I acquainted myself with many of the OSINT techniques mentioned in this week’s readings in my investigative journalism class last semester. I combed through lobbying databases, social media accounts, and donation records of wealthy businessmen to identify potential conflicts of interest with members of the Trump cabinet. While I’d known that the internet could make visible to journalists so much of what we see as personal or private — revealing hidden financial, political, and social ties between individuals that appear completely unrelated — it was striking to see how OSINT could go much further than that: identifying war crimes committed and concealed by entire governments, solely with evidence from the internet, accomplished thousands of miles away in the comfort of one’s home.

The HRW piece on Russian war crimes against Syrian civilians was striking in the diversity of sources that were used. From scrolling through the archives of the ‘flight spotter’ channels to analyzing the Russian Ministry of Defense’s social media posts to identify military officials who were rewarded for their service, no single source stood alone to support the authors’ claims — each new piece of evidence substantiated the other. I felt similarly about the sources of the Kramatorsk train station piece, which used a combination of civilian anecdotes, standards of international law, and Telegram messages/social media accounts to establish evidence of Russian war crimes. The Bellingcat documentary was a favorite: I was especially impressed by how they correlated the MH17 flight crash with Russian involvement through dashcam footage of the Buk convoy carrying the Russian missile that downed the plane, using fuel prices and shadows from the truck to correlate the footage to a date and time.

I was also intrigued by the Russian response to Bellingcat’s findings. Russia framed the Bellingcat investigators as secluded and uncredentialed, who knew far too little about journalism or the military to make any substantial claim against them. Yet the documentary showed how even media organizations we deem as reliable could fall short in their fact-checking efforts: take, for instance, the auto bomb incident in Baghdad that was reported on by both Reuters and the NYTimes, which was revealed to be staged even after Reuters journalists were there to report and speak to locals in person afterwards. I was also reminded of a conversation I had with my Syrian friend, who told me that for most of her life, the most reliable source of news had been Facebook, due to both the lack of trustworthy mainstream media outlets and the widespread availability of social media platforms that weren’t directly controlled by the Assad regime. It brought to my attention the question of whether our standards of journalistic credibility will change — or need to change — dramatically in the next decade. I’m concerned by both the rise of mis/disinformation through AI and the limitations of mainstream media falling short under political pressure, an issue that, perhaps, independent journalists and nonprofit journalistic organizations are better equipped to handle.