A draft for a letter to the Open Source Community.
Dear Reader,
Recently, it’s been a year since I started investing myself in open source research. A methodology that I would like to call, beautiful, in the sense that it allows us, as ordinary citizens, to hold those in power accountable while simultaneously giving something back to the world. While many in the past have mentioned to me that they expected me to be well established with years of experience behind me, I want to tell you that I am not and that is why I thought about writing you this letter with the goal of hoping that you, as a beginner — or maybe you’re already a veteran but are curious to what I’ve written — could learn a thing or two from my first year of experience that consists of a lot of positive things that I look back on with a smile but also a few disappointments that I pray others won’t have to face but do risk that it eventually will happen.
It was after the colder months had passed away that I was sitting at the office during work in the morning with a cup of coffee. Reading through my inbox, I was interrupted by a colleague who put an article from the dutch newspaper, De Volkskrant, in front of me with an interview with Christiaan Triebert, Visual Investigator at The New York Times, formerly Bellingcat researcher. “You should read this article during lunch break because you two have something in common,” the colleague said to me. “I’m not going to tell you what, see for yourself”.
When I read the interview, I saw what he meant. Christiaan and I happen to share the same name, my official name is also Christiaan, we both have an Indonesian father and a Frisian mother, and we also happened to grow up in the same province, Fryslân. But what he described doing, open source investigation, using visual footage and audio material in conflictzones to hold state actors such as Russia responsible for bombing Syrian hospitals, stood out to me the most. Being less satisfied with my career as a marketer, in the sense of having not done much good for humanity, other than generating revenues for companies, I thought, “If he can do that, then I can also give it a try”.
I started reading into certain investigations done by the Times and also looked into research published by Bellingcat. My curiosity gave me a spark to start talking to people who were more experienced in the field. As a dog who ran after a loose stick, I remember that I reached out to Christiaan, Foeke Postma, and also got the (lucky) opportunity to share a lunch with Giancarlo Fiorella after having joined the Bellingcat Discord Server. All three of them gave me the following advice:
- Open source research is not something that you do on your own. It is a collaborative thing.
- Try to find a subject that you care about and motivate yourself to do something good with it.
- Don’t dive into it deeply from the start, try to first learn the skills needed by engaging into such challenges from QuizTime and GeoGuessr.
With those words in the back of my head, I started watching the tutorial video’s from Benjamin Strick and took on the challenges from QuizTime. The first thing that I noticed is that people reply to your findings, which gives you feedback. In all sincerity, I took a few wrong steps in the beginning and that’s what makes such initiatives great. You have the freedom to make a wrong step and nobody will judge you for it. There isn’t anything that can go wrong there while when you are actually engaging into an investigation there’s a risk that you as someone new might come to the wrong conclusions. In fact, some of the researchers hosting the challenges, will offer you advice going through it.
Practice makes perfect, which is the case in a lot of things while learning, I started to complete a few of these correctly and then started writing blog entries on Medium. That enabled me to put what I learned into practice. Given that everybody was pre-occupied with the Russia — Ukraine War, I started using China’s military and police activity as a subject at first, to learn geolocation during an episode of Hong Kong repression, verification of aircraft and navy, and in the meantime, I would also debunk disinformation on Twitter with the use of Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit.
This lead me quickly to one of the first disappointments that I faced as a newbie. During this phase, I was approached by a group of journalists who were running a project on China. They were interested in working together with me and as someone who felt honored to support them, I did that by putting in two days of work for their request. My memory serves me well that I even took those days off from my regular job to offer them my full capacity. Yet, when I finished the work, I received the message that I was not needed anymore because their data journalist could do “the same thing” and there I was, left behind with empty hands. A feeling that echoed through my mind for quite some time and even made me contemplate stopping with further doing what I had just discovered. But in the end, I realized, that it’s their loss, not mine.
After having taken a short break after that, I returned to the exploration mode and started geolocating online video’s that came from different parts of the world: Azerbaijan-Armenia, Kyzgyristan-Taijkistan, and Israel-Palestine. A moment that gave me the opportunity to delve deeper into the area of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT), using different tools such as PeakVisor, Google Earth Pro, and Mapillary. It also led me to receive help from Sarah Stoecklin, another member of the Bellingcat Discord Server, who’s the best editor that I’ve ever met in the community. Together, we publicized our first article: “Geolocating conflicts in Fall 2022 with various methods, and a preview of the new tool Atlos.”
