Using Google Earth to Find an ISIS Training Camp | Hacker News Reader

Using Google Earth to Find an ISIS Training Camp

bellingcat.com

547 pointsmmayberry106 comments

It makes me super proud that he used Panoramio, a site I created 9 years ago. Nowadays with the prevalence of Google Street View is less useful than it used to be for this kind of stuff, but there are still places that the GSV guys have not (yet) covered.

Rachel Maddow, popular American talking head, mentioned this project and your site on her show tonight.

Popular where? I think I've heard her name once over the last year and I live in the SF bay area.

MSNBC, left-wing of fox's right-wing talking heads, approximately

except nobody watches MSNBC... Old people and conservatives watch TV, young people and liberals read the internet, leaving MSNBC a ghost town, in my estimation

I'm not in the US, don't ever watch MSNBC or Fox and I know who Maddow is just from political blog/story mentions.

I think the original commenter's point was that the project was mentioned to a large audience. Seems fairly accurate.

Yes, I didn't mean literally nobody, I just meant that compared to other markets MSNBC is fairly small so I can understand missing who Rachel Maddow is if you don't watch MSNBC or follow political blogs, shes not O'reilly or Jon Stewart, but yes it is a mainstream cable TV channel so that necessitates some minimum audience size lest the channel go off the air

Her show is also distributed as a podcast, which is relatively popular.

this is a generalization. there are old liberals.

To paraphrase one Jack Sparrow: "At least you've heard of her."

http://www.raspberrypi.org/layercamera/ used Panoramio too, just in case you didn't catch that one, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8211473.

I love Panoramio and shame on Google that they made it more difficult to access in the new maps.google.com! I often use it to see how places look like I may or may not travel to, sometimes to see how places look like that I order things from (for example obscure Chinese sellers and manufacturers on eBay).

Whats really impressive is that we use email to deliver messages but the US armed forces uses GBU-12 Paveway II.

Anyone who is impressed by this should seriously check out Andrew Sullivan's view from your window contest. Most weeks a reader submits a photo from their window, literally anywhere in the world. And people track it down with very similar techniques, to the exact window. And a lot of the contest photos offer much less to go off of than this [namely, only 1 photo, low res, country/context unspecified].

Here is the winners archive.

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/vfyw-contest/

Some of photos aren't too crazy or offer a landmark that is recognizable if you'd seen it before. But most of them offer very little in terms of knowing where to start unless you've got a huge body of contextual knowledge you can draw on.

A couple ones that I had absolutely no idea where to start with:

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2010/08/17/the-view-from-your... http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/08/19/the-view-from-your...

I imagine the CIA/NSA has a crack team of a couple dozen people doing this exact job.

I imagine the CIA/NSA has a crack team of a couple dozen people doing this exact job.

There is actually an entire Agency devoted to doing this exact job and other similar activities:

https://www.nga.mil/Pages/default.aspx

A few recent ones that I had absolutely no idea where to start with:

Those actually provide TONS of identifiable features that make them relatively easy to track down with relatively simple tools.

Nice. They are on github! https://github.com/ngageoint

Perhaps I didn't select the hardest from the recent archive. My basic point was more to show that people have the tools to a lot more digging with a lot less context.

Hadn't heard of the NGA. Well there you go.

Perhaps I didn't select the hardest from the recent archive. My basic point was more to show that people have the tools to a lot more digging with a lot less context.

Sure. Not intended to be a slight, more a nod to our Defense brethren doing this with a lot harder targets!

Indeed. I swapped in a couple tougher ones :)

> https://www.nga.mil/Pages/default.aspx

They have an HTTPS warning, due to a Facebook image being loaded over HTTP.

My wife does this sort of analysis when she is trying to track down where a VRBO rental actually is :-) The Andrew's stuff is quite impressive. Before modern CGI it used to be great fun to try to figure out where a movie or TV show was really shot in the outdoor scenes. Apparently there is a whole group of Stargate fans that do that around Vancouver.

