OPEN SOURCE INVESTIGATIONS IN THE AGE OF GOOGLE

How did a journalist find out who was responsible for bombing hospitals in Syria from his desk in New York? How can South Sudanese monitors safely track and detail the weapons in their communities and make sure that global audiences take notice? How do researchers in London coordinate worldwide work uncovering global corruption? What are policy-makers, lawyers, and intelligence agencies doing to keep up with and make use of these activities? In the age of Google, threats to human security are being tracked in completely new ways. Human rights abuses, political violence, nuclear weapons, corruption, radicalization, and conflict are all being monitored, analyzed, and documented. Although open source investigations are neither easy to conduct nor straightforward to apply, with diligence and effort, societies, agencies, and individuals have the potential to use them to strengthen security. This interdisciplinary book presents 18 original chapters by prize-winning practitioners, experts, and rising stars, detailing what open source investigations are and how they are carried out, and examining the opportunities and challenges they present to global transparency, accountability and justice. It is essential reading for current and future digital investigators, journalists, and scholars of global governance, international relations and humanitarian law, as well as anyone interested in the possibilities and dangers of this new field. Contents: Preface and Acknowledgements About the Authors Open Source Investigations in the Age of Google: Introduction, Context and Overview: Open Source Investigations in the Age of Google: How Digital Sleuths Can Strengthen Human Security (Henrietta Wilson, Olamide Samuel and Dan Plesch) Transparency and Accountability: Tracking Human Rights Abuses through Online Open Source Research (Benjamin Strick) Open Source Investigations on the Ground: Reflections on Experiences from South Sudan (Geoffrey L Duke) Monitoring Nuclear Weapons Developments with Open Source Intelligence (Hans M Kristensen and Matt Korda) Remote Scrutiny: How Online Information Can Help to Investigate Airstrikes (Christiaan Triebert) Links in the Chain: How the Berkeley Protocol Is Strengthening Digital Investigation Standards in International Justice (Lindsay Freeman and Alexa Koenig) Information and Societies: Open Source Journalism, Misinformation and the War for Truth in Syria (Muhammad Idrees Ahmad) Saviour or Menace? Crowdsourcing Open Source Research and the Rise of QAnon (Aric Toler) Collecting Conflict Data Worldwide: ACLED's Contribution (Andrea Carboni and Clionadh Raleigh) OSINT and the US Intelligence Community: Is the Past Prologue? (Kathleen M Vogel) Global Governance: Open Source Investigations before the Age of Google: The Harvard Sussex Program (Henrietta Wilson, Richard Guthrie and Brian Balmer) The Verification of Dual-Use Chemicals under the Chemical Weapons Convention through Open Source Research: The Pugwash-SIPRI Thiodiglycol Project (Robert J Mathews) The Role of Open Source Data and Methods in Verifying Compliance with Weapons of Mass Destruction Agreements (James Revill and María Garzón Maceda) Current OSINT Applications for Weapons Monitoring and Verification (Dan Liu and Zuzanna Gwadera) Data, Methods and Platforms: Identifying and Collecting Public Domain Data for Tracking Cybercrime and Online Extremism (Lydia Wilson, Viet Anh Vu, Ildikó Pete and Yi Ting Chua) Assessing the Relationship between Machine Learning and Open Source Research in International Security (Jamie Withorne) Shadow World Investigations: Tracking Corruption in the Arms Trade (Rhona Michie, Paul Holden, Andrew Feinstein and Alexandra Smidman) Democratization of OSINT: The Vision, Purpose, Tools and Development of the Datayo Platform (Veronika Bedenko and Jonathan Bellish) Index Readership: Open source research practitioners; investigative journalists; national and international humanitarian lawyers, undergraduates and graduates of...