Transcript
Transcribed automatically: it certainly contains errors. It’s pretty good, just not perfect. We provide it here because, for accessibility, it’s better than nothing.
Aaron Stein
0:09
Hello and welcome to the Arms Control Wong podcast. My name is Aaron Stein. I'm a contributor to the Arms Control Wong Blanc, as well as an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London and a PhD candidate at King's College.
Jeffrey Lewis
0:22
And I'm Jeffrey Lewis. I'm the founding publisher of armscontrolwonk.com. And I'm the director of the East Asia Non-Proliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Non-Proliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute. Hey, I managed to say that without screwing it up. It's really long. Today we're going to... Today we're going to talk about the role of open source analysis with Malaysian Airlines Flight 17.
We did a previous podcast on the topic of open source analysis after I gave a talk at Wilton Park on the topic. But this is really interesting. So we thought we'd revisit. It's not a nuclear or arms control per se, but there's a missile involved. That's close enough, right?
Aaron
1:03
It's close enough. They're close enough. Missiles, missile contrails, open source. It fits in our wheelhouse.
Jeffrey
1:08
I think so. So there are actually like way too many instances of open source analysis to cover them all. So I thought we would go through my favorite bits and pieces. But before we got started, I wanted to make two general observations and see what you think about them. The first is that there is a ton of information available on social media, and yet I sense that a lot of people discount it because it's free.
And so I constantly see these references to like real evidence or real intelligence as though getting a person on the ground to take a photograph and giving it to a case officer is somehow different than putting it online, even though the tools are basically the same. You get a picture of a system and try to geolocate it using satellite photograph.
So I think that's kind of interesting that people don't necessarily think of this as being real intelligence. And then the second is, and I don't know if you watched it. I didn't. I just read the coverage. But boy, it seemed like the White House's press conference went over like a lead balloon.
Aaron
2:20
Yeah, I mean, I also did not watch it due to the time change because I'm over here in Europe. But I was expecting more, just reading the reports. And I was expecting a lot more, frankly, of the type of stuff that you have been doing and other people are doing, myself a tiny bit more. And I was looking for a data dump or something along the lines of what exactly we were doing.
This is the photo we saw, this is what we see, and this is why we think what we think. And they didn't do that.
Jeffrey
2:47
Yeah, so I wrote an article for Foreign Policy when the Syria information came out, where I made this argument that if you look at the movie In the Loop, which was a British movie about the selling of the Iraq War... It was a great movie. Ah, it's magnificent, but... It's funny and funny in a painful way because I think it satirizes or presents in satirical form rather how cynical most people are about intelligence now.
And I got the sense when the US and UK governments released information on Syria and I get the sense when they're releasing the information now. They haven't kind of figured out that most people look at what they think of as incredibly secret and sensitive information and say, yeah, I get that on Twitter for free. Where's the rest?
Where's the stuff my tax money pays for? And I think that there are just these changed expectations, and I don't think the White House has figured that out yet.
Aaron
3:49
Yeah, I mean, in fairness, I'm always struck by – I'll use Assyria as an example. The evidence that they were relying on were the same YouTube videos that we were watching. And I felt it odd that they didn't just say that we base this on these YouTube videos so that we can go look and we could almost double check them.
Because I think it actually reinforces the credibility of the product that they're putting out there. Generally, because I think the product, when they agree on these things, it's usually based on a lot of stuff. But that stuff that they're basing it on, I do think we can also watch as well. I'm also struck by the fact that it seems like a lot of people do this open source stuff, because I do it, you do it, people we talk to on Twitter do it.
I'm always surprised, though, that when you expand it out, more people aren't doing it. And journalists or... Other people don't see this as an opportunity to confirm stories as they are happening. Like with what happened with MH17.
Jeffrey
4:47
Yeah, so this gets to the way the press tends to cover these stories. And I don't want to say, I don't want to group everybody because there actually are a lot of reporters who are Taking advantage of this stuff. So, you know, but, but there's something about the way stories are traditionally covered in the way the white house expects them to be covered.
And, and so when you read the things they produce, it's sort of reassess in this voice of God, as though anybody has any confidence in their credibility whatsoever.
Jeffrey
5:14
And it's always struck me that that might've been a, a successful thing to do 20 years ago. But today it's, Because there is so much available information and because the credibility of institutions seems so low, they would be way better off to do what you just said, which is do a data dump, is to present all of the information, provide some information in terms of summaries and some analytic work to sort of put things in context.
But instead of making the story, the White House said the Russians did it, they really should make the story, here is the evidence. And by the way, dozens of independent analysts working on these issues have all reached the same conclusion, which is it points in the direction of the Russians and not the Ukrainians. I think if they used validators in that way, they would be way more successful.
Aaron
6:05
Right. But I agree. I mean, I think one thing that I found interesting Particularly interesting was through the leaks in the beginning of the story. It seemed as if the only difference that the government had than what we were looking at was satellite information. And by that, I mean the ability to look at, you know, infrared, I believe, to pick up missile contrails.