Regarding the VRBO research, how does this help you vs. plain ole' Google streetmap? Or is she using streetmap in a non-traditional way? We've been renting a property sourced from VRBO for the past 6 years, so I'm curious how you're researching properties.

Some VRBO properties only have vague generalities about their location and not street address - "3 minute walk from the beach", "Close to wineries" etc etc...

I've done this before as well - most of the time you find out the description is entirely accurate, but I'd hate to find out they exaggerated upon arrival for a week long vacation.

Reminds me of this:

http://www.dominic-deegan.com/view.php?date=2007-01-04

Summary: In a fantasy setting with seers who get random visions, they must have encylopedic knowledge of the history of everything to be able to tell, from contextual clues, from where (and when – past, present, or future) the visions originate.

I keep telling users of my website that want to keep their identity safe to NOT point their camera out of their window and yet quite a few of them ignore that advice and have their home address and other private details published by jerks and find stalkers at their door at 6 am. Very silly, and possibly even dangerous.

What's the nature of your website? The reason I ask is, I'm curious as to what sort of website would attract actual 'yes he really physically showed up at someone's door at six a.m.' stalkers as opposed to just the theoretical possibility of such.

I pioneered the 'live webcam' concept. This has brought all kinds of creeps out of the woodworks.

It's fascinating how this is literally out of science fiction.

The short story "WHILE-U-WAIT" by Edward Wellen (from 1978) describes a world where offering this kind of detective work service is made possible by technological data collection and filtering advances.

When I first read the story sometime in mid 90's it still felt too far off, but over the past 5 years it has become not only reality, but apparently also a competitive sport for would-be forensics hobbyists.

Well, consider that Sullivan has a reader base of tens or hundreds of thousands. So while it is hard to impossible for any one reader to be able to know or determine the location of a particular VFYW shot, among all of his readers there is very likely at least one and probably a handful who do recognize it right away.

Check out the Pop Spot archive. Some of them are very detailed:

http://www.popspotsnyc.com/

I'm sure the government is on this as well but its pretty incredible what a citizen journalist can do from his home computer with a few basic web sites. Some of the other projects that he has worked on (finding a russian training camp, authenticating an Egyptian revolution movie, etc..) are worth a read as well

I can't believe noone has mentioned NRO and NGA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligen...

Relatively less is known about them, since CIA and NSA get all the attention lately (to their detriment), but as far as we can tell (from Snowden docs), NRO has about equal budget to NSA, and NGA has about half (and CIA has 1.5 times NSA's):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black-...

Considering the incredible things NSA has been able to do with its $10B/yr, a combined NRO+NGA budget of $15B/yr sure raises a lot of questions. Presumably, they do a lot of work similar to the OP's - but noone really know what the capabilities are.

NRO has such a large budget because they design, build and launch a ton of satellites, high-altitude equipment and a number of ground and space-based comms networks. They provide that raw data to CIA, NSA & DIA who do analysis.

NGIA do GEOINT - think of them as the government's own Google Earth but with a ton more detail and live or near-live tracking in areas of interest. They provide maps to troops on the ground, determine what the NRO satellites should be looking at and merge all they produce (optical, IR, etc. imaging) and merge it with their geospatial and cartography data.

CIA, NSA, DIA along with NRO and NGIA are the big five. Think of the later two as tech departments for the intelligence community.

CIA, DIA, NSA and State (and others) will analyze ISIS propaganda using data from all these orgs and convert data to intelligence.

With all that capability, I can't help wondering why they underestimated IS so badly.

All the satellites in the world, and we still can't read the human heart.

If they do/pay their own satellite launches that would explain some of the budget.

Unfortunately once IS gets wind of this they'll be more careful and revise their strategies for releasing media. Those guys are disturbingly tech savvy.