Atlos, which is mentioned in the article, was built by two students from Stanford University, Miles McCain and Noah Schechter, to enable investigators to collaborate at scale while cataloging photos and videos spread on social-media. It gives you the possibility to add a description and attribution which could be used as data to run investigations on. Both of these guys have been supporters of mine as much as I support them after having believed in me to help them shape the platform, set a standard for supplying geolocation evidence, and fine-tune the structured data of each incident.
Inspired by Eliot Higgins his book, I wanted to collect a group of people who just like me, were at the beginning of their course in open source research. I read through articles that Benjamin Strick did on Information Influence Operations and replicated his methodology only to shape it in a way that would suit our own investigative work. I asked Sarah, Morsaki, and MikeX, all three from the Bellingcat Discord Server, if they wanted to collaborate with me on the Analysis of the whitewashing of human rights violations in Xinjiang.
It is one of the articles produced that still is at the top of my list of accomplishments. I am really proud of it because it has the goal to motivate others to come together and collaborate.
I started mapping incidents in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict around the time before I first met Noah and Miles, which was during the 2022 Gaza-Israel Clashes. Looking back at it, I am quite surprised why I choose that moment, given the fact that geolocating in Gaza is one of the more difficult assignments that you can give yourself. Those obstacles became apparent to me when noticing that you do not have access to Street View or decent quality of satellite imagery available. The latter has appeared to have a change, I recently saw, which I will explain in a following blog entry that will come soon.
At that moment, I received a little help and advice from Samir, who’s one of the better geolocation-researchers out there. I started looking at the methods that he applied by viewing what he shared and also read into certain investigations done by Forensic Architecture. While the conflict may seem difficult at first to apply your skills on, methodologies from them and the one by Bellingcat on Unravelling the Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh will help you further. However, not unimportant to know, is that experience will also strengthen you because after a while, you’ll start to understand the landscape and urban environment of Palestinian cities and communities.
One of the key moments that made me decide to further invest into the Israeli — Palestinian conflict is the explosion that struck Al-Fallujah Cemetery on 7 August, 2022, in Jabalia Refugee Camp, that killed five Palestinian children: Jameel Najmuddin Jameel Najim, 3; Hamed Heidar Hamed Najim, 16; Jameel Ihab Jameel Najim, 13; Mohammad Salah Hamed Najim, 16; and Nathmi Fayez Abdulhadi Abu Karsh, 15. (Read more here and Israel has admitted to be responsible for the killing).
I geolocated the Israeli airstrike that day. The horrifying footage was shared on Twitter and archived in Atlos but I do want to emphasize that it did something with me. It has been graved in my memory and I don’t know whether that’s trauma or not but I do want to tell you that prevention is better than having to solve afterwards. Always put your mental health as a priority before everything else. There are people who are experts and specialized on analyzing saddening moments such as these.
While in the beginning I did this all by myself, I was fortunate enough to meet Gabòr Friesen and Kyle McCormick, two bright young and intelligent guys, who have always stood behind me and helped me despite the heavy amount of footage that we are often dealing with. Kyle, who I am very happy for, has actually landed a job as an open source investigator and nothing gives me a better feeling than him having thanked me that he couldn’t have done this without our collaborative project.
Gabòr is incredibly talented and has a bright future ahead of him. At the same time, he’s also the one who’s more calm between the two of us, as I tend to be the one who has more of a temper. In the sense of collaborating together, we empower one another because sometimes when one of us oversees something, the other gives it a look and points us in the right direction.
That has caused us to have a database and interactive map of 300 incidents in the West Bank and Gaza. An effort that has led us to collaborations with The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, and Al-Haq’s Forensic Architecture Investigation Unit (FAI). The skills that I’ve learned, were also used on a total other subject, namely the investigation together with Capitol Terrorists Exposers, on tracking San Diego neo-nazi Robert Wilson as the perpetrator of the antisemitic projection on the Anne Frank House, in Amsterdam, published in De Volkskrant.