Jeffrey
6:30
Well, and telephone intercepts. And telephone intercepts, right. Yeah, those are the big, I would say, so I would sort of broadly call it like signals intelligence, whether it's data on the location of the aircraft, Whether they saw the flash of the launch, whether they saw the flash of the intercept. Actually, not sure they would. But, you know, whether it's technical means like that or intercepting phone calls.
But right. Instead, they sort of said, you know, oh, well, you know, there's a bunch of stuff on Twitter. So let's talk about that stuff.
Aaron
7:04
Let's talk about what's on Twitter. It's pretty, pretty compelling.
Jeffrey
7:08
I have to say two things just to get this out of the way. Having looked at the open source information, it all seems to point in one direction. And that's that's at the Russian separatists around Donetsk.
Jeffrey
7:25
And and and there is one side in this discussion, as far as I can tell, that is deleting evidence and faking evidence and trying to hide evidence. And that is the people at whom the finger is pointing.
Jeffrey
7:40
And we'll talk about some of these cases. But I just as a as a general impression. Boy, the Russians are acting guilty.
Aaron
7:50
Yeah, and it's something, we talked about this in the last open source podcast, but it's, you almost make yourself look silly because you can follow, the same way our open source analysis allows us to follow what's being put out there and geolocate pictures and we'll get into all that. It also allows us to watch when state governments, like, say, change a Wikipedia page or see what's on RT today.
And you know what I mean? Like, it's all instantly accessible to the point where one side becomes the theater of absurd, whereas the other side... Side's analysis gains more credibility because that other side is acting so strangely.
Jeffrey
8:27
Right. Yeah. If the Russians aren't lying, they're terrible at telling the truth.
Aaron
8:31
Yeah. I mean, exactly. That's a good way to put it. So let's talk about how this all went down.
Jeffrey
8:37
Right. So, I mean, I think the first case study, which is a wonderful example of social media and the ability to use that is when the Malaysian airliner went down, the The, the Twitter feed and Russian equivalent of Facebook, the contact fee, I'm just going to call it VK. So Twitter and VK, the friendly feeds to Strelkov, the rebel commander took credit for shooting down the aircraft.
They said they thought it was an AN 26.
Aaron
9:09
I don't think they said they thought it. I mean, he said we brought down an AN 26. Right.
Jeffrey
9:15
And, and Almost immediately, once it became clear it was a civilian airliner, they deleted the VK post and replaced it with another post saying that they weren't guilty. But lots and lots of people screenshotted that. And I mean, it was totally clear that they took credit. And so then two things happened. One is he linked to two videos showing the the plume of smoke from the crash.
And I geo located one of the videos just to make sure that yes, indeed the plume was from MH 17. Right. And it, you know, it turns out it's, If you're standing where the video is and you look past the houses and over on the horizon and you see the smoke plume and it's exactly the spot where we see the...
The recent release satellite photos. Right. The images of the location of the crash. So, you know, Strelkov links to a video of the MH17 crash site and says, we shot down an AN-26. Yay. Exactly. He actually said it fell on a heap of garbage. And he was not, as you can imagine, not so kind about it. But yeah, they deleted it and people screenshotted it.
And so you know, it lives on.
Aaron
10:47
Yeah. And if the video is actually the markers and that thing were pretty easy. I mean, I know you did a lot of work for it, but once you found it, you know, the markers were clear, you know, there was that little shed that was like, you know, they had a tree behind it that was in front of a apartment building.
So I'd say it's, it's one of those cases where social media allowed, allowed you to find this video and, Did you use Google Earth or Yandex to then find the location?
Jeffrey
11:12
Yeah, that's a really important thing to say. In that particular case, I used Google Earth. But if people are thinking about doing this at home... Maps Yandex RU, which is the Russian equivalent of Google, has much more recent, much higher resolution satellite images of the former Soviet world. Right. And so, you know, it's easy to use Google Earth.
And it has a lot of functionalities that make it appealing. But always go check the Yandex maps because often there's really great stuff.
Aaron
11:51
Yeah. Yandex is good for that part of the world. I found that like, say you want to do this in Iraq or in Mosul, which I've recently done some stuff Bing has the best quality maps. Although it always shows up in German for me and I have trouble because I'm here in Switzerland. So I have trouble using it.
Jeffrey
12:07
But anyway, I don't, I don't want to get off, off, off topics. I don't want to talk about the next case, but I did a post not so long ago on the Dutch airbase ad Volkl. And it's really interesting because Google Maps, and I'm probably going to get this wrong, but I'm pretty sure Google Maps blocks out the area where the nuclear weapons are stored.
Aaron
12:30
I think it was Google Maps.
Jeffrey
12:33
Bing and Nokia here blur it. Oh, actually, maybe it's Google Maps blurs the whole base and Bing and Nokia here black out the part where the nuclear weapons are stored. Right. And they degrade the quality of the shot of the rest of the base. You can see it goes blurry a little bit. But, you know, Yandex has a perfectly uncensored, beautiful picture.
