For me, reading about the use of OSINT to document atrocities, identify targets, and foster liberation is really exciting for a budding engineer like myself and is a welcome instance of technology being used for good. Ukraine can see Russian barracks and neutralize them through this interactive map. Russia is incontrovertibly refuted on multiple counts. But technology, surveillance, and intelligence have always been a part of warfare. Now, it’s the democratization of information, thanks to the internet and the rise of white intelligence, publicly available resources that allow for truth to arise.
This is my first introduction to forensic architecture, and it’s truly shocking how much can be constructed from what seems like so few resources. The audio modeling, where they simulate echoes and relate it to the physics of sound interaction with matter (i.e, walls) to model the building, was very astounding.
In the case of the Douma yellow canister, what is revealed is how white intelligence can be used to not just show what is now, but say something about what happened in the past and how it happened. Specifically, they were able to show that the canister fell from the sky and the debris supports that trajectory.
Studying the methodology of open source research, especially through HRW’s Syria article, opened my eyes to the necessity of this constructive process and helped me understand what is really meant by “fog of war.” It’s not that information doesn’t exist. The gap that open source fills is to take data and corroborate them with one another to reconstruct an event and reveal something tangible and definite.
In the context of Russia’s kidnapping of Ukrainians, the general question of motive in this entire war comes to the fore. We have a sense that Russia’s motive for starting the whole war is expansive and imperialist, and trying to reclaim some Soviet Era dream. We also know that they’re afraid of NATO expansion to Eastern Europe and their potentially being encircled.
Zooming in particularly to the motive for kidnapping children, it’s hard to see how indoctrinating kids advances those objectives. Yes, indoctrination can be used to make a population more manageable and less resistant. But the logic is you take over a place, then indoctrinate the people so that you can preserve control. To abduct people into your land and then indoctrinate them makes no sense.
Population boost is another touted reason. But that’s negligible. You can’t implement a population overhaul through kidnapping. So it makes sense that they’re trying to bring occupied territories to the Russian fold. But still, it seems like the route they’re going is too costly.
