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Using Google Earth to Find an ISIS Training Camp
- kelukelugames 12y agoapplauds What are the next steps?
- IBCNU 12y agoNice work.
- DrSayre 12y agoThis is pretty awesome! I wanted to do something similar with the video of James Foley, but I figured there was people smarter than me already doing that and I really didn't want to watch that video.
- nikcub 12y agoFinding where James Foley was executed is less interesting. It is most likely just outside Raqqa. Not much you can do with the location (and they likely know it). When they were AQI, the beheadings were conducted in homes and buildings in areas under US control as part of an insurgency - so finding where they were was essential.
- bmmayer1 12y agoWay to crowdsource ours and Iraq's military intelligence! I'm sure someone will find this useful.
- mmayberry 12y agoI'm sure the government is on this as well but its pretty incredible what a citizen journalist can do from his home computer with a few basic web sites. Some of the other projects that he has worked on (finding a russian training camp, authenticating an Egyptian revolution movie, etc..) are worth a read as well
- iaw 12y agoUnfortunately once IS gets wind of this they'll be more careful and revise their strategies for releasing media. Those guys are disturbingly tech savvy.
- mmayberry 12y agoI thought the same but with so much media coming out from both IS and the public there is no way they can censor every image/video.
- eastbayjake 12y agoGet ready for ISIS to submit a post-mortem blog post to Hacker News about this
- lostlogin 12y ago... Poor choice of words given the subject of many of their videos!
- brador 12y agoAny examples of their tech savvy?
- eastbayjake 12y agohttp://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/isis-iraq-twitter-social-media-strategy/372856/ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/isi...
- justplay 12y agothis man deserve a huge applauds. He is our sherlock holmes.
- carlob 12y agoHonest question: what's the advantage of using FlashEarth over Bing maps (which appears to be the source of the data)?
- runjake 12y agoTypically an analyst would use both. They tend to compliment each other for multiple reasons: Bing has imagery from a different time period (most of the time newer than GMaps, but some of the time older, which can be useful). Bing also has the Bird's Eye view, and different aerial imagery in general, which can help with clarification and image artifacting. So basically, we're using all of our available options. BTW, this is all run of the mill stuff in mil/int circles, but with better resolutions and light/electromagnetic bands.
- magicalist 12y agoI think you misunderstood the question? FlashEarth[1] appears to just be a Bing Maps imagery viewer. [1] http://www.flashearth.com/ http://www.flashearth.com/
- martin_loetzsch 12y agoYes. If you want to have bing aerial images next to google satellite imagery, use this app to display bing maps in google earth: http://ge-map-overlays.appspot.com/bing-maps/aerial http://ge-map-overlays.appspot.com/bing-maps/aerial
- jebus989 12y agoI like this, but probably worth mentioning that this isn't a covert group so it seems somewhat akin to reporting where the Donetsk separatists are.
- ctdonath 12y agoBeing active combatants with numerous enemies, they still need to consider operational security. The Donetsk separatists are more like a political party than a combat force.
- elleferrer 12y agoWe need more bellingcats' - this was a great find - can we expect a planned airstrike in this location any time soon?
- davidrusu 12y ago> can we expect a planned airstrike in this location any time soon? I hope your not serious
- tzs 12y agoIs that because you think ISIS should not be fought militarily, or because you think tactically a ground strike would be a better approach, or what?
- panzagl 12y agoI think it's more the flip tone of the message.
- rcthompson 12y agoMaybe something to do with the location being in the middle of a city full of civilians.
- xorcist 12y agoIt would indeed be the perfect weapon for a terrorist. Just post a picture of something on the Internet and have foreign military blast it to the ground. Create terror and blame americans, and anyone can do it.
- tdicola 12y agoDo you really expect someone with the authority to make a strike is going to post about it on the internet?
- trentmb 12y agoBecause ISIS probably isn't there anymore.
- notastartup 12y agoAbsolutely amazing investigative work. This is very good intelligence from using everyday resources and a keen eye from the determined.
- magicalist 12y agoWait, so is the "new construction" around the tower the training camp? The article doesn't seem to say explicitly. Or is this more finding where they do training marches?
- e98cuenc 12y agoIt makes me super proud that he used Panoramio, a site I created 9 years ago. Nowadays with the prevalence of Google Street View is less useful than it used to be for this kind of stuff, but there are still places that the GSV guys have not (yet) covered.
