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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now open-source intelligence versus the fog of war. We'll talk a bit about Russia's war in Ukraine in this context. For the moment, we're going to focus not on what we know from the front lines, but how we know what we know from the front lines, and who it can help. You've heard the expression the fog of war. Essentially how hard it is to get accurate and up-to-date information from a war zone. Communications infrastructure might be damaged.

Either side of a conflict might try to get a leg up with active disinformation campaigns designed to trick the enemy but also wind up tricking everyone else paying close attention.

There's a lot of reasons to question any information coming out of a war zone, but there are just as many reasons why the world needs an accurate picture of a global conflict. First of all, it can help civilians on the ground stay out of the crossfire, so important in this war. It can help governments be more sure that they're responding appropriately. It can make it harder to start a war on false pretenses. In the aftermath of war, it can help bring accountability for some of the atrocities that we know take place under the cover of the fog of war.

In this day and age, what does it look like to bring clarity to conflict zones like Ukraine? Maybe you're not surprised that the internet has played a role. Photos posted to social media have helped keep tabs on the movements of Russian military vehicles, and have helped create a more accurate picture of Russia's equipment losses.

A satellite map that was designed by NASA to help track wildfires can identify urban fires in the wake of airstrikes. Maybe you've used a flight tracker to time your trip to the airport to pick up a loved one. Ever done that? Well, the same technology can be used to track military planes and cargo planes carrying military equipment. Now, the effort to take all these publicly available sources of information, these open sources, and turn them into intelligence is called OSINT, open-source intelligence.

It means that folks around the world can access that information, pool resources, and share their analysis with the community of other researchers, all in the name of clearing out that fog of war. Joining me now to talk about those efforts, the work of open-source Intelligence, especially in Ukraine, but also beyond is Aric Toler, director of research and training at Bellingcat, which is a nonprofit organization that has helped bring this type of research to conflicts around the world.

Aric, thanks so much for some time. Welcome to WNYC.

Aric Toler: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: First, how'd I do in the intro summing up what open-source intelligence is? Anything you want to add or change?

Aric Toler: No, it's pretty good. It's basically just the collection and analysis of anything that a person with internet connection can get to. Sometimes you got to pay a little bit of money for satellite maps and things like that, but yes, it's basically the collection of and analysis of information that can be collected by any person maybe with a credit card at most, and doesn't rely on secret sources and classified intelligence and all that stuff.

Brian Lehrer: Much of this work is enabled by or enhanced by social media which we love to vilify for many legitimate reasons these days, but what are some of the things about this that only work, because of the open part of open-source intelligence, meaning various social media platforms?

Aric Toler: This works in a lot of different ways with the open-source angle of the war. You're getting materials, photographs, videos, witness counts, things like that from participants of the war from both sides right from the Ukrainian side and the Russian side, and also from civilians. Just for example, if there's an attack in a city, there's an artillery strike, there's soldiers moving through and occupying a village or a town, you often get materials from soldiers in both sides.

Not so much this war, people are being a little bit more careful than normal though there are definitely some exceptions, but not oversharing information from the soldier in both sides. More importantly from civilians especially in very, very high populated areas like Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Mariupol, and elsewhere, where you have basically ubiquitous internet presence. Everyone has a smartphone. Everyone has social media. Everyone has 3G internet or better.

People can record what's happening, take photos and videos of artillery strikes and attacks and so on and share them either anonymously or under their real accounts on Telegram, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all the popular social media outlets.

From there, you can collect these, you can analyze them, you can verify they actually took place in the place and time that they claimed, because of course sometimes people shared old recycled materials, because this war's been going on for almost eight years now. [crosstalk] Once the materials are verified, you can--

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead, I'm sorry. Once the materials are verified, what?

Aric Toler: Sorry, one second. I'm sorry. I didn't hear you. Sorry, my internet's cutting out. One second. Let me change my audio.

Brian Lehrer: That's right. While our internet specialist guest fixes his internet, listeners, we only have a few minutes in this segment, but I wonder if there are a few of you who are actually doing some of the open-source intelligence work around the war in Ukraine who might be listening right at this moment. Anyone like that, we would love to hear from you. Give us a call at 212-433-WNYC, and help us report the story. Tell us a story. That's 212-433-9692.

Obviously, there aren't that many people doing this kind of research per se, but maybe you've been keeping tabs on Russia's war in Ukraine through social media, even as just a consumer of it. Call in and tell us how that's changed your relationship to this conflict as a purveyor of some of this information, or just as a consumer of some of this information. Has the internet really made the world smaller in this particular respect?

