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< | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | >
> | | | | All Quiet on the Twitter Front: Open-Source Intelligence and the War in Ukraine
-- By StewartPollock - 19 Apr 2022 | |
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< | Section I: Chronicle of Death | >
> | Introduction: Open-Source Obituaries | | | | |
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< | The Twitter post shows three pictures: in the first, a young man stands awkwardly while wearing the distinctive blue and white striped uniform of the Russian paratroopers, the VDV. In the second, an honor guard of soldiers escort a coffin draped with the Russian flag. The third picture shows the same young man, smiling as he embraces his mother. The caption reads “Alexander Shrayner served with the VDV’s 104th Air Assault Regiment. He previously deployed to Syria from the fall of 2020--Jan 2021 and fought in the Donbas in 2014. He was killed near Kyiv on February 25.” This is the 383rd tweet in a single thread, posted by Rob Lee, a PhD? student at King’s College, who has been updating the thread daily since March 7th. Many of the posts show smiling men standing, in and out of uniform, with girlfriends, wives, and fellow soldiers. Many are ethnic minorities from Russia’s constituent republics, such as Buryatia, Chechenia, and Kalmykia. All of them have captions saying that they were killed in Ukraine. Interspersed with these posts on Lee’s timeline, are others, showing burned-out Russian and Ukrainian tanks, armored personnel carriers, and helicopters. | >
> | The Twitter post shows three pictures: in the first, a young man stands awkwardly while wearing the distinctive blue and white striped uniform of the Russian paratroopers, the VDV. In the second, an honor guard of soldiers escort a coffin draped with the Russian flag. The third picture shows the same young man, smiling as he embraces his mother. The caption reads “Alexander Shrayner served with the VDV’s 104th Air Assault Regiment. He previously deployed to Syria from the fall of 2020--Jan 2021 and fought in the Donbas in 2014. He was killed near Kyiv on February 25.” This is the 383rd tweet in a single thread, posted by Rob Lee, a PhD? student at King’s College, who has been updating it daily since March 7th. Many of the posts show smiling men standing, in and out of uniform, with girlfriends, wives, and fellow soldiers. Many are ethnic minorities from Russia’s constituent republics, such as Tuva, Buryatia and Kalmykia, who have disproportionately been on the front lines of Putin's war. All of them have captions saying that they were killed in Ukraine. Interspersed with these posts on Lee’s timeline, are others, showing burned-out Russian and Ukrainian tanks, armored personnel carriers, and helicopters. | | |
Lee’s feed is notable not only for its harrowing content, but how he obtained it—all of the information on the thread of Russian casualties comes from open sources, including news reports and social media feeds. As Russia tries to hide both its crimes and casualties in its war with Ukraine, open-source intelligence (OSINT) provides a valuable, if sometimes distorted way for ordinary civilians to follow the true course and cost of the conflict. Although the war in Ukraine is not the first conflict to utilize open-source intel, the circumstances of the conflict combine to make it an especially powerful case study in the way that social media and technology can be used for intelligence gathering by members of the public. | |
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< | Section II: The History and Nature of Open-Source Intel | >
> | Section I: The History and Nature of Open-Source Intel | | | | |
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< | The history of open-source intelligence can actually be traced back to a Columbia Law graduate—William Donovan, who led the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner to the CIA) during the Second World War. After Pearl Harbor, the OSS created a Research and Analysis branch which meticulously pored over “dozens of newspapers, journals, press clippings, radio broadcast reports from around the world” looking for information which might give some information about strength and movements. Donovan noted that even a totalitarian regime, in which the media was strictly controlled by the government, would still, for propaganda purposes, be compelled to release some inadvertently useful information. | >
> | The history of open-source intelligence can actually be traced back to a Columbia Law graduate—William Donovan, who led the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner to the CIA) during the Second World War. After Pearl Harbor, the OSS created a Research and Analysis branch which meticulously pored over “dozens of newspapers, journals, press clippings, radio broadcast reports from around the world” looking for information which might give some information about strength and movements. Donovan noted that even a totalitarian regime, in which the media was strictly controlled by the government, would still, for propaganda purposes, be compelled to release some inadvertently useful information. | | | | |
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< | This fundamental tension is being echoed in Ukraine—for example, following the sinking of the Russian missile cruiser Moskva on April 14, the Russian Ministry of Defense posted a video purporting to show the sailors of the ship, who it claimed had all been rescued following its “accidental” sinking. However, geolocation of the footage quickly raised questions about when and where it was taken—and the fact that only 100 sailors, out of a crew of over 500 were being shown at all, raised more questions than it answered. In the days following the sinking, Lee and others began scouring Russian-language social media for information, and soon began reporting on memorial services being held for crewmembers of the Moskva. Even in Putin’s Russia, there is only so much information could be controlled. | >
> | This fundamental tension is being echoed in Ukraine—for example, following the sinking of the Russian missile cruiser Moskva on April 14, the Russian Ministry of Defense posted a video purporting to show the sailors of the ship, who it claimed had all been rescued following its “accidental” sinking. However, geolocation of the footage quickly raised questions about when and where it was taken—and the fact that only 100 sailors, out of a crew of over 500 were being shown at all, raised more questions than it answered. In the days following the sinking, Lee and others began scouring Russian-language social media for information, and soon began reporting on memorial services being held for crewmembers of the Moskva. Even in Putin’s Russia, there is only so much information could be controlled. | | | | |
