May 31, 2015
In Bellingcat’s latest report, Forensic Analysis of Satellite Images Released by the Russian Ministry of Defense, we exposed how Russia had falsely claimed satellite imagery from June 2014 was from July 14th and July 17th. As with nearly all of Bellingcat’s work we used open source information, satellite imagery from Google Earth, to expose the fake…
May 29, 2015
This article was originally posted on Arms Control Wonk. Sadly, there is no textbook for imagery analysis. I would love to contribute to one someday, but until that becomes an option, here’s the March 1996 Unclassified Photo Interpretation Student Handbook. I picked it up from from a rather unusual meeting on a DC trip and…
May 28, 2015
In the Ukraine conflict, many have scoured the military equipment sightings on social media to find evidence of Russian involvement. One obvious sign to look for is equipment that’s either exclusively used by Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, or has not ever been in manufactured or service in Ukraine. The modernized T-72B3 main battle…
May 26, 2015
By Justin Seitz
This article was originally published on AutomatingOSINT.com. On May 20, 2015 the ODNI released a trove of documents called “Bin Ladin’s Bookshelf“. This included all kinds of materials including letters he had written, books he was reading and other various bits of information. This document released piqued my interest primarily because I was interested to…
May 22, 2015
This article was originally posted on Arms Control Wonk. A lot of people are asking how to take measurements and make 3D models from 2D images. If conditions are juuusst right, SketchUp’s Match Photo technique is the way to go. Unfortunately, in our world, conditions are almost never just right, unless you happen to be…
May 13, 2015
By Justin Seitz
This was originally posted to AutomatingOSINT.com. Welcome back! To continue our photo retrieval magic, we are going to now incorporate Wikimapia photos. If you remember our first posts on Panoramio, the goal is to automate as much photo retrieval as we can in order to speed up the process of geolocating photographs. Much like Panoramio,…
May 11, 2015
By Justin Seitz
This post originally appeared on AutomatingOSINT.com. Ok we’re back. After a bit of feedback from readers on the first post and some investigation on my end, we have discovered the following: Panoramio API does not report the correct number of results as an API result. So your script might say that it found 200 images…
May 8, 2015
By Justin Seitz
This blog post was originally posted to AutomatingOSINT.com. Stemming from the recent riots in Baltimore, Eoghan mac Suibhne (Twitter) wrote an interesting piece on image verification. Read it first before carrying on: Baltimore ‘looting’ tweets show importance of quick and easy image checks The moral of this story was that you can use reverse search on…
May 4, 2015
By Justin Seitz
This post was originally published on AutomatingOSINT.com. When geolocating a photograph part of the effort involves looking at photos from various websites (Flickr, Panoramio, Wikimapia) that may lie within the area of interest. We are going to use a previous Bellingcat post (Geolocating Tunisian Jihadists in Raqqah) as a starting point for beginning to automate…
April 24, 2015
This article was originally posted on Arms Control Wonk. One of the easiest and most useful methods for an open source analyst is to extract metadata from imagery. Metadata is data that is often included with an image, such as the time it was taken, the type of camera that was used, and yes, if…
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