intelligence in public media
Open Source Investigations
in the Age of Google
Henrietta Wilson, Olamide Samuel, Dan
Author:
Plesch (eds.)
Published By: Worldwide Scientific, 2024
Print Pages 388
Stephen Mercado
Reviewer The reviewer is a retired CIA open-source officer and
frequent contributor to Studies.
I n today’s digital age, those who conduct the
ancient art of open-source research benefit
from technologies and techniques unknown to the
and analyze open sources. The vast card catalogs
of research libraries have given way in recent years
to rows of computer terminals. The World Wide
medieval scribes who translated texts of classical Web went public in 1991. Google, the world’s most
Greek into Latin on parchment, or for that matter popular web-based search engine, dates to 1998.
to the Cold War officers in the Foreign Broadcast Space Imaging released the world’s first high-resolu-
Information Service (FBIS) who used typewriters to tion commercial satellite images in 1999.
produce translations and analyses of Soviet media.
The authors of Open Source Investigations in the Age More than 30 experts have contributed 18 articles
of Google inform us of the modern ways and means on conducting open-source investigations today.
to use open sources to investigate issues in human Most of the contributors hail from Great Britain or
rights, military conflict, nuclear nonproliferation, and the United States. Many are academics. Some work
other issues of interest. at prominent open-source organizations, such as
Bellingcat and the Federation of American Scientists
Advances in computer science and information (FAS).
technology have greatly changed the way we gather
All statements of fact, opinion,or analysis expressed in this article are those of the author. Nothing in the article should be construed as
asserting or implying US government endorsement of its factual statements and interpretations.
Studies in Intelligence 68, No. 3 (Extracts, September 2024) 51
Open Source Investigations in the Age of Google
The authors highlight the myriad tools for violence, and protests, “collects reports from
open-source investigations. Beyond Google, notes thousands of sources in over 75 distinct languages”
Christiaan Triebert of the New York Times, stands as part of its intake of open sources.
Russia’s Yandex search engine. Alternatives to
Google Maps, writes digital investigator Benjamin Language, now as ever, remains important. As
Strick, include China’s Baidu Maps, Microsoft’s Triebert suggests in his article, when investigating
Bing Maps, Apple Maps, and HERE WeGo’s an event in Yemen, conduct your search in Arabic.
mapping from the Dutch multinational Here Remember that, even today, there is no standard
Technologies. transliteration for Arabic words in the Latin alpha-
bet. Some aspects of open-source work remain the
With tools come techniques. Several authors same today as in the era of typewriters.
mention geolocation, the identification of an
object’s location in a digital image. Hans M. The book’s authors also point to the challenges
Kristensen and Matt Korda of the FAS, explain- and limits of open sources, including protecting
ing that geolocation is sometimes possible with the privacy of individuals in the course of inves-
Chinese videos of military content, write that the tigations and sorting the real facts from disinfor-
technique led in 2019 “to the discovery of the mation. Within the US Intelligence Community,
Jilantai training area” for Chinese missiles, which as Kathleen M. Vogel writes, open sources are at
led the next year to uncovering new silos, “which a disadvantage in organizations that prize secrets.
led to the discovery of China’s three large missile Machine learning promises to take open-source
silo fields in 2021.” investigations to an even higher level but, as Jamie
Withorne notes, the emerging technology is not
Another technique is chronolocation, a technique without limitations.
to determine the time and place of an event. Henri-
etta Wilson, Olamide Samuel, and Dan Plesch I could point out an isolated error here, a
note in the book’s first article that cross-checking questionable assertion there, but my impression of
information from different data streams, such the book is a positive one. A bibliography or guide
as comparing videos from social media against to further reading would have made the book even
satellite imagery, is one way to locate and date an better, but the copious footnotes effectively serve
event. One can even travel back in time. Rhona the same purpose. Contributions of open-source
Michie, Paul Holden, Andrew Feinstein and experts from China, Russia, and elsewhere outside
Alexandra Smidman explain how investigators can the Anglo-American sphere would have given the
use the Wayback Machine (https://wayback-api. book a more universal character.
archive.org/) to compare new versions of corporate
websites against old ones to catch businesses that Overall, the articles in this book provide
have erased incriminating information from their much food for thought. Both students new to
corporate websites. open-source investigations and experienced practi-
tioners in the field will find material that is new
Even in this digital era, time-tested methods and interesting. Much has changed in open-source
still hold true. Experts in open sources still read investigations since the internet came on the scene
print media and monitor radio programs. The twist in 1991. This book gives us a good idea of where
today is that we likely go online rather than read we are today.
paper or listen to a nearby radio broadcast on a
physical receiver. Andrea Carboni and Clionadh The book is available free of charge at https://
Raleigh of Britain’s University of Sussex write www.worldscientific.com/doi/epdf/10.1142/q0414
that the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data n
Project for monitoring military actions, other
52 Studies in Intelligence 68, No. 3 (Extracts, September 2024)