Aaron
13:00
This is more of the beauties of social media. The information is at our fingertips. It's hard to keep it from us.
Jeffrey
13:05
Right. Well, and then as a consequence, right, like they're really drawing attention to where the nuclear weapons are stored because they've got like a big black splotch.
Aaron
13:13
Right. Exactly. So it's almost like accidentally shooting down an aircraft and then putting videos online and trying to take them down as if we couldn't get the cache or save them.
Jeffrey
13:23
Right. OK. So but with with geolocating the plume, I mean, that's a that's a really that's a funny story because it's I know it's funny, but it's so we kind of knew the area where the crash went down.
Jeffrey
13:36
And, you know, we could see they were looking over a field and there was some like large, there was kind of a large-ish building and some sheds. And they had described the town they were in. So it kind of just went to the edge of the town closest to the crash site. And there's one road that kind of runs along the edge.
And I just kind of start going up the road as I'm talking to somebody like, oh, well, you know, we should kind of look here. And I figured this would be like a couple hour project to kind of trace this thing down. And as I'm saying, you know, we'll look for this building and this I'm like, oh, crap, that's it.
And then it took, I don't know, maybe 10 more minutes looking at photographs of the road and the utility poles, which run on both sides, just to make sure it was the right road. And then we were certain that Strelkov had not just taken credit for downing an airliner or an airplane, but had taken credit for downing this airplane.
Aaron
14:33
Right. And the person who shot it was standing right there, so you could look back at it.
Jeffrey
14:37
Yeah, the person who shot the video, right?
Jeffrey
14:40
Now, the person who shot the airplane was standing someplace else.
Aaron
14:43
It was standing someplace else. We're going to get there. We're getting there. We're moving there. We're building a case here. It's like a prosecution.
Jeffrey
14:49
Yeah, you know, that wasn't really my goal. I just, early on, they said, oh, we shot down an AN-26. And I was like, well, is that the same plane? Yeah, it's MH-17. And then they say, well, we couldn't have shot it down because we don't have the right kind of anti-aircraft missiles.
Aaron
15:07
Right. Exactly.
Jeffrey
15:09
That would be lie number two.
Aaron
15:10
Right. Whenever government officials or I guess these people, whatever you want to call them, terrorists or groups, insurgent groups, say something like, absolutely, we don't have X, I always get it in my mind, well, I'm going to go look for that. Do you know what I mean? In the way they're challenging me to go find it. When they said they didn't have This missile system.
I didn't personally go do it, but other people took up this challenge and went after it.
Jeffrey
15:35
I have to say it's something that kind of has gone unremarked, although I've been remarking it. You know, the separatists claim they are there to defend the Russian-speaking peoples in these areas.
Jeffrey
15:52
But, right, lots of those Russian-speaking peoples are going out and taking pictures of their horrible lies.
Aaron
16:01
They don't agree with liberal interventionism.
Jeffrey
16:03
Yeah. So, you know, I mean, you know, and you see this in the election returns, right? I mean, people say, oh, these areas are pro-Russian. And it means that, like, the pro-Russian candidate gets 60% of the vote, you know? But, like, 40% of the people are, like, Hey, you know, I even go home. So one of the things that happened were pretty quickly two different images of the, I guess we should say SA-11.
It eventually became modified into an SA-17, but that's really the difference in the missile and the radar. It's called the book in Russian, which I don't speak Russian, but I'm just going to say SA-11 because it's easiest. I mean, that's why we named these things as well, so Americans can avoid embarrassing ourselves. Two images of that system showed up in the same place where the video was shot of the smoke from the wreckage.
And so this guy, Eric Toller, who's just a recent graduate of Kansas, who's a Russian speaker, this is major, I think, Slavic languages, manages to geolocate the first picture.
Aaron
17:30
Yeah, in a rather impressive way, if I may say so myself. Very impressive, the way he did that.
Jeffrey
17:36
Yeah, I was really kind of blown away.
Aaron
17:40
Blown away is exactly right. That's one of those videos that if I got my context, I'd say, oh, it's impossible to find this, even though I would try. He went the extra mile and really found it.
Jeffrey
17:50
Yeah, so basically the book was parked off this little – Town square.
Aaron
17:56
It's like a triangle. Yeah. Like a town square, like three roads intersect.
Jeffrey
18:00
Yeah. There's like a statue and there's a gas station and there's an apartment building with some kind of storefront. And it's a really, really weird angle. And so when he posted the geolocation, I looked at it and I was like, no, I don't think that's right. Like I can't, you know, some of the things added up, but lots of little stuff didn't.
And then this is so amazing, right? You know, Russians all have dash cams.
Aaron
18:24
See, I didn't know this. I felt like I was in an episode of Cops when I watched that video.
Jeffrey
18:27
Well, I figured this out when the – or I learned this rather when the – I guess it was a bolide hit the atmosphere and exploded. Oh, right. The asteroid. Yeah. Everybody had these dash cams. I guess that's because there are all these like insurance scams. And so people all record their driving as a defensive measure to prove that they – that this other guy hit them.
Aaron
18:48
Right, right.