Have the images and videos and firsthand accounts on Twitter or Telegram or any other social media changed the way you feel about this war compared to other wars that you've seen play out not on social media? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Maybe it's a needle in a haystack, but if we have any such needles out there call in and needle us 212-433-9692

with Aric Toler, director of research and training at Bellingcat, a nonprofit organization that has helped bring this type of research to conflicts around the world.

Aric, you're there? Still with us?

Aric Toler: Yes. Sorry about that. I should be clear now.

Brian Lehrer: Good. I see that your work at Bellingcat has focused on Russia for a long time. You've been integral in the investigation into their involvement in the downing of Malaysian airlines flight MH 17, over Ukraine Donetsk region in Donetsk, that's not the easiest word for me to say, in 2014. The poisoning of dissident Alexei Navalny by the FSB in 2020. That time, in 2018, that the GOU used a nerve agent in a public park in Salisbury, England, some of our listeners will remember that, to poison a double agent and his daughter.

Plus a lot of ongoing investigations into corruption and Putin's oligarchs. Having been really up close and personal with a lot of things, Putin doesn't want the world to know about, how has that shaped your take on Russia's war Ukraine?

Aric Toler: I think, well, a lot of different ways. One, you see how far they're going to go. When you look at a lot of the things you've been talking about in your brief survey there about poisoning Sergei Skripal and Salisbury in the UK in 2018. Another thing you didn't mention was the FSB, the Russian internal security services, they sent a man to kill a [unintelligible 00:08:34] guy in Berlin in broad daylight. Just in the park, shot him broad daylight in the park. It was a guy the Russian security service sent.

It puts in the context maybe about how [unintelligible 00:08:46] things are in the war and you think yourself, "Oh, well, surely they'll have restraint, or surely they won't go that far. Surely they won't do this." I didn't think that the war would happen like most other people, because it seemed like it was a break too far. Maybe I should have been a little wiser to it, because a lot of those previous patterns that you mentioned, the poisoning Navalny, and Skripal, the assassinations of dissidents, the arms depot explosions they carried out in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic.

It shows how there really aren't a lot of the limits and the guardrails that we think about when it comes to acceptable behavior or at least the things you can get away with I guess you could say with security services in the military, maybe they aren't actually in place. There aren't actually guardrails with Russia, and human rights abuses atrocities, shelling of civilian infrastructure. Those are things that we thought that theoretically maybe could be restrictions with the military and the state, but in reality, maybe we should have seen this coming a little bit more than we had.

Brian Lehrer: There are a couple of noteworthy efforts from the OSINT community that I want to shout out, and I think these are things that you haven't directly worked on, but I hope you can tell us a little more about them  perhaps.

One is a database of Russian military equipment that's been deployed and, in more cases than Russia has admitted, destroyed cataloging that has helped fact check some of Russia's claims. There's also this effort to catalog and verify evidence of possible war crimes committed in Ukraine with the idea that it might be useful for holding Russia accountable for these acts sometime in the future at the International Criminal Court or whatever.

Taking just those two examples, how does the OSINT community fit in with the broader community of global intelligence, the official Government Intelligence Agency and how serious do those agencies like the CIA or MI6 in the UK take OSINT work?

Aric Toler: I'm not sure how serious they take the war. I assume they do it themselves. This open-source work is nothing new. Back in World War II, you hear about BBC monitoring service about, monitoring Germans and stuff back in the mid-'40s, decades and decades ago. This isn't a new thing altogether, it's just the amount of information that's out there to collect and analyze, that's a new frontier.

The two projects that you mentioned, the database of human rights abuses in civilian harm, that's what our group, Bellingcat, has been putting together. You just go to ukraine.bellingcat.com, you can check it out, where we collect verified incidents of civilian harm. We put them on a big map so you can click through and see them if you really like.

The other thing you mentioned was the catalog of losses in the war, both on the Ukrainian side and the Russian side. This is being done by a group called Oryx, O-R-Y-X like the animal.

It's a really fascinating data set they've collected. They collect open-source photos and videos showing different attacks, aftermath of attacks, drone videos, and so on, showing destroyed and repaired captured military equipment. A lot of these are quite-- you may have seen them on your own social media feed. There's like memes about Ukrainian farmers who take tractors who haul away Russian tanks. That tank will be abandoned because it ran a fuel or maybe partially destroyed. Then the crew jumps out and runs away and then they use these tractors to haul them away.

Of course, these go viral on social media. It's funny about-- the joke is that the Ukrainian farmers are better armed than a lot of European countries for all the tanks they've taken. It's all open-source evidence. You can look at the weapons that are being hauled away and you can determine exactly the type of weapon it is and what brigades and what fighting groups within Russia use this exact tank or artillery thing or radar equipment or whatever it is.

