I do too much reading! Hours every day. The Internet is my personal time sink. Everything is here.
This blog entry started as a Hacker News link with a provocative headline: “Gun Safety, Self Defense, and Road Marches – Finding an ISIS Training Camp.” It led to bellingcat.com, motto: “by and for citizen investigative journalists.”
Bellingcat was funded as a Kickstarter project, raising a little north of $80,000.
I read the article and my jaw dropped. The unnamed author had found some photos online,
showing one of the Islamic State’s training camps in Ninewa Province.
These are nondescript images. They could be anywhere, until he looks closely at the background (that’s his red arrow for reference). By the end of the article the training camp has been found. It’s along the Tigris River in Mosul. And all this done using the Internet.
Same for “How to Locate a “Secret” Pro-Russian Training Camp,” which is currently missing some of its supporting images.
The site is full of investigations and discussions based on freely available information. I can’t yet vouch for its efficacy, but taken at face value this is pretty powerful stuff.
Bellingcat.com gets a bookmark. I wonder what they’ll find next.
I’m not criticizing Bellingcat. It seems like a rational site.
In the past our news sources were checked for accuracy by journalists. Now anyone can post anything. I’m really starting to notice problems with news from the Middle East. I saw a horrific photo of 50 dead bodies burned black and lying on the ground. The text said terrorists did it, but the picture was from an accidental tanker truck explosion in Congo. As if things were not bad enough we have horrible lies that can go viral and hit a massive audience. Some stories seemed contrived to enrage a particular audience that they immediately set off my BS detectors. But I see many people that I thought to be rational re-posting these monstrosities as if they were legitimate.