- pbhjpbhj 12y agohttp://www.raspberrypi.org/layercamera/ http://www.raspberrypi.org/layercamera/ used Panoramio too, just in case you didn't catch that one, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8211473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8211473.
- 3rd3 12y agoI love Panoramio and shame on Google that they made it more difficult to access in the new maps.google.com! I often use it to see how places look like I may or may not travel to, sometimes to see how places look like that I order things from (for example obscure Chinese sellers and manufacturers on eBay).
- kyro 12y agoRachel Maddow, popular American talking head, mentioned this project and your site on her show tonight.
- hueving 12y agoPopular where? I think I've heard her name once over the last year and I live in the SF bay area.
- PostOnce 12y agoMSNBC, left-wing of fox's right-wing talking heads, approximately except nobody watches MSNBC... Old people and conservatives watch TV, young people and liberals read the internet, leaving MSNBC a ghost town, in my estimation
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- joelrunyon 12y agoInteresting that as it's getting easier & easier for "normal" people to do stuff like this - our media is getting worse and worse at it. They've essentially given up on reporting or investigating anything original and simply spew back "opinions", "tweets" or PR releases.
- narrator 12y agoThe more cynical among us would say that one of the media's main jobs is to reinforce pre-approved narratives by cherry-picking examples that fit that narrative. Look how much attention the mediocre punk rock band"pussy riot" got because they happened to reinforce a narrative that the west was pushing about Russia.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoI don't know if I'm being less or more cynical, but I have simpler explanation - the main job of the media is to make as much money as possible. This means optimizing for number of readers, and nowdays (because people interact with news on per-article, not per-site basis) pageviews. More pageviews = more ad dolars. Optimizing for profit is a strong force, and initially it helps any new industry make huge leaps of quality. But at some point, it starts to be more profitable to sacrifice human values. We're far into this part in case of media. What sells is linkbait, controversy, "reinforcing pre-approved narratives" (or more generally, reinforcing what people already believe), fake "thought provoking" content that is actually repeating established beliefs. Investigative journalism, good news, well-thought pieces don't sell enough, so they get left behind.
- blakeja 12y agoThis may be the best explanation I have ever seen.
- Bulkington 12y agoShould one -- moi, specifically, a journalist -- upvote the approved anti-narrative? In terms of making a modest living, I don't see much middle ground. Both sell newspapers/pageviews. There's all the room in the world between approved objectivity and calculated dissent. It just don't pay. The recently butchered James Foley said he'd cover local planning commission meetings if that was his last professional option. Idealist? Chump? Who else is going to do it, and do it well -- who informs the polis, so that a half-ass democracy can at least pretend to function? Crowd-sourced event coverage is cheap and easy and sexy. But it doesn't provide context. Sadly, for-profit media seems determined to capitalize on free YouTube and Twitter feeds at the expense of paying professionals to pay attention and make sense of complex issues. Nothing new here. Move along. News at 11. Did I say that out loud? Again? (Edit: I'm also a big fan of The Dish View From Your Window Contest, which leads this discussion. Interesting media model at The Dish: curate/create great content/commentary, and ask readers to pay. So far, so good.)
- moskie 12y agoThis is cool and all, but I can't help but be reminded of the hunt for Boston Marathon bombers. Sure, maybe the author's heart is in the right place, but Random Person On The Internet could easily have gotten something wrong, that seems intuitively correct to the author and a general audience (us), but is in fact incorrect. Which makes me inclined to instead leave stuff like this up to the professionals. (appeal to authority, i know, but... getting this stuff right is important.)
- joelrunyon 12y agoI think this is more research than akin the boston marathon hunt. This guy doesn't have access to bombs and I would assume the people who do have access to them would probably fact check it with some higher-level intelligence.
- Bluestrike2 12y agoI think the difference between the two scenarios is largely dependent upon the source materials and the quality of the analysis. The author knew that the photographs were authentic because they were sourced directly from ISIS. It wasn't a matter of determining who--out of many potential matches--might have fight a given profile (young male, bomb and backpack as people were searching for after Boston), but comparing the photographs to others in order to find matching geographical points of reference. The bridges in the photographs weren't going to change their looks. Even if you grant the possibility of a false positive in one instance, the use of multiple source photographs and different angles all combine to increase the accuracy of the analysis. This analysis in this blog post was thorough, precise, and clear. Professional. The responses to Boston, on the other hand, lacked such rigor and amounted to little more than a witch-hunt, despite the fact that most of those going through photographs were simply trying to help. You're right, in a sense, that it's easy for this type of analysis to be mishandled. But that's dependent upon the analyst and the materials they're working from. Rather than fret in this case, I'm happy to support it. Good examples should always be highlighted and praised, if only in the hope that such examples might help prevent poor examples in the future. A bit of a pipe-dream, but it's a nice one to imagine.