Jeffrey
18:49
But, you know, Ukrainians and Russians post a lot of these cam footages of their towns online. And so he literally found a picture of somebody driving down that street.
Aaron
19:02
Yeah, from a video.
Jeffrey
19:04
Right. So we had the picture of the book in the square. We had the satellite photograph that largely matched. And then all of the last remaining questions we had were totally resolved when the car drove down the street. Right. You know, and confirmed like, oh, yes. OK, so that's the store and that's the gas station. And, you know, that's the statue.
And those are the two buildings. And, yep, the book is right there.
Aaron
19:27
Yeah, it's unreal.
Jeffrey
19:28
And it's really just a few kilometers from the crash site. So, you know, and certainly in an area held by separatists. So, you know, immediately the claim of, oh, we don't have these buildings. Which, by the way, you know, again, I should add, they had to put up other posts previously saying, oh, we captured them. I think we don't necessarily believe they were captured.
We think Russia. But, you know, they were bragging about having them and they delete those. Right. They say, oh, we don't have them. And it's like, really? Because here's a picture of one in a town you control.
Jeffrey
19:56
Like the day of the shoot down.
Jeffrey
19:59
A few kilometers away. And then there was a second picture, which I thought was going to be impossible to locate.
Aaron
20:07
Yeah, the first one was in the town of, it was in the first town.
Jeffrey
20:10
Like Torres? Torres.
Aaron
20:12
We're going to caveat that neither one of us can speak Russian. T-O-R-Z-E-Z, right? Yeah, I see it sometimes translated as E-S or E-Z. Okay, so Torres. We'll call it Torres. Which makes it sound like it's in Spain. Yeah, no, I'm from California, so I'll go with that accent.
Jeffrey
20:31
I live there now. You know, it makes it sound like a cleanup hitter for the Padres. Yeah. And then there was a second picture, which I thought would be impossible to geolocate because it shows half of a book peeking out behind a building.
Jeffrey
20:48
And it's just like the edge of this building. And it took a bunch of people working. So Eric and this guy, Andrew Haggard, who tweets under the name Korean Defense. And this is really an interesting story because the person who puts it up actually provided some geographic data. But basically said, oh, it's near this restaurant, you know, in Schnezno.
I can't remember.
Aaron
21:18
It's called Schnezno. Yeah.
Jeffrey
21:21
Yeah. And so Andrew actually finds the restaurant.
Aaron
21:29
Because he's a whiz on Google Translate.
Jeffrey
21:32
Yeah, right. Not speaking like a word of Russian. Think of that where the restaurant is. And then it becomes pretty clear that this vehicle is driving up a road sort of at the restaurant. And so again, it's, you know, they're starting to recreate the movements of this system.
Aaron
21:52
Right, and I helped here. This is my one area where I helped on this. This is the only one is that Eric was asking, he said on Twitter, I didn't know what time it was at. And for another post that we referenced last time, For this video that was shot in Syria, I used this tool online called suncalc.net and used the shadows where you can put in the coordinates of where you want and you can track the sun movement and it coordinates to a time of day.
So you use the shadows as a – what am I trying – what's the word I'm looking for? As a sundial. So Eric was able to do that. And say that, you know, the first, according to the shadows, I think the first picture was taken in Torres and the second one was taken in Chez Nez. And then he was able to put it into Google maps or one of the maps and figure out how far they were apart.
And the timing basically matched that you could drive that the, you know, you could drive from one city to the other in about an hour and the, and the, the shadows match that.
Jeffrey
22:55
Yeah. That's amazing.
Aaron
22:58
So pick up where you left off.
Jeffrey
22:59
I have to say, I totally freaked out when I opened Twitter and then saw like everybody talking about like sun angles. Oh, my goodness.
Aaron
23:08
I started that. And I have to say, I started that sitting outside the Geneva train station on get ready to board a train on my way to the Montreux Jazz Festival. So at that point, I got off the thread and missed the only to check it later to realize I had like 45 retweets.
Jeffrey
23:26
So what I really liked about the second identification, apart from the fact that it was nearly miraculous, is that there was also a news story that the separatists released where basically they said that they had a deployment of separatists in a building next to that restaurant.
Aaron
23:51
Oh, I didn't know about this. This is news to me.
Jeffrey
23:53
So, you know, I mean, look, we know they control this area. But on top of controlling it, you know, this system drove right by, you know, a nest of separatists.
Aaron
24:05
They probably ate at the restaurant.
Jeffrey
24:06
Yeah, right. They probably stopped and had a little vodka, you know. So it just, this claim that, you know, suddenly this claim... That they didn't have this system, right? Just completely fell apart because it was just totally a lie. And now the Russian response is to be like, oh, the Ukrainians have them too. It's like, well, yes, right?
They do have some older generation of those systems. And that's just probably why the Russians, I think, supplied them as they're trying to supply things that the Ukrainians also have. But nobody should lose sight of the fact that After having taken credit for downing the aircraft and then deleting that post, their next kind of refuge of defense was, oh, well, we don't have an SA-11.