The collaborative work with Al-Haq is special to me because in the open source community, it’s common that people such as myself turn into researchers over night but don’t really speak or work together with someone from there. Someone who actually experiences the Israeli occupation of Palestine on a regular basis and has seen a checkpoint many times in front of their own eyes. Your work becomes much more valuable, in my opinion, once you start to get contacted by locals or collaborate with them. It’s nice to have your name in the newspaper or get called a specialist on a television channel but what really matters is that what I’ve mentioned in the beginning — giving something back to the world and in this case to the people who suffer under an occupation while also being led by leaders that don’t really bring much of a change for them. They have to receive the power to be able to bring justice and accountability to those who hurt them. It’s even more nice when they know that people from outside are reaching out with a helping hand.
The publication in De Volkskrant was symbolic to me as Christiaan Triebert mentioned to me afterwards during a conversation of ours, referring back to how his interview with the dutch newspaper motivated me to begin with it all in the first place, “The circle is round now”.
While the collaborations have brought more eyes to our work and the compliments from the community are heartwarming to hear, I also want to mention that it’s not always a story with the sun shining and the flowers blooming. There are times that I’ve been extremely frustrated and have contemplated, as mentioned before, quitting with what I am doing on more than one occasion.
This is because institutions and media organizations, in my opinion, based on my experience so far, don’t always value the effort of citizens who are involved in open source research in an acceptable manner yet. The situation with the subject on China wasn’t the first and the last time. During the time of the laser projections in the Netherlands and the United Status by the far right, there have been moments that I shared my progress openly on social-media as it is meant to be in open source work, and newspapers published the exact same findings but without any form of credit or mention. While I have no desire to become a celebrity, recognition for the work that you do is important and it’s highly demotivating when a journalist or platform takes your efforts without showing gratitude for it.
There’s also the experience of how collaborations can lead to you being stuck in an endless loop of a bureaucratic process after you’ve already done research and the other party, in the end, not meeting up to certain promises that were made because you didn’t go through the administrative work. Now while I can understand that this is a step needed for organizations and media, I do believe that you should be arranging that — black and white on paper — before you dive in with full enthusiasm to research and risk not having your name on a publication.
Sometimes you’ll also have somebody who’s enthusiastic to work with you only to hear never from them again or lacking in communication. That’s not how we, as people who mostly do this next to a regular 9 to 5 job, should be treated. Don’t be worried about standing up for yourself, thinking that your chances are ruined if you speak up or end further cooperation, because where one door closes, another one opens. You deserve to be communicated with. Simple as that.
I think there’s a problem in media organizations and traditional journalism that still considers to see open source researchers as a “lead” or a “tip” to a story that they can publish on their own or they see it just as “useful” while in reality you should demand them to see you as a “colleague” and not as an asset that you can use whenever they like to.
It comes down to a very basic thing that everybody should realize even in their daily lives: treat people the way that you want to be treated and value them for their hard work. A friend who helps you, shouldn’t always be the friend who needs to help you. It’s easy for us as human beings, I have made that mistake in the past myself, to assume that just because they’ve always been helpful that we can demand that from them.
Just like you give something, you deserve to receive something back.
Keep that in mind.
I will now be focusing in the future on how to visualize the work and data that we have more while giving birth to the Coeus Collective.
Our own research initiative.
You can do with this letter whatever you like but I hope the lessons will stay in your mind.
Kind regards,
Chris Osieck.
A special thanks to: Christiaan Triebert, Gabòr Friesen, Kyle McCormick, Giancarlo Fiorella, Foeke Postma, Cate Brown, Omar Ferwati, Nour Abuzaid, Kalim, Nederlandse ‘Ben’ (from Centre for Information Resilience), Thomas Mulder, Midwest, Capitol Terrorists Exposers, Sarah Stoecklin, erredece, Morsaki, Hromvys, Dars, SlowT, Miles McCain, Noah Schechter, and the people from Al-Haq who I can’t name out of safety reasons.
Some of you have supported me since the beginning.
