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I'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 o
by mmayberry 12y ago
I'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...
- talmand 12y agoI don't think I would call spamming Twitter as being tech savvy.
- eastbayjake 12y agoYou call it "spamming Twitter", others might call it "developing a web app": In April 2014, the group developed a free internet application called The Dawn of Glad Tidings, which automatically posts tweets - approved by Isis media managers - to the accounts of the application's subscribed users. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-27912569 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-27912569
- talmand 12y agoSure, developing a web app that spams Twitter...
- BrandonMarc 12y agoThis one's rather chilling. ISIS is employing social media — ‘crowdsourcing’ — to identify Saudi agents. They’ve even got an Android app just for the purpose. ”U.S. intelligence agencies monitoring ISIL’s social media communications identified the campaign as a crowd-sourced effort to gather names and other personal information about Saudi intelligence officials for the assassination campaign.” http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/08/04/terror-and-the-sword-of-justice/ http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/08/04/terror-and-th...
- im3w1l 12y agoHmm, smartphones are quite easy to pwn right. So, I'd wager US has the names of lot of civilian ISIS supporters now. I wonder what that will be used for.
- latj 12y agoThese are probably staged photos taken for use as propaganda. The probably train far from this location. This is just where they stopped on the side of the road to take pictures.
- nikcub 12y agoThey are also intel savvy. They understood the propaganda value / intelligence tradeoff prior to publishing the first photo. AQI/ISIS have adapted and evolved from almost a decade of fighting the US military and intel orgs. They also had AQAP counterintel guys from Yemen advise them on counter-drone and other strategy.
- iaw 12y agoI think latj's idea is right and that these photos were staged as propoganda
- brianmwaters_hn 12y agoI can't believe noone has mentioned NRO and NGA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligence_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligen... Relatively less is known about them, since CIA and NSA get all the attention lately (to their detriment), but as far as we can tell (from Snowden docs), NRO has about equal budget to NSA, and NGA has about half (and CIA has 1.5 times NSA's): http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black-budget-summary-details-us-spy-networks-successes-failures-and-objectives/2013/08/29/7e57bb78-10ab-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black-... Considering the incredible things NSA has been able to do with its $10B/yr, a combined NRO+NGA budget of $15B/yr sure raises a lot of questions. Presumably, they do a lot of work similar to the OP's - but noone really know what the capabilities are.
- zokier 12y agoIf they do/pay their own satellite launches that would explain some of the budget.
- nikcub 12y agoNRO has such a large budget because they design, build and launch a ton of satellites, high-altitude equipment and a number of ground and space-based comms networks. They provide that raw data to CIA, NSA & DIA who do analysis. NGIA do GEOINT - think of them as the government's own Google Earth but with a ton more detail and live or near-live tracking in areas of interest. They provide maps to troops on the ground, determine what the NRO satellites should be looking at and merge all they produce (optical, IR, etc. imaging) and merge it with their geospatial and cartography data. CIA, NSA, DIA along with NRO and NGIA are the big five. Think of the later two as tech departments for the intelligence community. CIA, DIA, NSA and State (and others) will analyze ISIS propaganda using data from all these orgs and convert data to intelligence.
- lovelearning 12y agoWith all that capability, I can't help wondering why they underestimated IS so badly.