by Miles O’Brien and Will Toubman
[The post below, the transcript of a report broadcast on the PBS NewsHour on Wednesday evening, 13 April 2022, is about the growth of the phenomenon called “open-source intelligence,” which correspondent Miles O’Brien defines as “information in the public domain hoovered up by armchair analysts and intelligence professionals alike.” (In the U.K., for those not up on British English, ‘hoover’ is the common verb for ‘suck in or inhale, as if by a vacuum cleaner,” according to Wikipedia.)
[Even occasional readers of Rick On Theater will probably know that I was an intelligence officer in the army, so this kind of report interests me. I’ve posted others on ROT over the years. A recent one, from the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes, was “‘Ritchie Boys: The Secret U.S. Unit Bolstered by German-Born Jews that Helped the Allies Beat Hitler’” (posted on 19 May 2021).
[When I was wearing the cloak and carrying the dagger (not really—we wore civvies and carried .38’s), OSINT, as O’Brien says it’s called now, wasn’t part of my job. I worked in HUMINT, or Human Intelligence. We dealt with living sources. Other Military Intelligence units and personnel handled ELINT, or Electronic Intelligence—bugging and counter-bugging—and SIGINT, Signals Intelligence—listening in on other people’s telephone and radio communications.
[OSINT, it seems, has grown up and become, says O’Brien, “actionable.”]
Judy Woodruff: It is often said that truth is the first casualty is any war. Propaganda, disinformation and outright lies have always been dependable tactics to win hearts and minds.
But in a world filled with millions of connected cameras on smartphones, street corners, dashboards and satellites, it’s increasingly possible for anyone who’s online to root out the real story. It’s called open-source intelligence.
And our science correspondent, Miles O’Brien, met some of the people using it to lift the fog of war in Ukraine.
Miles O’Brien: It is spring break. And University of Alabama Birmingham sophomore Justin Peden is savoring some downtime with friends in the Florida Panhandle, while thinking about a war more than 5,700 miles away.
Justin Peden, The Intel Crab: I wanted to pull the curtain back on the world and just, I’m so sheltered, so many of us are sheltered, and to expose them to what is going on out there.
Miles O’Brien: Eight years ago, when he was all of 12, Russia’s first push into Ukraine piqued his curiosity. He gravitated virtually to a place he has never been and got to know people he has never met, lots of them.
Justin Peden: I came to realize that they are just like me. Some of them are even adolescents at the time, just like myself. And this is not a story to them. This is their life.
Miles O’Brien: And now it is a big part of his. Young Justin is a highly regarded practitioner in the fast-growing field of open-source intelligence, or OSINT. It is information in the public domain hoovered up by armchair analysts and intelligence professionals alike.
His Intel Crab feed has drawn a quarter million followers outside and inside the intelligence community.
Justin Peden: I never, ever in a million years could have imagined it would be so relevant as it is this current month, last month as well.
Miles O’Brien: In addition to cultivating a cadre of 500 sources on the ground in Ukraine, mostly through Twitter, he combs the Internet to gather information from flight and ship trackers, commercial satellite imagery, streaming Webcams, and smartphones stills and videos shared on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Justin Peden: It has been consistently uncovering some of the biggest leads of this conflict in the lead-up to it.
Miles O’Brien: Nick Waters is an ex British army officer and open-source analyst at Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based nonprofit that harvests OSINT to publish investigative journalism.
Nick Waters, Bellingcat: With the advent of smartphones, as well as social media and the Internet, what we have done is created an incredibly powerful information network that pretty much anyone can use to discover what is happening in the world around them.
Miles O’Brien: OSINT is often useful to determine what did not really happen. Right before the invasion, Russian separatists posted images purporting to show the aftermath of a fatal bomb attack aimed at them by the Ukrainian army in Donetsk.
Media embedded with Russian separatist troops swooped in to cover the event.
Man (through translator): The armed forces of Ukraine blew up two improvised explosive devices on this highway.
Miles O’Brien: But the online crowd was immediately skeptical of the video. They noticed the vehicles had no license plates, saw no evidence of an explosion, and found the injuries to the victims highly suspicious.
