Open source intelligence (OSINT) is a term used to describe information acquired from publicly available sources. This includes both online and offline sources.
Different parties can use OSINT for various purposes. For instance, it’s used by commercial organizations to plan an entry into new markets, track competitor activities, and understand customer habits in a particular geographical area.
Some interesting non-commercial use cases for OSINT have also begun to appear lately, boosted by changes in the geopolitical landscape. Now, we’re seeing it used widely in military stages for both offensive and defensive operations.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, global social media platforms have been flooded with a massive volume of information about the war. This includes live broadcasts, images, and videos recorded from the battlefield and posted to various social media platforms.
This massive volume of war-related information has been leveraged for different purposes. For instance, some organizations use it to identify perpetrators involved in potential war crimes. In contrast, others use it to plan their humanitarian assistance and to help citizens residing in war zones. The most notable usage of OSINT in the Ukrainian-Russian war has been the lifesaving task of assisting in clearing mines and other Unexploded Ordnance.
How was OSINT used in mine cleaners operations in Ukraine?
In the context of the Ukrainian-Russian war, OSINT has been utilized in various ways. Its application has been instrumental in tracking troop movements, identifying targets for airstrikes, guiding artillery fire, and providing humanitarian assistance. Furthermore, OSINT has also played a critical role in removing landmines and explosive remnants, making the area safer for civilians and aid workers.
The HALO Trust, a pioneer international charity specializing in mine clearance, has used OSINT extensively to create a database of all areas containing landmines and unexploded shells across Ukraine. HALO teams have used information collected from various public sources, mainly social media posts sharing videos and images, to locate unexploded remnants and guide their on-ground teams and authorities to remove them. Other organizations, such as the ICRC, now use the same OSINT techniques in different scenarios.
How can social media be leveraged to locate landmines?
Each social media platform will have advanced search techniques to locate particular information within its data. In this report, we’ll focus on Twitter.
There are different special advanced search operators for searching Twitter data. In this experiment, we’ll search for tweets posted in a particular geographic location. Later, we’ll combine other advanced search operators to narrow down the returned results.
The “geocode” search code is used to locate tweets based on their location. To use it, we need first to find the geographical coordination (latitude and longitude) of the place where we want to retrieve all related tweets.
The Twitter search string for geo search:
geocode:latitude,longitude,radius
We can use Google maps to fetch the coordinates of any place on Earth. To do this:
- Go to https://www.google.com/maps
- Search for your desired location, and retrieve the “latitude” and “longitude” by right-clicking over the map. A pop-up window showing place coordination will appear (see Figure 1).
- Specify the radius which determines the area of your retrieved tweets. In our experiment, I selected 50km.
- Now, the finished search string has become: geocode:50.029980058054505,36.272293783924866,50km Run the search query in the Twitter search box. This will display all tweets (see Figure 2) within the selected location that you are allowed to see (some tweets might be protected and will not appear).
If you don’t know where to start your geo-search and you’re not familiar with the current war zones of Ukraine) you can check the Institute for the Study of War and AEI's Critical Threats Project interactive map, which shows Ukraine's assessed control of terrain and is updated daily (see Figure 3).
Search keywords and hashtags can be combined into your search query to return more specific results as follows:
- First, we need to prepare a list of search keywords in three languages: Russian, Ukrainian, and English. As we’re searching for unexploded ordnance and landmines, the following list of keywords will be a good start (see Table 1).
- Hashtags can be combined in the search query as well. The following hashtags are popular and link to content related to the Ukrainian war.
#UkraineWar #UkraineRussiaWar️ #Donbass #Crimea #StopRussianAggression #StopRussia #StopPutin #UkraineConflict #PrayForUkraine #SaveUkraine #DefendUkraine #SupportUkraine #NoWarInUkraine #SaveMariupol #UkraineUnderAttack #Ukraine
Use advanced Twitter search operators
We can fine-tune our search by adding additional search operators, such as:
filter:images will only return tweets that contain images within them
filter:links will only return tweets that link to a URL
url:”Search Keyword” replace the “search keyword” with something you want to appear in the URL. For example, url:rocket should return tweets with a link containing the keyword “rocket” in their URL
since:yyyy-mm-dd until:yyyy-mm-dd will return tweets between two dates. For example: since:2023-02-01 until:2023-03-30
For example, the following query
unexploded geocode:50.029980058054505,36.272293783924866,50km filter:images
will return all tweets containing the keyword “unexploded” from a particular geographical location within 50km with images embedded within them (the tweets contain one or more image).
Other sources to find unexploded shells in Ukraine
Other sources can help find unexploded ordnance and landmines in Ukraine. The Live Universal Awareness Map is a popular service that displays the locations targeted by air and missile strikes in Ukraine based on different sources.
Go to https://liveuamap.com, and you’ll see the targeted locations along with the relevant sources mentioning these attacks on the right side of the screen (see Figure 4).
This article sheds light on leveraging social media information to locate landmines and unexploded shells in Ukraine. Using Twitter's advanced search operators, individuals and organizations can easily find tweets containing information about these dangerous explosives.
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