Here's some thoughts I've had recently on the whole geolocation business and rules of ethics I think people should have in this effort.
1. GIVE CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE
2. Post the link to your original source for the YouTube or the still photograph or screen grab in news media or social media which you took very often from local sources — local social media users, commenters on forums, etc.
3. Place a Google Map or Google Earth or Yandex map link within your tweet or post.
4. Put a picture, e.g. from Panoramio or Google Street View or VK showing your "proof of concept". Show your work.
5. Use Amnesty's tool or Google reverse image or YouTube or other searches to see if the video or picture already appeared and isn't from another date or place.
6. Don't be anonymous.
Five of these things ought to be really simple and easy, but many "conflict reporters" don't do them. The sixth is controversial, but I don't care, I'm stating it anyway. The reasons for the first five are the following:
1. They are lazy or hurrying to be "first."
2. They can't or don't want to try to fit it all into a tweet (use Awesome screenshot then).
3. They want to get the credit themselves because their reputation or grants or ego depends on it.
4. They claim to want to protect sources.
5. They don't want anyone questioning their work as check-ups can be adversarial and undo their find.
6. They claim they are the victim of trolls.
I'm sorry, but all of this is bullshit.
The notion that you can't give a link because you're protecting a source who is already public on the Internet belongs to the "Secret Policeman's Ruse" fallacy I've blogged about constantly. That person is already public on the Internet. To be sure, they may not realize they are as public as they wished, but they're public.
The most often cited reason for not giving a source to a VKontakte or other account is that then, they won't get anything more from this source. Its cover will be blown. Or the person might be harmed. Or the account will be closed.
This is ridiculous, because you can easily solve this problem by contacting a credible journalist, or even your best friend, another blogger, and divulging the link and having them just check it. Then, without revealing it, you can have another person vouch for it. Ideally, this will be a credible journalist and not your best friend, but why can't you do even that? No one will lose their "cover" by having another person review a link. In fact, perhaps some sort of "Link Ombudsman" could be created who can be asked to check authenticity and vouch for content.
Yes, there are cases when people were forced to remove their social media accounts under the glare of geolocators (the guy writing on his buk (Macbook) and not inside a Buk, remember? Or the man on a picnic with his family who filmed a Grad out of Russia? Did he keep his position in a police academy after that?)
But given how many people ARE linked and are NOT harmed or removed, the claim really, really has to be challenged. I think the REAL reason behind failure to supply links is wanting or taking credit and refusal to submit to adversarial review.
Aside from the issue of protecting sources — which I've just shown you that you can deal with — there should never be a case where you just swipe someone's picture, just because they don't speak English and you think they will never see you or because you think "it's out there."
That's just wrong.
It costs nothing to link to their tweet or put a h/t and their name.
This is very important. Please don't tell me bullshit about how you're "in it for the cause and not the money" and imply that those who are paid for doing this week are sell-outs and Moscow shills, in the end — or again, that you don't want to "harm locals."
Altruism is pretty suspect on the Internet, because Klout or reputational enhancement for things like geolocation finds is a value, and sometimes a cash value. So knock off the fake altruism. It's okay to get and give credit.
More importantly, giving credit is part of establishing a "chain of custody," if you will, so that in case that person who made that big find is wrong, they can take blame as well as credit. And by "blame," I don't mean a witch-hunt, but just a recognition. If you can see where the hypothesis of a find went wrong, you can then unravel the problem and work to construct the correct hypothesis. There is no shame in being wrong in a geolocation if you admit it. That means taking and giving credit.
Because I'm stuck in a moderation queue here, I'm going to give an example of where I think credit should be given — and of course, I'm totally aware that these geolocations may have been made separately. I'm just using this occasion to make some points I've thought about making for a long time:
- Catherine Fitzpatrick – January 4th, 2015
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
It’s important to give credit to the people who make these finds when you write articles about them. Even if you found them somehow independently, if you discover someone had the find first, you should give them credit. It’s important.
