This week’s readings and videos were quote inspiring to me. We watched and read about a phenomenon that I had heard much about, but didn’t fully have a grasp of. I had heard of the wars in Ukraine and Syria having a larger online presence than previous wars, but I suppose I didn’t the full extent of it – nor helpful it could be to investigators (both journalists and official administrative bodies) in holding perpetrators to account.

The documentary about Bellingcat was especially illuminating. I knew basically what the organization was and that they used open-source intelligence to investigate things like the downing of MH17, but I didn’t fully understand how they did it, nor how instrumental social media videos and google maps is. I really enjoyed watching the process of geolocating the tank and jeep caravan with the gas station – it felt like a great demonstration of what they do and how they do it. The same goes for The Listening Post video – I was really inspired learning about how the Xinjiang story first came out, and it reminds me that I have resources like that as a student to find stories that impactful and world-changing.

The Time article about Ukraine “crowdsourcing” intelligence reminded me a bit of how Bellingcat works, but instead of for journalism, it’s for intelligence and warning the Ukrainian people. I think that’s a really smart way of fighting a war in the modern era, and I wonder if we’re going to see more tactics like that in future wars as people get a better grasp of technology and artificial intelligence. To me, it was a more hopeful version of the podcast, where they used technology to find and identify people in mass graves and what happened to them. Instead, it was the Ukrainian government warning and collecting evidence of Russia’s actions, like Bellingcat does.

The Foreign Affairs, Forbes, and NPR articles all concern the difficulty of trying Russian crimes in a court like the ICC, and it makes the situation seem almost hopeless. But putting those with the journalism discussed above, there is some hope that open-source and crowdsourced evidence can help bring some accountability in the future for the war crimes, especially because the footage and evidence is being investigated and, perhaps more importantly, preserved. I suppose time will tell if any of the work makes a difference in terms of legal accountability, but it certainly helps in getting the stories out into the world.