Get ready for ISIS to submit a post-mortem blog post to Hacker News about this

... Poor choice of words given the subject of many of their videos!

These are probably staged photos taken for use as propaganda. The probably train far from this location. This is just where they stopped on the side of the road to take pictures.

They are also intel savvy. They understood the propaganda value / intelligence tradeoff prior to publishing the first photo.

AQI/ISIS have adapted and evolved from almost a decade of fighting the US military and intel orgs. They also had AQAP counterintel guys from Yemen advise them on counter-drone and other strategy.

I think latj's idea is right and that these photos were staged as propoganda

I thought the same but with so much media coming out from both IS and the public there is no way they can censor every image/video.

Any examples of their tech savvy?

This one's rather chilling.

ISIS is employing social media — ‘crowdsourcing’ — to identify Saudi agents. They’ve even got an Android app just for the purpose. ”U.S. intelligence agencies monitoring ISIL’s social media communications identified the campaign as a crowd-sourced effort to gather names and other personal information about Saudi intelligence officials for the assassination campaign.”

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/08/04/terror-and-th...

Hmm, smartphones are quite easy to pwn right. So, I'd wager US has the names of lot of civilian ISIS supporters now. I wonder what that will be used for.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/isi...

I don't think I would call spamming Twitter as being tech savvy.

You call it "spamming Twitter", others might call it "developing a web app": In April 2014, the group developed a free internet application called The Dawn of Glad Tidings, which automatically posts tweets - approved by Isis media managers - to the accounts of the application's subscribed users.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-27912569

Sure, developing a web app that spams Twitter...

Interesting that as it's getting easier & easier for "normal" people to do stuff like this - our media is getting worse and worse at it. They've essentially given up on reporting or investigating anything original and simply spew back "opinions", "tweets" or PR releases.

The more cynical among us would say that one of the media's main jobs is to reinforce pre-approved narratives by cherry-picking examples that fit that narrative. Look how much attention the mediocre punk rock band"pussy riot" got because they happened to reinforce a narrative that the west was pushing about Russia.

I don't know if I'm being less or more cynical, but I have simpler explanation - the main job of the media is to make as much money as possible. This means optimizing for number of readers, and nowdays (because people interact with news on per-article, not per-site basis) pageviews. More pageviews = more ad dolars.

Optimizing for profit is a strong force, and initially it helps any new industry make huge leaps of quality. But at some point, it starts to be more profitable to sacrifice human values. We're far into this part in case of media. What sells is linkbait, controversy, "reinforcing pre-approved narratives" (or more generally, reinforcing what people already believe), fake "thought provoking" content that is actually repeating established beliefs. Investigative journalism, good news, well-thought pieces don't sell enough, so they get left behind.

Should one -- moi, specifically, a journalist -- upvote the approved anti-narrative? In terms of making a modest living, I don't see much middle ground.

Both sell newspapers/pageviews. There's all the room in the world between approved objectivity and calculated dissent. It just don't pay.

The recently butchered James Foley said he'd cover local planning commission meetings if that was his last professional option.

Idealist? Chump?

Who else is going to do it, and do it well -- who informs the polis, so that a half-ass democracy can at least pretend to function?

Crowd-sourced event coverage is cheap and easy and sexy. But it doesn't provide context.

Sadly, for-profit media seems determined to capitalize on free YouTube and Twitter feeds at the expense of paying professionals to pay attention and make sense of complex issues.

Nothing new here. Move along. News at 11.

Did I say that out loud? Again?

(Edit: I'm also a big fan of The Dish View From Your Window Contest, which leads this discussion. Interesting media model at The Dish: curate/create great content/commentary, and ask readers to pay. So far, so good.)

This may be the best explanation I have ever seen.

I'm not trying to attack you here but what you proffer here sounds like typical Russian tyranny apologia. To pick that old example makes me feel more like you're trying to blame the media for being very bad and biased because how dare they expose such shenanigans. Saying they are "mediocre" is just a way to slight them and downplay what actually happened.