Jeffrey
24:52
And it's like, no, you guys, you guys do, you know, the pictures are clean, plain, plain as day. And I, I should say Eric, you know, who has just sort of joined this community got a free login at Bellington. I was just about to go there. It's a new site. Yeah. Ellie Higgins is AKA Brown Moses's new site.
And I, and I have to say that they've, that, that Bellingcat has done a really great job of collecting and summarizing this information in ways that are really readable. And does a great job. I mean, one of the things I think that I say, Elliot, like I know him, I've just traded some emails. But one of the things he does that I really like is he's really good at keeping in mind the places where there's still a question.
Aaron
25:36
No, absolutely. You know, Bellingcat is where I'm going to actually to get the summaries. So like when I go to the Montreux Jazz Festival and I come back and I want to see what I missed, I usually go to Bellingcat.
Jeffrey
25:46
Probably easier than sifting through Twitter. I get these like pain emails from reporters all the time like, okay, what is this all about?
Jeffrey
25:56
So launch photo.
Aaron
25:57
Then we moved. Yeah. So we built the case here. So we geolocated all these things. And then we got to this new photo. Did it come out today or come out a couple days ago?
Jeffrey
26:08
No, it came out almost immediately. But it took us a long time to geolocate it. And we got a little bit lucky. So there is a photo of a field. With some houses in front of it, that shows what looks like the last remnants of a dissipating missile plume.
Jeffrey
26:31
And one of the questions is where, you know, there aren't, like, a lot of reasons for there to be a missile plume. And so, given that it's alleged to be in the same area, it raises this question of, is that the launch?
Aaron
26:49
And it's worth checking out.
Jeffrey
26:51
And so there's this guy who blogs or tweets rather as DJP3TROS. Let's call him DJ Petros.
Aaron
27:00
Yeah, it's DJ Petros.
Jeffrey
27:02
Who seems to be getting ground truth photographs on demand from the area. Yeah.
Aaron
27:10
I love Twitter.
Jeffrey
27:12
Yeah, I know.
Aaron
27:12
It's hilarious. He's a complicated figure.
Jeffrey
27:15
He has some strange ideas. I'm not totally comfortable with the fact that he thinks that the Russians also brought down the other Malaysian airliner. Yeah, I don't quite follow the logic there. But somehow... Somebody went out. Basically, there was this picture and he said, oh, I think this picture is here. And someone went out of his or her house, went to a local hill and took a very similar picture.
Aaron
27:45
Of the location of the missile contrail or the missile contrail itself?
Jeffrey
27:50
Of the location of the missile contrail. Like he said, I think this picture was taken here. So then this person went on the hill and took the picture from the hill of the spot. And he did this really excellent geolocation. I mean, the quality of the work is very good, matching telephone lines and electrical lines and poles.
Aaron
28:11
Yeah, it was really good. I read that. It's extremely good.
Jeffrey
28:14
I mean, you know, I'm a little bothered about the other Malaysian airliner hypothesis.
Aaron
28:17
Let's put that aside. Let's focus on the geolocation.
Jeffrey
28:20
But, you know, this is the nice thing about, actually, this is, you know, seriously, the nice thing about open source is, You don't have to think the person is right about everything because you're not taking his word for it. You can recreate the analysis.
Aaron
28:32
Right, which is essentially what we want the US government to do is to allow us to do this ourselves.
Jeffrey
28:38
Right, right. Instead of taking their word for it, we just want to be able to do the analysis. And I looked at the picture and he, I won't say he missed, but there was a much more obvious clue, which is the houses match. Like I went through and started matching up houses. Like, oh, look, it's this house next to that house.
And this house is red and this house has a garage. And so it was super clear that the analysis was absolutely right that you know, the photograph had been taken not from the same place because the photograph of the launch plume was taken further back and higher up, but it was taken from the same direction.
Jeffrey
29:15
And then this morning something crazy happened. Which is a journalist, I think.
Aaron
29:25
I don't know who the source of the image is.
Jeffrey
29:28
I know the source of the image. I'm just trying to double check on Twitter to make sure that he is saying that he is the source of the image.
Aaron
29:38
Does that make sense? We don't want to misattribute anybody's photos.
Jeffrey
29:43
What I really don't want is creepy people go beat him up.
Aaron
29:48
Oh, right, right. So maybe we just say there was an image that popped up on Twitter.
Jeffrey
29:53
I mean, he's got his... Well, I, you know... So yeah, a journalist went to the spot suggested by the launch and took pictures of what looks like burn marks in a field.
Aaron
30:06
Yeah, so he went to the spot that DJ Petros identified.
Jeffrey
30:10
As the launch site where we saw the plume. And and he had seen tracks right and the question is well because we don't have a bunch of satellite photographs are they old tracks or are they new tracks right but then this guy took a took a picture and it it looks like they're burn marks and it's worth saying this is the same spot that the u.s briefing identified as the launch site right i mean i think that the day after this is where i got really excited so the day i was sort of wrapped in a in on this twitter exchange
Aaron
30:41
Where the bucks were found in Torres and . The New York Times had a leak that basically said, I think it did say, that US satellite trajectory says that it came from, I believe it was Torres. So it matched with what we had found, or I guess what Eric had found. By geolocating the pictures.
