4 ms·

It’s a real, professional skill used in intelligence, among other industries. It’s not as easy as the author makes it sound.

• casefields 7y ago
  Whenever posts like this or BellingCat pop up, they always seem stupidly easy. Is this really some special skill that I didn't realize I had? It feels like it's just a visual aspect to someone's Google-fu ability, with a dash of critical thinking.
  • patrec 7y ago
    Well, did you stop reading the article past the pic, do it yourself from scratch and finish in 10 minutes, or did you just nod along each time?
• Hitton 7y ago
  It's skill, but I would hardly call it professional. Anons on 4chan do regularly much more impressive stuff. The gas station in this case made it particularly easy, anyone with a bit of experience from stuff like geoguesser and similar quizzes can find it easily. That's why I too consider calling this a "case study" pretentious.
  • ShorsHammer 7y ago
    The 4chan instance with Shia Lebouf was an amazing read. After months of harassment over the He Will Not Divide Us art project Shia moved it to a livestreamed flagpole with nothing but the sky as the background. In under 48 hours they mapped various contrails to flight lanes, matched up star constellations at night using celestial navigation and correlated weather to pinpoint the flags location. Then they went and stole it. Ignoring the childishness of it all, it was some impressive crowdsourced investigative work given nothing but an empty sky to work with.
    • Scoundreller 7y ago
      I thought the last step was driving around town honking their horn until they heard it on the webcam stream.