For a long time, I have been interested in open source intelligence (OSINT). I mainly followed the Bellingcat website and Christiaan Triebert of the New York Times. Later I watched more and more documentaries about OSINT and read Elliot Higgins’ book about Bellingcat.
Recently I came across the videos of Benjamin Strick (Bendobrown) on YouTube and out of interest I went to watch all the OSINT tutorials. It made me so enthusiastic that I started investing more and more time in OSINT to learn it and to eventually be able to do investigations myself.
Links:
Bellingcat — https://www.bellingcat.com/
Christiaan Triebert — https://twitter.com/trbrtc
Benjamin Strick — https://www.youtube.com/@Bendobrown/featured
I started my first simple geolocation, and this is the result:
Some time ago I visted Lebanon and followed some photographers and filmmakers from the country on Instagram. For my first investigation my attention went to some video’s that were posted on the Instagram story of one of the photographers. The video's were made high up in the Lebanese mountains.
First, I started making panoramic images of the videos so that I could see more of the environment. This helped me later in the investigation to compare the images with the locations found. I thought it would be a good plan to start with the second video because there were quite clearly recognizable landmarks such as a large lake and the mountains.
Video 1
After making the panorama the first thing I did was analysing the image. In the foreground you can see a large lake with some green grass en trees on the right side of the image. In the background you can see that the lake is quite big and there are some mountain peaks. It also looks like this lake is really high up in the mountains because there is very little vegetation.
The second step was to use Google Earth Pro to try and find some lakes that are high in the mountains of Lebanon. I started by globally scanning the area and eventually found a lake. It met the requirements because there is little vegetation to be seen and at the bottom right of the lake there is a small bend that is also visible in the panorama.
The Chabrouh Dam can be seen in the image above. This is a large reservoir high in the mountains near Beirut. This could be our lake and I went to see if the mountains in the background matched the video panorama.
A good way to check if there are 360 images from this location is to drag the Streetview icon in Google Earth on the map and see if there are blue spots where you can drop down. I tried this and there was indeed a 360 image uploaded on the dam.
This image immeditaly looks like the panorama image I made from the video. I wanted to compare the images so I put them side by side.
On the right side of the images, you can see the same piece of land sticking out with more green vegetation and trees. The mountains in the background also match exactly between the panorama and the Streetview image in Google Earth. The only differences are the water level in the lake and the little green vegetation on the mountains.
Lastly to really confirm the location I used the peakvisor.com function to upload an image and do an overlay of the mountains. I learned this trick from a very good geolocator named Samir (https://twitter.com/obretix) on Twitter.
Here you can see in the centre of the picture that the edges of the mountains match exactly with the panorama I made. Now the verification is done in two steps and I can assume that the first video was made at the following location: 34.028903, 35.836688
Video 2
Finding the location of the second video was a bit more difficult because there is so much going on in the landscape.
Again I started with analysing the picture. It looks like the picture has been made from a very high point. Also on the left and right I can see some steep ridges in the mountains and there is a recognisable building with a red roof down in the valley. In the background there are also a lot of peaks that I can search for.
Close to the dam that I found first, there is a viewpoint that, seen from above, could well be the location of video 2. The ridge in the mountain seen in the video can be seen on the left of the satellite image, the viewpoint seems to be very high and the hairpin road leading up to it can also be seen in the foreground of the panorama.
Then I used the Streetview technique again to see if there are any 360 pictures available at the viewpoint.
It looks like I have found a match. To verify this I again compared the panorama I made from the video with the 360 image to see if this is the right location.
This time I added some markings to the images so that you can see the comparisons. The hairpin road can be seen in both images as wel as the little hill on the right, the red building in the valley and a distinctive mountain summit in the background.
My last step was again to check in peak visor if the mountain edges can be aligned with the panorama.
In the image above you can see that part of the mountains are again exactly aligned with the mountain edges in peak visor. The other mountains (to the left and right of Qornet er Rou…) do not exactly align due to distortion in the panorama.
We can now say with certainty that the video was made at the following location: 34.017741, 35.841650
Coordinate 1: 34.028903, 35.836688
Coordinate 2: 34.017741, 35.841650
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