Jeffrey
31:07
Right. Although this is kind of on the far side. So it's actually really, you know, it's an area that's clearly held by separatists. So, and I should say, when you look at the path of the airplane based on the things like flight radar, which isn't, you know, it's kind of accurate, you know, don't, Don't overdo it, right?
But generally tells you, and you know where the crash site is, and you know where the launch site is. It looks like it's a head-on shot. And in fact, the debris damage with the shrapnel shows that it was a forward shot, forward and off to the right.
Aaron
31:51
Well, that's another piece of the puzzle. I mean, it's been widely accepted that this was brought down with a surface-to-air missile. But another way that social media has allowed us to do this is that the pictures that have been put out there clearly show that it has been. You see the shrapnel impact.
Jeffrey
32:08
Right, and you can basically tell where it hit.
Aaron
32:11
Exactly. You can basically tell where the impact was.
Jeffrey
32:13
And it looks like it's a head-on shot slightly to the right, and this looks like basically a head-on shot. I mean, it would be really nice if the shot had been at such an angle where it had to be on the right, but there's so much uncertainty in the location of the aircraft precisely, and the aircraft could turn a little bit this way or a little bit that way.
So you basically have 50-50. Did the shot come from the front or did it come from the back? And it's clear it came from the front, and it just turns out that this launch site is sort of dead on the flight path of the airplane.
Aaron
32:48
Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Jeffrey
32:51
So, right, if you're keeping score at home, it's like, hey, the separatists said they shot down at AN-26 and linked to a picture of the smoldering wreckage of MH-17. They deleted that, said that they don't have the SA-11 system that would have taken down the airplane. And there were at least two, we'll talk about the third one in a second, two videos of that system in areas they controlled.
And then, you know, finally, those pictures are right next to The area where people photographed a plume and have seen burn marks that is consistent with a head-on shot that downs the plane.
Aaron
33:32
Right. And then they got to get the thing out of Dodge.
Jeffrey
33:35
And then they got to get the thing out of Dodge. And there's a whole bunch of other videos of it moving around and them trying to get it out.
Aaron
33:41
And this brings in the billboards. The billboard. The billboard controversy.
Jeffrey
33:45
You're totally baffled by the billboard.
Aaron
33:46
This is where I got lost on it. So I had to have some explanation before this podcast started.
Jeffrey
33:53
So we'll see if we can recreate it in a way that's even mildly interesting. Oh, it's very interesting. The Russians do this press conference. And it's a fascinating press conference because it basically mimics the open source analysis that you see on Twitter.
Jeffrey
34:11
Or purports to, right? And I guess this is like their version. Right, right. It's their version. And one of the pieces of evidence is there is a video that has been linked that many people on social media have been sharing that shows a book on a transporter. Well, this is just like a regular truck really being driven, right?
Aaron
34:30
Yeah, it has missiles missing too. If it's one or two, I can't remember.
Jeffrey
34:34
Yeah, I think it's just one, but boy, memory is so...
Aaron
34:38
I think it's one.
Jeffrey
34:42
And obviously people are like, aha, look, it's another book.
Aaron
34:45
The Ukrainian government, if I'm remembering correctly, said that's the system.
Jeffrey
34:49
Yeah, I think that's right. So the Russians say, ah, it's driving by this billboard. And they circle this line on the billboard, and then they type out the text. And they say, this is a billboard for a car show, and it has an address in a part of Ukraine that is held by the military. Or is held by the Ukrainian government.
And so therefore, this shows that the system was actually in Ukraine. And this is just further proof that all of this evidence that proves we are guilty is just a fabrication of the wax.
Aaron
35:19
And they were sloppy.
Jeffrey
35:21
And so the first thing that happens is if you look at the billboard, you look at the thing they circled and look at the address that they present. They're very different, right? Like the address is about twice as long as the actual text on the billboard. And they were like too lazy to even like Photoshop in the second line.
Aaron
35:40
That's what I find stunning about this. I look at the pictures. They didn't even try to Photoshop it.
Jeffrey
35:45
No, no. They just said, you know, no, he's address. Okay. Anyways, keep going. And then it gets better. So then then someone I wish I remembered who that was. Everybody should get credit for all the amazing work they're doing, but there's just so much going back and forth. But I, several people found the print version of this advertisement.
There's this thing called Bogdan, which is like It's a, they sell cars all across Ukraine. They have centers all across Ukraine, right? So it's not really a car show and it's not really one specific location. It's a, it's like a, you know, it's like a Ford advertisement, except for, you know, Ford and their dealerships, I guess. And they, so we find the print advertisement and, and you can actually read the line of text.
I mean, it's identical. It's the print advertisement is just slapped up on the billboard. There are no differences and it doesn't, it's not an address at all. It's like a slogan.
