Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://archive.gijn.org/tag/geolocation/)
In this excerpt from GIJN’s Guide to Investigating War Crimes, Sam Dubberley and Başak Çalı discuss how to use open source research to reporting on possible war crimes.
This 2023 edition of the guide was compiled and written by Ryan McNeill, deputy data journalism editor, Reuters; Deborah Nelson, professor of investigative journalism, Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland; and Toby McIntosh, independent journalist and former director of the GIJN Resource Center. Satellites are a powerful investigative tool.
Bellingcat fellow Dennis Kovtun tests the online geolocation capabilities of two popular AI chatbots — Microsoft’s Bing AI and Google’s Bard — and finds both have some serious limits and drawbacks to their effectiveness.
In this quick how-to article, open source researcher Youri van der Weide walks readers through how to use the free tool SunCalc to verify where a photo or video posted online was taken.
Christo Grozev, the executive director of Bellingcat, gives his insights for covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He talks about how the role of reporters has changed in modern day conflict, and reveals how his team is gathering and verifying data while focusing on investigating potential war crimes.
Quiztime is a Twitter game beloved by journalists and other online sleuths who play it to hone their geolocation skills. Every day, one of the quizmasters tweets a mysterious image, and participants try to figure out where in the world it was taken by examining the minutest of clues.
In this interview, Amnesty International’s Sam Dubberley discusses how open source techniques can help in the investigation of human rights abuses and gives advice for journalists interested in this type of research.
In a GIJN webinar on investigating the police, investigative journalists from Tunisia, South Africa, and the United States shared several effective approaches and tools for holding law enforcement bodies accountable for misconduct. Their tips include open source tools for visual forensic analysis of incidents, strategies for matching police radio audio files with social media video, and easy ways to begin your hunt for CCTV footage.
The New York Times’ Privacy Project highlighted the alarmingly unregulated activity of location data companies collecting data from millions of smartphone users. As the coronavirus pandemic sheds further light on the uses and misuses of location tracking, here’s a deeper look at the project that visualized phones being tracked around the US, from the Pentagon and the White House to the streets of San Francisco.
What tools do you need to master as you head into your next investigation? We’ve rounded up some of GIJN’s most popular how tos from our story archives, as well as select items from our growing Resource Center.