![]() The technological landscape for OSINT has changed a lot since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine and backed separatists in the Donbas region, starting a conflict in eastern Ukraine that has since claimed some 14,000 lives. Melissa Hanham, an OSINT specialist affiliated with the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, told BuzzFeed News that she believes that practitioners need to wrestle with some difficult questions: “Are OSINT analysis now actors in an active conflict? Can OSINT analysts change conflicts?” “Putin lost significant credibility because his government’s statements were inconsistent with the objective reality,” Aftergood said.Ĭountering propaganda is welcome, but some OSINT analysts also wonder about the ethical implications of their work. OSINT analysts could clearly see from satellite images that the buildup continued. This meant, for example, that reporters and the public did not have to rely solely on the statements of US government officials to understand that Russia’s claim in mid-February that it was withdrawing some troops near the Ukrainian border was false. Certain kinds of deception are more difficult and the possibilities for press and public accountability are increased,” Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, a longtime critic of government secrecy, told BuzzFeed News. “Someone’s on the move,” tweeted Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert who heads the Middlebury team. The only reasonable explanation for the signal on Google Maps was that the Russian armor was now on the road, blocking progress for the few civilians traveling at night and whose smartphones were sending location data to Google’s servers. He had been scouring imagery for the region after TikTok videos posted by Russian civilians appeared to show hardware including Buk surface-to-air missile launchers. It was right at the spot where a graduate student, Steven De La Fuente, had earlier seen the buildup of armored personnel carriers, mobile missile launchers, and other military vehicles on high-resolution images from a commercial satellite that can pierce clouds and fog using radar. ![]() Watching the traffic layer on Google Maps for the main road from Belgorod, Russia, to Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv, analysts at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies saw a “traffic jam” appear at 3:15 a.m., local time. 24, Moscow time, a small team of researchers based in Monterey, California, knew that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had begun. Hours before Vladimir Putin announced the start of “special military operations” on the morning of Feb. ![]()
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