In this blog, Sam Pearce, Fivecast Channel Sales Director (APAC), reviews Eliot Higgins’ book ‘We are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People’ and explores the advancements in open-source intelligence in the last few years.
The Power of OSINT: Reviewing “We are Bellingcat”
Over the last few weeks, I finally found the time to read ‘We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People’ authored by Bellingcat founder, Eliot Higgins. The book was published a couple of years ago, so granted, I’m a little late to the party.
But, better late than never. It’s a fascinating read that really highlights the revolution in OSINT practices, technology, and culture that’s taken place over the last decade or so.
Bellingcat has played a central role in exposing malign activity in a range of theaters, from war crime atrocities in Syria to assassination attempts in the UK. It’s little wonder, therefore, that the name Bellingcat has become synonymous with leading-edge, open-source investigations, and the organization continues to produce articles and resources for the benefit of the OSINT community around the world.
One of the things that intrigued me the most as I read Higgins’ concluding chapter was his stated hope for how Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology might in the future revolutionize the OSINT community – from government agencies to amateur investigators.
The Role of AI in Modern OSINT Investigations
A huge part of the challenge with OSINT work – specifically called out by Higgins – is the manual effort and time required to painstakingly review available data. Most OSINTers know only too well that finding data to underpin analysis isn’t hard. Instead, the true challenge is sifting through the sheer volume of it to find the nugget of gold. The resource impost can defeat even the most perseverant of investigators.
With mainstream social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok playing a pivotal role in today’s OSINT arena, investigators are increasingly faced with the task of sifting through and assessing multimedia data. This includes thousands of photos and videos, amounting to gigabytes of data. While most of this data may seem insignificant, it all must be examined to ensure that nothing of value is missed.
In his book, Higgins describes many such examples. In one notable incident, a Bellingcat researcher – looking to identify Russian-made Buk missile system in Russian soldiers’ Instagram feeds – spends “four days scrolling thumbnail previews of videos, hardly sleeping, scanning hours of mind-numbing footage.” Hardly the James Bond experience they might have otherwise been hoping for…
Higgins also publishes the fascinating statistic that the Syrian war has left “more hours of video footage in its wake than hours in the actual conflict itself”. According to Higgins, the Syrian Archive has preserved about 3.5 million pieces of digital content; approximately 1.5 million YouTube videos, plus 2 million clips and images from other mainstream social media platforms. Only 1% of which has so far been assessed.
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Enhancing the work of Analysts with OSINT
In this context it is little wonder Higgins describes the only answer to the challenge of properly analyzing such material as being “to employ machines to watch the videos on our behalf”. He writes that “we hope in the future for a way to trawl automatically through social-media postings, with AI eventually being able to work alone, tagging all instances of cluster-munitions footage among millions of clips, allowing humans to check just those cases”.
“Someday”, Higgins writes, “we could automate such work – train a computer to, say, detect people in uniform, or those wearing specific military colours, or search social-media posts for mentions of a military unit, and compile the results for review by humans, including a network map of how everyone is connected, identifying high-status individuals whom we should study most closely.”
In short, Higgins talks of AI technology one day “coming to the rescue” of OSINT analysts and investigators.
AI and OSINT: OSINT Investigations of the future
In a concrete example of just how far the technology has come in the three years since Higgins penned his book, I can state with confidence that help has indeed arrived. The “future technology” Higgins writes of is well and truly here.
Not the kind of all-encompassing, black-box-decision-making, eliminate-the-humans technology that has kept sci-fi authors in work for decades. But AI-augmented software that can assist the OSINT investigator; eliminating from their workload exactly the low-level, monotonous tasks described above. Freeing them instead to make the nuanced, context-aware analytical judgments that only humans can.
For those charged with collecting and assessing large volumes of social media data, advanced open-source intelligence technology can be deployed to enhance all steps of the intelligence cycle, enabling broad data collection and AI-enabled filtering and analysis of data in accordance with the intelligence requirements of a specific agency, team or even individual analyst.
Having worked closely with our customers across both the Government and private sector, I’ve witnessed the very tangible value that this technology delivers, and which Bellingcat predicted. OSINT investigators can harness user-trainable AI models within to automatically identify – for instance – image concepts in videos or known logos and license plates in images. Technology to automatically translate text – including that embedded within images – from whatever language it’s written into your native tongue speeds up investigations. The automatic generation of network graphs of the like imagined by Higgins – based on links within the social media landscape – uncovers previously unattainable insights.
None of this is to take away from the novel techniques and analytical rigor employed by OSINT analysts. With or without the assistance of AI technology, there should always remain space for the creativity and imagination of a determined human investigator. But it’s exciting – given the pace at which technology in this space is moving – to imagine what the Bellingcats of the world will be able to achieve in even the near future. I’m looking forward to the next edition of Higgins’ book and won’t take quite so long to pick it up this time.