Honestly, if that's the case then let's keep the "pre-approved" narratives coming because in that case, it happens to be the correct narrative.

That is a drastic reduction of the pussy riot situation. The attention they received had nothing to do with their music and everything to do with the fact that they were arrested and prosecuted in a a sham trial.

Honestly, there are hundreds of sham trials and prosecutions in the US every day, let alone the entire rest of the world. The question is, why focus on this one in particular?

They had two things going for them.

1) They represent a sexual minority

2) They have a name that allowed media to go for shock value by simply stating the band by their full chosen name

I think the issue isn't that the media is getting worse at it - rather they're just as good as they used to be (not very) but it's a lot easier to catch them when they're bad at it, so they just don't do it as much anymore.

I think this is related to the newspaper death. They have to lay off the non-essential positions, and can only afford to do the bare minimum.

I like this, but probably worth mentioning that this isn't a covert group so it seems somewhat akin to reporting where the Donetsk separatists are.

Being active combatants with numerous enemies, they still need to consider operational security.

The Donetsk separatists are more like a political party than a combat force.

I'm not saying IS are the Donetsk separatists, just that they're not hiding in mountain ranges or tunnels and there's never been a question of "where are these guys".

The Donetsk separatists are more like a bunch of advance troops from Russia than a political party.

This is pretty awesome! I wanted to do something similar with the video of James Foley, but I figured there was people smarter than me already doing that and I really didn't want to watch that video.

Finding where James Foley was executed is less interesting. It is most likely just outside Raqqa. Not much you can do with the location (and they likely know it).

When they were AQI, the beheadings were conducted in homes and buildings in areas under US control as part of an insurgency - so finding where they were was essential.

What an odd introduction: "Have you ever wondered what it would be like to go through training as an ISIS terrorist? Or better yet, where you would go to find such advanced training?"

Nope.

This is cool and all, but I can't help but be reminded of the hunt for Boston Marathon bombers. Sure, maybe the author's heart is in the right place, but Random Person On The Internet could easily have gotten something wrong, that seems intuitively correct to the author and a general audience (us), but is in fact incorrect. Which makes me inclined to instead leave stuff like this up to the professionals. (appeal to authority, i know, but... getting this stuff right is important.)

I think the difference between the two scenarios is largely dependent upon the source materials and the quality of the analysis. The author knew that the photographs were authentic because they were sourced directly from ISIS. It wasn't a matter of determining who--out of many potential matches--might have fight a given profile (young male, bomb and backpack as people were searching for after Boston), but comparing the photographs to others in order to find matching geographical points of reference.

The bridges in the photographs weren't going to change their looks. Even if you grant the possibility of a false positive in one instance, the use of multiple source photographs and different angles all combine to increase the accuracy of the analysis. This analysis in this blog post was thorough, precise, and clear. Professional. The responses to Boston, on the other hand, lacked such rigor and amounted to little more than a witch-hunt, despite the fact that most of those going through photographs were simply trying to help.

You're right, in a sense, that it's easy for this type of analysis to be mishandled. But that's dependent upon the analyst and the materials they're working from. Rather than fret in this case, I'm happy to support it. Good examples should always be highlighted and praised, if only in the hope that such examples might help prevent poor examples in the future. A bit of a pipe-dream, but it's a nice one to imagine.

I think this is more research than akin the boston marathon hunt. This guy doesn't have access to bombs and I would assume the people who do have access to them would probably fact check it with some higher-level intelligence.

Honest question: what's the advantage of using FlashEarth over Bing maps (which appears to be the source of the data)?

Typically an analyst would use both.

They tend to compliment each other for multiple reasons: Bing has imagery from a different time period (most of the time newer than GMaps, but some of the time older, which can be useful).

Bing also has the Bird's Eye view, and different aerial imagery in general, which can help with clarification and image artifacting.