Nick Waters reached out to pathologists and explosive experts. A few days later, a detailed Bellingcat report concluded the cars were torched, the supposed shrapnel damage was more likely bullet holes, and the bodies had clear angular cuts and organs removed, evidence of autopsies.
Nick Waters: So, basically, these people were already dead before they were put in this vehicle. And so what we saw was the attempt by Russian-backed separatists to try and fake an incident.
These kinds of initial inconsistencies were identified by individuals online, and were then confirmed by experts.
Miles O’Brien: Russia’s attempt to create a false flag pretext for war was not a surprise to those who investigate disinformation and how it spreads.
Jane Lytvynenko is a senior research fellow at Harvard Kennedy school’s Shorenstein Center.
Jane Lytvynenko, Harvard Kennedy School: Russia has made multiple attempts to essentially fake pretext for invasion. And through using this open-source intelligence, granular gathering of information, we are essentially able to say that it is hogwash.
Miles O’Brien: The intelligence gathering, fact-checking, and debunking is happening in real time. When this deepfake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appearing to surrender emerged, it was quickly debunked online, including by Zelenskyy himself.
The online crowd is also documenting the movement and placement of Russian troops, creating something more than just a snapshot of recent history. It is often actionable intelligence.
Juliette Kayyem, Former Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary: It is a war where the crowd is essentially helping to make tactical decisions.
Miles O’Brien: Juliette Kayyem . . . is a former assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Juliette Kayyem: People are making decisions about where they want to attack, or where are the Russian tanks, or what are we seeing in the skies, based on the guy or the woman on the street with an iPhone. We have never seen anything like that.
Miles O’Brien: Before the advent of this technological revolution, open-source intelligence was limited primarily to professionals collecting and translating foreign media reports.
Heather Williams, RAND Corporation: Now we are sort of seeing how David can weaponize his cell phone against Goliath.
Miles O’Brien: Heather Williams is a former intelligence analyst now at the RAND Corporation.
Heather Williams: There may be times where Goliath learns how to fight back against that. But, right now, we are seeing a lot of savvy on the part of the Ukrainian people and on the Ukrainian government on how to use some of these different tools to their advantage.
Miles O’Brien: All of these points of data might help clear the fog of war. The challenge is piecing it all together quickly and accurately. Open-source intelligence is not inherently intelligent.
Justin Peden: Just because it is a firsthand account does not mean it is truthfully from there. You never know until you go through that process, that verification process. They could live in Alabama too.
(LAUGHTER)
Miles O’Brien: We are seeing a war unfold like never before. What once might have been kept secret is out there for all of us to see.
The real secret now? Knowing who to trust and what to believe.
For the “PBS NewsHour,”
I am Miles O’Brien.
[In my remarks in the foreword to his post, I didn’t mean to intimate that OSINT didn’t exist or was unknown when I was a Special Agent. It was—on a much simpler level, given the times—but I didn’t work with it myself. As O’Brien says, “Before the advent of this technological revolution, open-source intelligence was limited primarily to professionals collecting and translating foreign media reports.”
At the beginning of the 1962 film of The Manchurian Candidate, Major Marco (Frank Sinatra), an army intelligence officer, has a job after the Korean War reading books for random bits of information. (In this instance, it’s a make-work job, invented to keep Marco occupied and out of the way. The books, like Paintings of Orozco and Modern French Theater, are irrelevant.)
[In Three Days of the Condor (1975), however, Joe Turner (Robert Redford) is a CIA researcher in a cover organization whose job is to read books, comics, magazines, newspapers, and anything else published to look for actionable intelligence. In these cases (Condor was made a year or so after I was an active intelligence field agent), that was as far as anything resembling OSINT—a term unknown at the time of either film—went. There were, of course, no social media, Internet, or computer databases yet.
[Miles
O’Brien is a veteran, independent journalist who focuses on science, technology,
and aerospace. Will Toubman is a producer
and series coordinator for NewsHour’s Leading Edge stories.]
No comments:
Post a Comment