Aaron
36:43
Right. So somebody found the print advertisement that corresponds to the billboard and there was no address on it.
Jeffrey
36:52
So at that point, realizing what the billboard is, it's not likely to have an address. It's not a car show. The address that they give doesn't fit. And oh, by the way, there is no address at all. It's pretty clear that the Russians are just lying, right? That they're just making stuff up so that they can kind of muddy the waters, which we've seen a lot, right?
There's the, oh, it was a plane load of dead bodies. Oh, the Ukrainians directed it into the airspace.
Aaron
37:22
They may have been shooting at Putin's plane. They were shooting at Putin's I think the new one now is that it was a Ukrainian fighter jet that shot it down.
Jeffrey
37:29
Right. So they just kind of keep muddying the waters. So this is just one of the muddying. But it was fun because it's a lot. But then Eric and Andrew and some other folks find the locations.
Aaron
37:49
Yeah, they did.
Jeffrey
37:51
You know, sure enough, it's in a separatist controlled area. And it's amazing because it's such a grainy and difficult video because it's kind of zoomed in and there's a lot of trees and you really can just see like little bits of houses and like a little bit of a billboard. I would never have thought you could geolocate this thing, but they do.
Jeffrey
38:19
It's really amazing. And then two interesting things happen that are kind of, at least from my perspective, were fun. One thing is it turns out there are traffic cameras all over Ukraine.
Aaron
38:31
Yeah. Who would have thought, right?
Jeffrey
38:33
Right. So you can get street scenes, live street scenes. And you know, people get the live street scenes from the cameras and then sure enough, they look at that intersection and like, that's the one, right? So now they've got a ground truth photograph. They've got the video and they've got a satellite image and they match it all up.
Jeffrey
38:50
So what are the, what did the separatists do?
Aaron
38:52
They took down the streetcams.
Jeffrey
38:54
They shut off the streetcams in the areas they control. That's right.
Aaron
38:57
Yeah, oh, man.
Jeffrey
38:59
One side is deleting posts, deleting tweets, making evidence up, shutting down. And Strelkov this morning has said now it's a crime to photograph any piece of military equipment in the Donetsk People's Republic.
Aaron
39:12
Yeah, or the People's Republic of Donetsk. It's like a Life of Brian shit.
Jeffrey
39:16
Yeah, that's right. The Popular Front for Liberation.
Aaron
39:18
It's the Popular Front for the Liberation of the People's Republic of Donetsk.
Jeffrey
39:21
And so it's pretty clear, like, no, no, no, not only were the Russians making up the address, but we can actually locate the photo and it's not what the Russians say it is. It's in a separatist area.
Aaron
39:31
But there was a little controversy about the photo. There was some back and forth that eventually got resolved.
Jeffrey
39:35
You know, and I would say I wouldn't call it controversy because one of the reasons I would argue that the open source process is so valuable is that it's transparent. And so you see a lot of the Russian trolls just making stuff up and trying to stick to stories no matter what until they stick to a new story.
Whereas this is a case where you have a community going like, oh, I think it's here. And the other people in the community are going, well, I don't know. How do you explain this? How do you explain that? They really carefully are looking at each photograph. And so one of the big questions that emerged is the vehicle drives by a double billboard.
So it's a pole with a billboard on one side and a billboard on the other.
Aaron
40:15
And one side of the billboard is the car advertisement, yes?
Jeffrey
40:18
Right. And the other is behind a tree, so you can't really see it.
Jeffrey
40:21
But in the video, it looks like there's a space between the two billboards. And you can't really see the billboard in the satellite photograph because it's not high enough resolution. And the traffic cam seems to show a single continuous billboard. Well, two different posters, but there's no gap between them.
Aaron
40:41
Right. So there's no gap between the two separate advertisements on the billboard.
Jeffrey
40:46
Right. And so, you know, this is a real problem because if there's a gap in the video and there's no gap in the ground truth image, then it's not it's not the right image. So it turns out it was the angle that the traffic camera was at because there is a second photograph that DJ Petros comes back into the story now.
I don't know if he gets somebody to go up on the apartment building and take the picture or what. I don't want to know. But he's back. But he's back. And if you just step a few feet to the other way, you see that there is a gap and you can see a car between the gap. I mean, the car's on the road, but you can see through the gap and see the car on the road.
Right. And so actually, it's a great example where you really focus on this tiny, tiny detail It really looks like it's a problem. And then you get one more piece of data and you're like, oh no, that's the billboard.
Aaron
41:43
Right, exactly. Yeah, everything falls into place and you know you have your right spot. That's a great feeling.
Jeffrey
41:48
Oh yeah, it is. And it's a blurry photograph, but you can see the billboard. There's also a set of billboards on the other side of the road and you can see those through the trees and you can kind of match the houses. And so you get to the end of it and it's like, wow, not only did the Russians lie and say that this billboard was in this totally different part of Ukraine, We can figure out that that's a lie by finding the print advertisement that matches the billboard perfectly.