Then you can have a better idea about exactly which brigades and which battalions from which cities and from which military units are deployed in different theaters of war in Ukraine, if it's something Kyiv or Kharkiv or Mariupol or so on. There are countless photos and videos that have come out showing these, not just the funny ones of tractors taking Russian tanks, but also drones-strike videos and pictures of people take from the battlefields after the fighting is done.

The Oryx group, they've gone through every one of these you can possibly imagine and very, very meticulously documented thousands of unique pieces of military equipment that have been lost.

Every single military equipment, they keep them individually tracked. They don't duplicate the same tank twice. They found something, I don't know the most recent numbers, but something like 2,000 or 3,000 pieces of Russian military equipment that have been lost between artillery, helicopters, planes, at least one gigantic boat, which everyone knows about, the Moskva, the battleship that sank, and countless tanks as well too.

Brain Lehrer: I wonder if you can--

Aric Toler: Of course, they do the same thing for Ukraine as well, I should note.

Brain Lehrer: Talk just a little bit, before you go, about how this fits into the larger intelligence picture, how it actually works. One of your recent articles talks about using a Craigslist type website for car sales to help track Russian military vehicles. You've also recently tweeted about satellite images from NASA that are used to track wildfires and therefore urban fires that the rest of the military is setting. We've already talked about social media. Can you paint a picture for us if you have a good, for instance, that comes to mind of how those sources get synthesized into actual intelligence?

Aric Toler: Sure thing. There have been a lot of attacks recently in the Belgrade region in Russia, this is actually in Russia, proper Russian soil, of attacks that have been mysteriously carried out. We know it's Ukraine. Either Ukraine or sabotage, but we don't know exactly how it goes on, against critical infrastructure and Russia proper. These are oil-processing facilities. These are armies and arsenals of weapons and munitions, ammo dumps and so on, and Russia proper.

There have been maybe a dozen or so incidents of these things, at nighttime, just going up in flames and exploding. A few times, there have been claimed of Ukrainian helicopters that have been seen flying low and then attacking, other times claims of missiles and so on.

A lot of these are sketchy. You don't know exactly what's going on. Is it a sabotage and then maybe someone misheard a missile or whatever? Some of these attacks, no one knows that they actually happen or not. Maybe there's just a happens to be a normal fire, like a wildfire. You don't know if it's actually at a critical infrastructure facility or not. There's the massive fire map, which you mentioned at the intro of this that is normally used to track wildfires.

It can detect any significant heat-generating event. I know this is used by a lot of places like environmental organizations who track the use of offshore oil platforms and things like that, to track about which ones are active, which ones are not. Sometimes, there's these oil groups where maybe there's a lot in injunction about in-country and they're supposed to cease operations, but then they can detect that it's still being used through this map.

This is already being used by human rights activists and so for other and ecological activists for other reasons. Here, you can use this to detect the fires and the explosions because these things burn for a long time. This NASA fire map, which normally is supposed to be for wildfires off burning on mental nowhere, you can detect large heat-generating events like explosions and arms depot and oil facilities, and so on to track exactly where it happened.

You don't know if it's this facility or that one or whatever, because you can see exactly where it's happening. You also know about when it happened, because there's dates about when these is being captured, exact time of when the data is being captured by the satellite up in the sky.

This is just one extra little data point that comes up there, because you have the photos and videos from civilians who live in these cities who are [unintelligible 00:16:59] of the giant fire in the background, which you can then complement that data with this wildfire data, which shows the exact point, with a margin of error of a few hundred meters of where the fire is happening. You combine these together and you have a pretty good idea about what's happening and where the damage is.

Brain Lehrer: Very interesting stuff that our listeners who don't work in some of these specialized fields have probably not heard about before. I want to thank you. Aric Toler is the director of research and training at Bellingcat, a nonprofit organization that has helped bring open-source intelligence research to conflicts around the world and very much to the war in Ukraine right now. You want to just tell people how they can follow your stuff?

Aric Toler: Sure. We have a pretty search engine optimized name, Bellingcat, guess exactly how you expect with one word. Just type us into Google, you'll find our webpage, you'll find our Twitter or Facebook, all that. If you're more interested in the Ukraine work specifically, just you can head right over to our sub-domain of ukraine.bellingcat.com or just bellingcat.com. You'll find it if you look around a little bit.

Brain Lehrer: Thanks a lot, Aric. Appreciate it.

Aric Toler: Sure, thanks for having me.

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