- hemancuso 12y agoAnyone who is impressed by this should seriously check out Andrew Sullivan's view from your window contest. Most weeks a reader submits a photo from their window, literally anywhere in the world. And people track it down with very similar techniques, to the exact window. And a lot of the contest photos offer much less to go off of than this [namely, only 1 photo, low res, country/context unspecified]. Here is the winners archive. http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/vfyw-contest/ http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/vfyw-contest/ Some of photos aren't too crazy or offer a landmark that is recognizable if you'd seen it before. But most of them offer very little in terms of knowing where to start unless you've got a huge body of contextual knowledge you can draw on. A couple ones that I had absolutely no idea where to start with: http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2010/08/17/the-view-from-your-window-contest-winner-11/ http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2010/08/17/the-view-from-your... http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/08/19/the-view-from-your-window-contest-winner-218/ http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/08/19/the-view-from-your... I imagine the CIA/NSA has a crack team of a couple dozen people doing this exact job.
- AndrewKemendo 12y agoI imagine the CIA/NSA has a crack team of a couple dozen people doing this exact job. There is actually an entire Agency devoted to doing this exact job and other similar activities: https://www.nga.mil/Pages/default.aspx https://www.nga.mil/Pages/default.aspx A few recent ones that I had absolutely no idea where to start with: Those actually provide TONS of identifiable features that make them relatively easy to track down with relatively simple tools.
- ChrisAntaki 12y ago> https://www.nga.mil/Pages/default.aspx https://www.nga.mil/Pages/default.aspx They have an HTTPS warning, due to a Facebook image being loaded over HTTP.
- hemancuso 12y agoPerhaps I didn't select the hardest from the recent archive. My basic point was more to show that people have the tools to a lot more digging with a lot less context. Hadn't heard of the NGA. Well there you go.
- misiti3780 12y agoI read an interesting article a while ago about who they have tried (unsuccessfully) to track http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayman_al-Zawahiri http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayman_al-Zawahiri from land artifacts. I supposed it is a bit more difficult as google maps didnt make it to Waziristan yet. It sort of reminds me of this article from a while back http://reason.com/blog/2014/04/03/crowdsourced-amateurs-outperform-cia-at http://reason.com/blog/2014/04/03/crowdsourced-amateurs-outp...
- qstyk 12y agoWhat an odd introduction: "Have you ever wondered what it would be like to go through training as an ISIS terrorist? Or better yet, where you would go to find such advanced training?" Nope.
- jqm 12y agoWestern governments didn't know this already? I have a hard time believing they didn't. There are (in my opinion) strategic reasons ISIS was allowed to get as far as it did. And reasons they were allowed to appropriate large amounts of cash and US weaponry.
- Too 12y agoI bet this guy is good at https://geoguessr.com/ https://geoguessr.com/
- MrJagil 12y agoSuch an interesting analysis, and seemingly a very nice site too. A shame the comments are so headless. It's a travesty communities and discussions devolve so quickly on the internet (though I of course know from PGs eternal struggle how hard it is to prevent). Whoever can solve this problem (nice try disqus etc) will certainly claim fame. Up and down votes won't cut it. It will require a serious inquiry into psychology, sociology and behavioural studies I believe.
- lolryan 12y agoWhen looking for new apartments in NYC, a combination of Google Street View and the Flyover feature in Apple Maps does wonders to validate how truthful brokers are in their listings.
- known 12y agoYou don't need great weapons. Just Drop A "Heat bomb" In Antarctic Ice Shelves. You'll Drown The World.
- maouida 12y agoBut isn't the place already mentioned in the video footage? "State of Naynawa", which is a well known place.
- AnonJ 12y agoWhat totally shocks me here is the whopping ignorance and lack of even the least bit of effort of understanding shown in the pathetic comments. Are really so many Americans brainwashed to such a crazy extent? Well anyways it makes me sick.