And then just to really drive it home, right? Because at the end of the day, it's like, well, maybe there was an address. I mean, they can always say that, right? But at the end of the day, no, I can put that book at that spot at that time and know for certain That when the Russians put that thing up, they were lying, right?
That was just not true. That was, like, straight out of Pravda, 1968.
Aaron
42:39
Does the road head east or west?
Jeffrey
42:42
Oh, you know what? I think it's on its way out, but I actually don't remember. Somebody's actually bothered to, like, line these up and, like, trace the route of the book. Yeah, I know, because, yeah. But I was so focused on the billboard gap, I...
Aaron
42:59
I mean, I just find all this to be amazing, you know, that you can find these sites. Again, I think the work on this is, for me, it's the best I've ever seen in geolocation. I don't know about you. I'm relatively new to this. But the identification of these book videos has been, to me, absolutely stunning. And I didn't think it would be possible to geolocate them when I first saw those videos.
I don't know about yourself.
Jeffrey
43:26
I thought it would be possible, but like a lot of, and this is kind of my big argument. I thought it would be possible, but I thought it would take a long time.
Aaron
43:38
Yeah, it hasn't.
Jeffrey
43:39
That's a good point. And I always make this argument that all of the stuff that we do with social media, you could have done 20 or 50 years ago. It's just, it would have been impossibly hard, right? Like someone could have taken out a camera and snapped a picture of the book. And in theory, you could have found that person and they could have given you the picture.
And you could have either gone to the site or you could have gotten an early overhead image, a satellite image, so the 60s, I guess, at least. And you could have matched that. And you could have established who the person was and the provenance of the photograph. You could have done all of that stuff, but it would have taken you like six years.
It would have been this huge research project. At the end of it, you'd be like, Mr. President, we're pretty sure that this is a photograph of that system. And by the time you figured it out, it would be highly classified, and probably somebody would have gotten killed in the process, and it would have been six months after the crisis was over.
So you could have done it. But now you can do it fast. Somebody literally goes out of their house, they go up on a hill, they take a picture, they come home, and then they email it or they tweet it. And then everyone in the world has it. And it's not long before people start applying these kinds of tools.
And instead of having to actually go there, you have a traffic cam, or instead of having to buy a satellite photograph or task a satellite, you've got a repository of images on Google Earth. And so you just, it's just really, what's different is the speed at which you can do these things. And when things become efficient, Then all kinds of new applications are possible.
So I think that the Russians thought they could just make stuff up faster than people could troubleshoot it. But like we have seen with Wikipedia, right, where they try to change stuff. God, these guys. You know, it's actually hard for them to lie fast enough in real time to persuade all but what Michael Howard would have called a stubborn minority.
Aaron
45:54
Right. No, it's probably because they have to lie through bureaucracy, whereas we could just cut right through that and do it all by crowdsourcing on social media. Again, I guess we'll probably wrap up here. I've always been stunned by this because it's not very hard to do. It certainly takes talent. It takes time. It takes attention to detail.
But the tools are out there and they're all basically free. And you don't actually have to... Go out there and do anything other than basically download Google Earth or have the URL addresses for Yandex or Bing. And then have a good people on Twitter that you can then go back and forth with and compare notes. I think it's amazing.
Jeffrey
46:37
Yeah, I think that's right. And as a consequence, I think we discover talent. Like, you know, whatever. 20 years ago, Eric probably would have been sitting there in his little office thinking like, I could do that. And maybe he wouldn't even would do it, but how would you know? Right? Like, what would he do?
Aaron
46:52
He could do it really well.
Aaron
46:54
He could do it. He could really do it. Yeah, he's good. He's good.
Jeffrey
46:58
He and Hagrid have been really kicking some butt.
Aaron
47:00
Yeah, they have. Well, so have you. I mean, again, I had my one contribution on my way to the World Cup.
Jeffrey
47:05
Nah, I mostly come in as the old man who's like, no, no, no, no, no.
Aaron
47:08
I can explain that gap.
Jeffrey
47:10
Yeah. No, I... No, I, I, I let the, I let the young kids with energy and talent they do 99% of the work.
Aaron
47:17
And then I just kind of come in and go, Oh yeah, no, here's a little, just one little more. Well, I'm happy with that role.
Jeffrey
47:23
Hopefully we can get a, we've got our, you know, our staff is doing some of the same stuff here and, and hopefully we'll get a big community of young, talented people doing this stuff. And And, you know, the Russians.
Aaron
47:34
Well, maybe we'll give another plug to Bellingcat and we'll end up. I mean, Bellingcat is trying to teach people how to do this. So hopefully more and more people will try and learn and get down to it because I think it's fantastic. And it just helps explain news stories better than I think that they are being explained by governments.
And governments have to catch up, in my opinion.
Jeffrey
47:56
I agree. Boy, that was a long podcast, but it was fun.
Aaron
47:58
It was a long podcast, but I think it really helped explain all these videos. So I think we're done because we ended on a positive note.
Jeffrey
48:05
Absolutely. We'll end there. All right. Take care.
Aaron
48:08
Take care. Nice talking to you. Nice listening.
