With few exceptions, everything that appears in your browser can be downloaded and transformed into useable data formats, with many organisations or individuals maintain complex and publicly accessible datasets containing valuable information. Despite being publicly viewable, in many cases the underlying data is not able to be downloaded and further analysed. This guide will focus…
Evidence of human rights abuses often remains in some of the world’s most regional and unreachable parts. It is in these areas, where a view from satellite imagery above can be the sole method of visual evidence of bombings, attacks, and the destruction of communities. As satellite imagery becomes more available and technology permits for…
Most digital research can be done without any issues on a desktop or laptop computer; however, sometimes you may need to use a mobile device to use particular applications. This guide will provide a walk-through on setting up a virtual Android device on a PC to conduct open source research. Android emulation is also possible…
لقد أدى انتشار وسائل الإعلام الاجتماعي والهواتف الذكية في جميع أنحاء الشرق الأوسط إلى خلق قدر هائل من الوثائق المتاحة للجمهور حول النزاعات في المنطقة. سواء في شكل مقاطع فيديو أو صور و مقاطع من المعارك والاشتباكات إلى جرائم الحرب المحتملة,و يتم توثيق الكثير من هذه الاشياء بشكل روتيني وتحميلها إلى مواقع مختلفة مثل فيس…
Information from groups involved in international conflicts has never been as accessible as it is now. Rebel groups run social media accounts, video of missile launches are posted to Twitter, and the production value of propaganda has skyrocketed. For researchers and journalists who do not master the Arabic language, the same problems still exist: how…
The spread of social media and smartphones throughout the Middle East has created a truly enormous amount of publicly available documentation of conflicts in the region. Whether in the form of videos or photos, from combat footage to potential war crimes — a lot of things are routinely documented and uploaded to various sites like…
Throughout this story, click on any of the images to view in full resolution. When conducting open source investigations, an ever-present issue is how to archive away the materials you are researching. For example, a social media post may be deleted by a user after you publish an investigation, or a video on YouTube showing…
Recently, the fitness app Strava published a “heatmap” of trillion of data points visualizing the information of users who submitted or synchronized their fitness activity to their servers. This data includes both fitness information recorded directly on the fitness app and data synchronized with the app from a number of physical fitness trackers, such as…
Much of Bellingcat’s work requires intense research into particular events, which includes finding every possible photograph, video, and witness account that will help inform our analysis. Perhaps most notably, we exhaustively researched the events surrounding the shoot down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) over eastern Ukraine. The photographs and videos taking near the crash…
This article was originally posted to the AutomatingOSINT.com blog. More and more investigations are being conducted on Tor and many of them can also include investigating Bitcoin transactions. The nature of Bitcoin is such that the transactions themselves are designed to be anonymous but there are many other factors that can dictate whether the owner…
