Peering Through The Fog Of War With Open Source Intelligence
The fog of war" is a phrase that has been used for over a hundred years to describe the profound uncertainty that envelops armed conflicts while they are happening. Today, the uncertainty for non-combatants is exacerbated by the rapid-fire nature of social media, where people often like or re-post dubious war-related material without scrutinizing it first. The situation has become particularly bad on ExTwitter under Elon Musk's stewardship, as a recent NewsGuard analysis published on Adweek revealed. The platform's verified" users pushed nearly three-quarters of the platform's most viral false Israel-Hamas war-related claims, which were then spread widely by others:
The verified accounts promoted 10 false narratives, such as claims that Ukraine sold weapons to Hamas and a video of Israeli senior officials being captured by Hamas.
Collectively, posts promoting false claims garnered 1,349,979 likes, reposts, replies and bookmarks, and were viewed by more than 100 million people globally in a week, per NewsGuard.
A recent example of how difficult it is to tease out what happened in a fast-moving conflict with many civilian casualties is the explosion at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City. As Wired noted:
Within minutes, information about what had happened was distorted by partisan narratives, disinformation, and a rush to be first to post about the blast. Add in mainstream media outlets parroting official statements without verifying their veracity, and the result was a chaotic information environment in which no one was sure what had happened or how.
Open source intelligence - the analysis of information drawn from a variety of freely available sources, usually online - is emerging as one of the best ways to peer through the fog of war. For example both the Guardian newspaper and the UK's Channel 4 news made use of open source intelligence in their attempts to work out who was responsible for the explosion at the hospital in Gaza. One of the leading journalistic practitioners of data analysis, the FT's John Burn-Murdoch, believes that the absence of OSINT is why many traditional media outlets are failing so badly in their reporting of the Israel-Hamas war and elsewhere. As he wrote in a thread on ExTwitter:
With the proliferation of photos/footage, satellite imagery and map data, forensic video/image analysis and geolocation (~OSINT) has clearly been a key news gathering technique for several years now. A key news gathering technique *completely absent from most newsrooms*
According to Burn-Murdoch, this has had a terrible effect not just on the quality of reporting, but on the public's trust in journalism, already greatly diminished as a result of constant attacks on the media by populist politicians around the world:
most mainstream news orgs today are either simply not equipped to determine for themselves what's happening in some of the world's biggest stories, or lack the confidence to allow their in-house technical specialists to cast doubt on a star reporter's trusted source
So you end up with situations where huge, respected news organisations are reporting as fact things that have already been shown by technically adept news gatherers outside newsrooms to be false or at the very least highly uncertain. It's hugely damaging to trust in journalism.
It's great that a leading exponent of data journalism like Burn-Murdoch is calling for mainstream media to make the use of open source intelligence a regular and integral part of their reporting. Doing so is especially important at a time when the fog of war is thick, as is the case in the Middle East today. But it's a pity that it has taken this long for the power of OSINT to be recognized in this way. Techdirt first wrote about what is still probably the leading practitioner of open source intelligence analysis, Bellingcat, over eight years ago.
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