So basically, we're using all of our available options. BTW, this is all run of the mill stuff in mil/int circles, but with better resolutions and light/electromagnetic bands.

I think you misunderstood the question? FlashEarth[1] appears to just be a Bing Maps imagery viewer.

[1] http://www.flashearth.com/

Yes. If you want to have bing aerial images next to google satellite imagery, use this app to display bing maps in google earth: http://ge-map-overlays.appspot.com/bing-maps/aerial

I read an interesting article a while ago about who they have tried (unsuccessfully) to track

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayman_al-Zawahiri

from land artifacts. I supposed it is a bit more difficult as google maps didnt make it to Waziristan yet.

It sort of reminds me of this article from a while back

http://reason.com/blog/2014/04/03/crowdsourced-amateurs-outp...

Such an interesting analysis, and seemingly a very nice site too. A shame the comments are so headless.

It's a travesty communities and discussions devolve so quickly on the internet (though I of course know from PGs eternal struggle how hard it is to prevent). Whoever can solve this problem (nice try disqus etc) will certainly claim fame.

Up and down votes won't cut it. It will require a serious inquiry into psychology, sociology and behavioural studies I believe.

Western governments didn't know this already?

I have a hard time believing they didn't. There are (in my opinion) strategic reasons ISIS was allowed to get as far as it did. And reasons they were allowed to appropriate large amounts of cash and US weaponry.

Governments are slow and stupid.

Also they got the weaponry from the Iraqi army, who were given it by the US.

Some parts of government are slow and stupid.

Other parts are exceedingly clever and ruthless.

What totally shocks me here is the whopping ignorance and lack of even the least bit of effort of understanding shown in the pathetic comments. Are really so many Americans brainwashed to such a crazy extent? Well anyways it makes me sick.

Wait, so is the "new construction" around the tower the training camp? The article doesn't seem to say explicitly. Or is this more finding where they do training marches?

When looking for new apartments in NYC, a combination of Google Street View and the Flyover feature in Apple Maps does wonders to validate how truthful brokers are in their listings.

But isn't the place already mentioned in the video footage? "State of Naynawa", which is a well known place.

Way to crowdsource ours and Iraq's military intelligence! I'm sure someone will find this useful.

I bet this guy is good at https://geoguessr.com/

Absolutely amazing investigative work. This is very good intelligence from using everyday resources and a keen eye from the determined.

this man deserve a huge applauds. He is our sherlock holmes.

Nice work.

applauds

What are the next steps?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YqpAEA3wYE

Forgive me...

LOL

You don't need great weapons. Just Drop A "Heat bomb" In Antarctic Ice Shelves. You'll Drown The World.

We need more bellingcats' - this was a great find - can we expect a planned airstrike in this location any time soon?

Why would you plan an airstrike and destroy a major highway because ISIS took a picture of themselves there?

If you read the end of the article you saw large amounts of construction around the training camp.

This is what I was thinking, but then I got downvoted to hell. Understandable, there are innocent civilians and children around - most brainwashed by ISIS. But, it looks like these training camps seem to stay close to the river - as seen in the Vice documentary, "The Islamic State" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzCAPJDAnQA#t=160

My apologies everyone - it was a facetious and tasteless remark, and my poor attempt at being funny, while being sarcastic at the same time.

Crowdsourcing military actions? How repulsive.

> can we expect a planned airstrike in this location any time soon?

I hope your not serious

Is that because you think ISIS should not be fought militarily, or because you think tactically a ground strike would be a better approach, or what?

I think it's more the flip tone of the message.

It's the trigger happiness

Because ISIS probably isn't there anymore.

Do you really expect someone with the authority to make a strike is going to post about it on the internet?

Maybe something to do with the location being in the middle of a city full of civilians.

It would indeed be the perfect weapon for a terrorist. Just post a picture of something on the Internet and have foreign military blast it to the ground. Create terror and blame americans, and anyone can do it.

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