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< | Section III: The War on Twitter | >
> | Section II: The War in Ukraine on Twitter | | | | |
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< | If the Gulf War is sometimes called the “CNN War” for the role that the new 24-hour news cycle played in its dissemination to the American public, then Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine might be called the first “social media war”. From the relentless stream of posts by Lee and others (including Michael Kofman of the Center for Naval Analysis) to TikTok? videos instructing Ukrainian civilians how to operate Soviet BMPs, the current conflict has demonstrated the enormous role which social media can play in shaping how the public views a conflict amidst the fog of war. | >
> | If the Gulf War is sometimes called the “CNN War” for the role that the new 24-hour news cycle played in its dissemination to the American public, then Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine might be called the first “social media war”. From the relentless stream of posts by Lee and others (including Michael Kofman of the Center for Naval Analysis, and Dutch investigative journalist group Bellingcat) to TikTok? videos instructing Ukrainian civilians how to operate Soviet BMPs, the current conflict has demonstrated the enormous role which social media can play in shaping how the public views a conflict amidst the fog of war. | | | | |
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< | The Russian government’s effort to downplay and obfuscate the nature and scale of the conflict, by insisting that it is merely a “special military operation” has given Ukraine the initiative in this struggle to shape perception. For example, dramatic Russian underreporting of its own losses has helped spur the creation of accounts dedicated to tracking actual Russian losses in terms of personnel and equipment, such as Oryx, which has made an effort to catalog every vehicle loss suffered by the Russian military, including those captured by Ukraine. Russia’s policy of total denial makes it difficult to dispute these numbers, even if they are probably exaggerated. | >
> | The Russian government’s effort to downplay and obfuscate the nature and scale of the conflict, by insisting that it is merely a “special military operation” has given Ukraine the initiative in this struggle to shape international perception. For example, dramatic Russian underreporting of its own losses has helped spur the creation of accounts dedicated to tracking actual Russian losses in terms of personnel and equipment, such as Lee's. Major news sources have, in turn, begun to rely on the both the information and analysis obtained through OSINT. Russia’s policy of total denial makes it difficult to dispute these numbers, even if they are probably exaggerated. However, it also increases some of the risks of misinformation which are inherent to OSINT. | | | | |
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< | Section IV: Distortions and Limitations of OSINT | >
> | Section III: Distortions and Limitations of OSINT, and How to Overcome Them | | | | |
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< | One key drawback of OSINT, however, is that it is often difficult to sift through an enormous amount of content, some fake, some genuine, in order to create a clear narrative. This huge volume of information, on social media, has been called an “information explosion”. However, this is why open-source intelligence is especially well suited to crowd-sourcing. In the case of a conflict such as the war in Ukraine, where a huge number of lay-people are engaged and willing to help such crowd-sourcing efforts, then creating a clear narrative using OSINT is possible. | >
> | One key drawback of OSINT, is that it is often difficult to sift through an enormous amount of content, some fake, some genuine, in order to create a clear narrative. This huge volume of information, on social media, has been called an “information explosion”. However, this is why open-source intelligence is especially well suited to crowd-sourcing. In the case of a conflict such as the war in Ukraine, where a huge number of lay-people are engaged and willing to help such crowd-sourcing efforts, then creating a clear narrative using OSINT is possible. | | | | |
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< | Another major drawback of open-source intelligence (which is shared by more-conventional forms of intelligence gathering) is that it remains susceptible to the confirmation bias of those who compile it. Information which is consistent with one’s personal narrative (i.e. Ukrainian overperformance and Russian underperformance in the current conflict) is prioritized. Lee and others have generally limited their reporting of Ukrainian military losses, even though thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are known to have died in the conflict. The result is that OSINT risks creating a feedback loop of people only following sources which confirm their priors (this is, of course, a problem with social media more generally). However, even with these caveats, OSINT can be an immensely valuable tool for the public in tracking the course of a modern war, supplementing conventional media sources while providing a human face to a brutal conflict. | >
> | Another major drawback of open-source intelligence (which is shared by more-conventional forms of intelligence gathering) is that it remains susceptible to the confirmation bias of those who compile it. Information which is consistent with one’s personal narrative (i.e. Ukrainian overperformance and Russian underperformance in the current conflict) is prioritized. Lee and others have generally limited their reporting of Ukrainian military losses, even though thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are known to have died in the conflict. This is partially a result of Ukraine appearing to have better operations security than Russia. The result is that OSINT risks creating a feedback loop of people only following sources which confirm their priors (this is, of course, a problem with social media more generally). However, even with these caveats, OSINT can be an immensely valuable tool for the public in tracking the course of a modern war, supplementing conventional media sources while providing a human face to a brutal conflict. | | |
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