OSINT

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer. Photos: John Lund/Getty Images; EyePress News/Shutterstock

OSINT aka Open Source Network, is a collection of tech tools enabling one to track ops, both on and offline, something being leveraged to the max regarding Russian operations in its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

OSINT

Alex McKeever, a part-time furniture mover in Ridgewood, Queens, woke up Wednesday and started scrolling on his phone. Like many of us, he’s been obsessed with the invasion of Ukraine and has been spending ten hours a day trying to piece together what was happening from news coverage and social media. That morning, McKeever, who is 30, saw that someone had tweeted a video of destroyed vehicles in a suburb of Kharkiv called Bucha. It appeared to be the aftermath of a significant battle. The blackened wreckage of numerous Russian military vehicles lay scattered and smoldering along the road. Where exactly, McKeever wondered, had it taken place?

He wasn’t idly musing. For the last six years, McKeever has been active in open-source intelligence, or OSINT, which involves gathering and analyzing online information in much the same way that government intelligence professionals analyze classified data: identifying when and where events took place, who was involved, what kinds of weapons were used, and so on.

Sherlock would be proud & Sun Tzu would relate to this tech in a heartbeat.

Geolocation - one aspect of OSINT becoming ever more important in times of war.

Poking around the area on Google Maps, he found only one road wide enough to match the image: a major artery that ran from the suburb into Kharkiv. Using Google’s Street View mode, he explored along the road until he found a pair of buildings under construction that might fit the bill. The image was from 2019. He switched to Google Earth and found an image of the completed buildings from 2020 that looked “pretty compelling” but whose resolution was too low to provide definitive proof. Returning to Street View, McKeever compared the details of the fence and the trees across the street. They matched. He took a screenshot and tweeted it alongside the original image with the exact coordinates: 50.543838 degrees north, 30.226820 degrees east. “The whole process took 20 or 30 minutes,” McKeever says.

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