so well? Ukrainian officials are even speculating that Russia will go after Moldova once the Ukraine has been taken, because Russia succeeding is a serious likelihood. You must be even le
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I would really like to see russia turning their failure and incompetence into "Pearl Harbor" moment and attacking anything outside Ukrainian borders. They even managed to burn down their Aerospace Defense Research Institute. Probably to hide their "first in the World" technological advancements.
As for "russia succeeding". Just LOL
Re: You realize you aren't very smart? (Score:2)
You unironically quote the daily mail, which is just a right wing propagandasheet. I mean... seriously? It's almost as bad as quoting Infowars.
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That's a nice opinion, but you still missed the point. You can use any reputable news outlet. I doesn't matter if they have left or right bias. Nobody is watching CNN, not even left-wingers. They are not reputable if you have to fact-check their news to get the real facts. Other news outlines provide opinions around facts. CNN just omits facts for whatever reason, and then represents their opinions as statements of fact. They're columnists.
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I called out both FOX and CNN in the first sentence of my first post. You're just an idiot and that's why you missed it.
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Where did I make that claim?
And that's why you're an idiot lol.
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Well they're the least watched news station for a reason. Why do you suppose? The word "Especially" does not negate Fox. Stop grasping for straws.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
closing windows (Score:1)
This seems heroic, and it is. But by publishing these scoops they are hardening the Russian info sphere. Probably 5-eyes agencies knew these facts as well, but didn't publish, because they knew that if they did then those tactics would be removed for future exploitation. I am not sure this group is helping anyone in the long term. Their interests are not really perfectly aligned with the best intelligence posture of the West -- they get a lot of publicity from their discoveries. You have to wonder if t
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The corruption in Russian, well, everything, is so deeply ingrained by now that it's pretty much impossible to close all the holes that exist.
Reminds me of a comment "Why would we send spies if you can pay 2 bucks to a government official?"
Re:closing windows (Score:4, Insightful)
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We call them Ambassadors :)
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The 5-agencies probably do also know these facts. However, were they to publish them, useful tools like you would be claiming they were 5-eyes propaganda.
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tbh if you stop the CIA or NSA you've done the world a favor.
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Re:closing windows (Score:4, Interesting)
This seems heroic, and it is. But by publishing these scoops they are hardening the Russian info sphere. Probably 5-eyes agencies knew these facts as well, but didn't publish, because they knew that if they did then those tactics would be removed for future exploitation. I am not sure this group is helping anyone in the long term. Their interests are not really perfectly aligned with the best intelligence posture of the West -- they get a lot of publicity from their discoveries. You have to wonder if they have been privately asked to stop.
It depends. Going through social media to categorize Russian military equipment isn't necessarily exposing sources, and they can crowd source which gives them abilities that 5-eyes may not have. In fact, I suspect the 5-eyes agencies probably use Bellingcat as a resource when it comes to cataloguing Russian military positions and losses.
When it comes to the spy vs spy stuff yeah they might be blowing sources. Though at the same time there's people who will help a Bellingcat type operation who won't help a spy agency. Remember a spy agency is both trying to uncover enemy secrets and protect your own secrets and generally push the country's agenda. Lots of people will be very skeptical of discoveries by spy agencies for that reason. Bellingcat is just interested in uncovering secrets, so they have a certain credibility because they don't have a big secret agenda.
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Conservatives are used to having jokes explained to them and think doing so is just old fashioned courtesy.
right? (Score:1)
I don't think 905 words is a "summary" of anything. Holy crap, you know the first job of an EDITOR is to EDIT, right?
You would be fooling yourselves (Score:1)
Wow that is one big CIA ad... (Score:1)
Never seen a full page slashvertisement before. Was this some leftover CNN+ marketing budget? Good to know that slashdot is hitting even deeper lows. Bellingcat is just a PR agency for the CIA and sources 'appear' as necessary for them to claim they do open research to 'write' their articles legitimizing whatever the CIA is doing now.
Just watched... (Score:2)
Re: Bellingcat is just a CIA/MI6 cover. (Score:2)
What is the scam?
Why wouldn't CIA / MI6 / etc want this information released (as they see fit)? Obviously they can't do it themselves so let a resourceless journalist release intel about parts of the world that helps them.
23 years? (Score:2)
"But it was to be expected, because it's a reflection of 23 years of corrupt government."
I see someone's not a student of history.
This post has been hijacked (Score:3)
Just ask yourself who benefits and it all becomes crystal clear: Putin/Russia and the pro-Russia wing of the Republican Party. Welcome to a real world real time example of how Russian propaganda operates on the web right here in the good old USA. Instead of focusing on covert Russian activity, the topic is completely unsupported attacks on CNN. Score Putin/Russia 1, Ukraine/NATO/USA 0.
Many of the slime-casters are "useful idiots" for Russian propaganda, but there are a fair number who know the score and are completely on Putin's side. Remember that totalitarian leaders often admire others of their kind, and Trump loves Putin. At the start of the invasion Trump was "Go Putin!" Now the Trump toadies are continuing that support by somewhat less obvious means.