On January 2, a Russian-language Twitter user made this find after a video of a Russian tank reportedly in Lugansk was posted on YouTube:
https://twitter.com/murderotica_/status/551130552943017984
He put a Google map location but unfortunately Google Street View no longer works for Lugansk:
https://www.google.com/maps?q=48.567828,39.381326&hl=uk&gl=ua
He battled the trolls who kept telling him it wasn’t a match; it was.
I then found it in Yandex and indicated it was the same view:
Now again — because people can't read, especially a post bigger than their hand: I TOTALLY REALIZE that these finds could have happened INDEPENDENTLY. That happens ALL THE TIME. Hive-mind is not really that big, as it fits the same 3-5% power curve of all Internet phenomenon. But it does often happen that groups of people related by overlapping followers or followees loosely may find the same thing separately.
EVEN SO, if you discover someone else had it FIRST, you should CREDIT THEM.
Russians and Ukrainians and Russian-language speakers in the Eurasia region are making a lot of important finds, and they are often the first ones — and they get trampled over by Westerners who just don't think they have to credit the little people. I've seen this happen a number of times.
It must have taken hours of work to walk through the main roads of Lugansk likely to be used by tank convoys and try to find just that configuration of a newstand, a beer hut, and an apartment building.
Or again — Secret Policeman's Ruse — people say they shouldn't credit locals to "protect" them or "keep them safe" — which is not only patronizing but stupid as they're already on the Internet, already visible to the secret police, and usually with a pseudonym anyway.
I'm not even going to get into a discussion about my rule of "no anonymity" because I've debated this for 15 years and I'm utterly unimpressed with 90% of the people who insist on this. I speak as someone who is not anonymous, and as a woman, has suffered ENORMOUS harassment online, up to and including hate and intimidation videos from Anonymous personalized with my name on YouTube, doxing, and calls and visits to my home and my relatives' homes. People who tell me they are anonymous because they fear Kremlin trolls on the Twitter make me laugh. Man up, and learn how to block people. Women who tell me they have rape threats I can sympathize with, but I can only say woman up, and report such people to the police and tell them to go fuck themselves. You're not in Russia, where you can get clubbed to death. You're on the Internet in the West, most of you, and absolutely nothing is going to happen to you.
There's a few more comments I'll make about the whole geolocation racket about which I hope to write much more some day.
1. It's not a science. It's a hypothesis. It's one way of using the artifacts of the Internet to construct theses that may be compelling. It's not the be-all and end-all.
2. Old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism as well knowledge of countries matter. The AP journalists who went to Torez and got confirmation from locals that they saw the Buk in the parking lot matter. The seasoned war correspondent who persisted in trying to find the original local photographer who took the Buk rocket trail picture matter.
3. There's a tendency to think that only the world inside the electronics — the video tape, Google maps, a Panoramio picture — matter as factology, and anything organic life says in the video like the direction of a missile, the type of forces in the area, etc. or anything that some human says somewhere is somehow suspect. Just because people inside videos are sometimes wrong doesn't mean they don't count. That's why listening to them, and knowing their language and culture matters.
4. Obsessive pattern-matchers rather than conceptual thinkers or those with a rich store of local knowledge can succeed in this sort of thing, and that may not be a good thing, overall. After all, nobody ever stopped a war because I geolocated a tank. Facts do not speak for themselves. Politicians with political will do.
5. You can be really, really wrong. I remember once geolocating a Russian tank next to an intricate pattern of trees near a gas station on a road and it turned out that a reporter on the scene said he took the picture in a completely different town. A lot of trees and roads look alike. Nothing is definitive. You need corroborating evidence that comes from real organic eye-witnesses, journalists on the scene, government, intelligence agencies.
6. Speaking of which, no, the geolocation business is not replacing the State Department or NATO — and not "any time soon" but "ever" if I have anything to do with it. This is one of those recurring arrogant fallacies that is going to lead to some serious crashes and burns some day. The reason the State Department and NATO don't instantly give you their satellite photos and their HUMINT and OSINT and all the rest is because then they'd betray their methods, you know, like Edward Snowden did to them, and helped hostile powers and terrorists.
They are not obliged to provide a sat photo because Some Guy on Twitter thinks they should to prove his own point. Geolocators can work marvels. But so can states. That's why we elect liberal democratic states instead of you anonymous Internet obessive-compulsives to rule our countries. It's possible to have both.
