Comment by toofy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toofy | Hacker News Reader

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Regardless of your feelings on Bellingcat, none of that changes the fact that, us (the community) having access to more information and more tools at our disposal to analyze this information is a far better outcome than governments locking it away.

It is quite literally—as the headline says, challenging the governments (and i’d toss in corporations as well) monopolies on certain types of information.

Even if you don’t personally like Bellingcat, feed us more information, not less. The more information we have access to, the more difficult it is for authoritarian governments to run propaganda against us.

Also, yeah, I think you may have been drastically understating when you mention mint being biased. There are surely sites which are critical of open source research institutes like Bellingcat that will have a far better track record than somewhere like mint who have had multiple bouts of absolutely bonkers and absurd propaganda for brutal dictators and brutal regimes. Of course they’re against OSINT.

We need far more open source intelligence research not less.

Organizations like Bellingcat are really just sort of less-than-professional press outlets for the intelligence agencies. The information is controlled, the interpretation is biased because of spook affiliation at the highest levels, and they can be more sloppy than official government agencies with the information that is available to inject some narrative into public opinion without it actually being fact. They can wave off any harm they do. Some of these organizations make absolutely wild conclusions based on very limited info like looking up buildings on google earth and assuming they are some type of building, making some crazy conclusion like such and such number of prisoners somewhere.

If you're worried about brutality, you might want to look up what US sanctions on Syria are actually doing to the people there. They can't eat. They have no heat. No gas. We are stealing their oil. Do you think the Syrian people might see us as an authoritarian government? Because they are suffering, we are causing it, there's nothing they can do, and the situation is enforced by violence.

Really? You can't draw some conclusions about the number of Uighur prisoners in Chinese camps, based on satellite evidence? Oh, right, they're Sunni. We shouldn't put sanctions on Assad when he drops barrel bombs on his own civilians? Oh, wait, they were Sunnis. Wikipedia is controlled by the US intelligence agencies? Don't make me laugh. You want pure Shia propaganda from Assad and the Ayatollah, trust MintPress.

Even if Bellingcat's views and mission align with NATO and against Putin, Assad, et al, so what? We should take the word of murderous dictators instead, because the West is so evil?

That's exactly what the sanction is for: to make ordinal people suffer so they will rise. It took me sometime to understand it, now it is very logical. It creates instability and hopefully the government will collapse as a result.

> us (the community) having access to more information and more tools at our disposal to analyze this information is a far better outcome than governments locking it away.

> The more information we have access to, the more difficult it is for authoritarian governments to run propaganda against us.

I am definitely not going to defend the government monopoly on information, but people having access to information does not mean them coming to the rational conclusions either, as evident with the information we have available today more than ever and the polarized confusion accompanies almost everything that matters to us.

People rarely put in the hours of self-study to do a principled analysis and come to their own conclusions. Open source or not, people will recycle other people's pre-made conclusions with much simpler heuristics. That's not a problem per se, the problem is who gets to make those conclusions and make most people hear about them.

Just like research papers are cherry-picked to make one's biased point, this type of "open-source" branding will lend itself readily to narrative laundering, by (ostensibly) non-governmental interest groups. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Depends who has the resources to make and distribute those narratives. Are those going to be the people most interested in neutral reality most of the time? Unlikely. That's why we're reading about it on The Economist (or <insert-your-favorite-big-brand-information-resource>). That's why DC is choke-full of "think" tanks.

As information warfare gets complicated, it was expected to see innovations on narrative branding, e.g. fact-checking, fake-news, open-source-intelligence. None of these change the problems with the machinery of our collective intelligence; in fact they pose a Denial-of-Service threat to our individual sense-making capacity, and we either throw up our hands in nihilism or clutch on a heavily dichotomized version of reality because the discordance between narratives are growing larger and the discomfort of uncertainty is just too painful.

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