The assumption that Internet artifact scrutinizers are going to make a utopian state online without bumbling organic meat-world detectives and spies has a huge grip on some people's imaginations but thanks, I'll take appointed and elected officials over anonymous Internet jerks any day.
I'll make two more points. This field is tainted, and becoming more so. And not by the arrogance and stupidity and in-fighting that I've indicated above in this male-dominated field which has even driven some people off Twitter. That's fixable or at least can be minimized. It's tainted because:
1. Moscow and other hostile powers have gotten into the geolocation business. I've seen this ever since "Krasnoarmeysk", the fake location of the Buk video. I think they will harder and harder at this, because they see how fascinated the Western press is with it and how easily gulled. They will either work to shut things down (web cams and Google Street View in Lugansk) or Twitter, or they will inject disinformation and false clues that seem realistic — they're good at that. It's only a matter of time before this happens.
2. Well-meaning but problematic Western or regional Eurasian powers are mixing in. I've seen signs of this. They already know something, but they don't reveal it as themselves. So just like the FDA "reconstructs" the NSA's tips (something that I think they should in fact legislate instead of do illegally as it is legitimate), so some geolocators are essentially reconstructors of tips from intelligence.
So the way it works — the intelligence or military people put it out on social media on an anonymous account, or hand it to a "conflict blogger" or in fact the bloggers are themselves military or intelligence all along. People think this isn't a problem. People think it doesn't show. But it is and it does. Because it means that the entire "open source" or "crowd source" concept is in fact only a plaything for the great powers. It would be great if all the tip-offs were for the sake of good. But they might not be. And if they are found out, they will discredit the whole field.
And no, I don't have any illusions about this or believe it can be stopped — I have the same weather-eyed view of crowd-sourcing as I do of "open source software" which is the most closed society I've ever encountered after the Soviet Union or North Korea. Open source = closed society of arrogant coders who don't brook dissent and go wildly astray due to their own arrogance. Open source is open to tyrants, and Tor developers are abusively stupid when they can't concede that the Kremlin runs their nodes and deanonymizes traffic.
A final comment I think many will disagree with. I really think translators are important, and should be paid for their work. I'm sure people will find this self-serving, but I don't care. The same people who are prepared to recruit free translation online and then exploit it to sell videos for huge amounts of money to rich mainstream media clients should search their souls and ask themselves why they think they deserve a salary for wrangling social media, or mainstream media deserves a salary for editing and broadcasting or publishing wrangled social media, but the person who translated it and made it possible — upon which the entire edifice of their enterprise rests — the person who did hard, slogging work — is supposed to work for free. Oh, not to mention the local camera crew or amateur vlogger. You pay your Internet guy, right? You probably pay him $50/hour. Why can't you pay a translator even a fraction of that? The human code of language is far, far more important.
Google, Wikipedia and other wealty companies are the first culprit in this when they recruit locals to translate for free which they are willing to do because they think it might lead to a job some day. It usually doesn't.
There's a notion that Google translate is "getting better" and "good enough" but I have to say, that's not true.
I've seen some wild mistakes lately. Like a Dutch newspaper being translated as "Yahoo News" for some mysterious reason. Like the name of a Russian MVD spetznaz unit being called "Relight" instead of "Peresvet," which literally means "re-light" but which is the last name of a hero in the Battle of Kulikovo.
And speaking of the Battle of Kulikovo, these things are important to know, and translators are often people who know culture, too, or can find local experts. Knowing things like this gives you insight into people's mindset but also literally time and date stamps, if they are holding a parade of armor, for example, and mentioning something like this or you know the date matches that historic date that they celebrate.
Let me conclude by saying that I think everyone in the geolocation and social media analysis business in conflicts is doing really important and valuable work, even if I don't like some of their methods, as I've described. Most of the time this is a thankless and unpaid task that only earns them Kremlin troll harassment and sniping from their own ranks. But I think if some basic ethics were developed as they are in any other field than some conflicts could be minimized and the work could have more credibility.
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