Makers and talk about the stories that matter is there a. Hello im Richard Gaisford youre watching a special edition of the listening post on a new kind of reporting open source journalism citizen journalism allows anybody with a mobile phone to document a news story to produce content that is now routinely used by news organizations open source journalists often start with that kind of material and then they apply some of the same investigative techniques that are used by police and intelligence agencies this is a growth industry partly because of declining press freedom in some hostile place. In china for instance open Source Researchers have proven the existence and the location of socalled reeducation camps for muslims. The province of shin jack and they broke those stories long before Mainstream Media outlets to open source reporters have also proved valuable on the story in syria where at least 10 media workers were killed in 2018 and they did so without having to go there and take the risks that come with that assignment weve had 2 producers working on the story of open source journalism tarik naafa and daniel tory daniel youve looked at how open Source Research has shed light on the camps in synch and well see that report a bit later on but briefly what have you learnt while for a long time richard chinese officials were actually flat out denying that these camps even existed and at the same time the government was doing its best to make sure that journalists on the ground in shin jang didnt find it and thats where open Source Research has made their mark it was the evidence that they own coveted which ultimately gave the lie to those denials that have been coming out of beijing tarik your report on syria will be coming up 1st that war has been described as the worlds 1st you tube conflict and its produced a goldmine of material for these kinds of research absolutely because so many people have been documenting that wall or at least trying to consider this its estimated that there are more hours of footage of this wall than there are actual hours of the war in real life and only the images and information weve been thought treated with is rolling cereal for open Source Research is. But understand whats really going on in syria all of that media needs to be analyzed interpreted an authenticated and thats what the 2 investigators i interviewed for this piece had the wise men are doing in different ways in Different Countries on the same story. It is the most documented war in history producing millions of images and videos that shape how we see the carnage inflicted on syria the conflict that has been open season on civilians humanitarian workers and reporters. Even atrocities are open to subjective interpretation and control of information is used as a weapon where the age old photo of war is not just the byproduct but arrived at by design. When an incident occurred today immediately smartphones are switching on sometimes dozens even hundreds of videos around a single incident where are those people filmy what can we see in their images how can we make sense of all this material that otherwise seems completely chaotic when it comes to syria there is more tendency on depending on. It was integrated content videos photos because of the inaccessibility and the security situation that journalist who molest organizations and news agency face what open source. Gave information that could be verified in order to understand more incidents of human lives the nations. From a Compact Office in suburban len how the authority is building an archive of syrias revolution and subsequent well. The theory an archive is a huge database more than 2000000 videos more than 5000 sources utilizing open source tools like google earth qatif team pinpoint. Exact fights an attack using geographical landmarks a practice known as geo location location if thing corroborated with satellite imagery new documents and more than 200 different chemical weapons how does that work so weve collected 816 videos about the use of illegal initiations chemical and those were collected from 190 sources photos and videos that were published by either human attending groups that are working in syria or risk youth groups or just normal citizens that were document things the incidents and publishing that on social media and we placed it on a market like this here we can see this has been used to drop in this additional areas and it contains clothing we are able to see also like the impact sites of where this incident happened and this case it happened in. A hospital called lot on the Surgical Hospital of. The syrian archive takes the role material produced from syrias war the millions of hours of footage and tries to get to the truth behind some of the most contentious episodes in this conflict however its just one location where open source is being used to try and understand whats happening inside syria in london a group of research is easing some of the same technique for personal testimony Investigative Journalism and theyve combined it with 9 of spatial modeling to reconstruct the stories behind some of the atrocities that have been committed in syria. So imagine you find online 56 videos of an incident. All of them a shaky you dont know exactly where theyre filming from and what is being captured in the videos and weve figured out of it by building architectural models we can actually locate each one of those video sources and see the relationship between them as you can see they are wiseman is an architect by trade hes also the founding director for in the caucus section for us the architectural model is like an optical device and we can navigate from one point of view to the other and understand what it is that we see and understand also very importantly what cannot be seen in those videos. There are some places cameras cannot go. From the cockpit textures used a different kind of open source human to reconstruct and the tourists are in prison said. Thousands of syrians have been imprisoned and killed there. Im misty International Calls that an architectural instrument of torture of evidence. By tapping into the experiences into the memories of the few who escaped forensic architecture has been able to build a model of a prison that the reporter is impenetrable. Now is like a black hole there is no photographs there are no videos the only evidence that you have for what happened inside now is the memory of those detainees and they havent used the worst kinds of torture deprivation hunger and conditions that are inhumane would be extreme together with amnesty we met 5 survivors of the supply a prison we built a model of the prison starting from what was in front of them starting from the floor tiles has a little below. What i. Give that is an underground lot and this is a moment ok im going to be an issue in and measuring the floor tiles we figured out how big the room was in art off the floor tile the room the corridor or we figured out the architecture of the building and for the 1st time we have recreated the model of how this place looks like how it operates how torture was an acted there. One of the unique things they used is acoustic. New kind of a little bit about what and now find out about the prison so effectively prisoners where lead in blindfolded and they could remember the building for the sound for its acoustic correct arrestees i think they leave us a little on the side of. For a number of doors opening and closing. Footsteps in the corridor or coming in to take out those condemned to death to the place of execution. So this is a sophisticated sound software that allows you to mark the building not only as to what you had seen but to what you would hear in. April 28th seen one of the most contentious stories of the conflict the chemical weapons attack on do much. Thing you know hes going to. Produce as many narrative as this war has actors. I know just how to. Spread around. Russian news channels took the lead casting atrocity of the false flag attack staged by the theory in Civil Defense also in 9 of the white house. Philly. There are accusations that activists may have tampered with the scene of the attack for dramatic effect however internet detectives also revealed that Russian Media interviews with this boy used as evidence that the attack was staged was actually filmed at a syrian army facility in damascus in the presence of Russian Military advisers. The story with an amplified in from paul he thought of western journalism and left to fester in the darker more conspiratorial corners of the internet. With a case study in confusion the manufactured kind and open Source Research is working from a distance may approach of closer to the truth immediately after the yellow canisters hit about 20 in the room in duma images of those canisters start appearing online the next day the Syrian Military is there and the only news channels that are being brought in are russian news channels who start filming that area and claiming that the entire attack has been staged so the forensic problem was rather simple did those canisters come from the air we know that the air was exclusively controlled by the Syrian Air Force and the russians or from the ground did the rebels place it were working here like archaeologists but archaeologists that have no access to material ity only to the media and from the Media Building the closest possible proximity to the object of the canister so we could measure all its the formation that pointed to us to the fact that a canister is actually being dropped from the air because only a force of a drop could actually create such bombs at the front part of the canister and untangling all this twisted metal that we saw at the background of the images helpfully provided to us by the Russian Media who didnt know that in that mess there is actually quite useful information. Taking of that School Approach to war footing is not only healthy but necessary history has taught us that while much scope to. Directed primarily or governments with their agendas and track records of producing propaganda the work of reporter and open Source Research is most wise men could see it also comes them to critique. Theyve been questioned on their qualifications their methods and their motives think we need to be always tune to criticism of our work however there is a difference between criticism and denial and especially in the field of syria there are people whose work is more to obs for k. And in fact politically motivated attacks on the very fact and possibility of verification much. As you are trying to. Write back to protect the public and. The white house and this is part of our post truth environment and i think the answer to this need to be in the meticulous systematic way which we work in showing how it is that we arrive at our conclusions are in fact most or far analysis is showing how we know what we know if you look at the videos its mainly a methodology as long as people risk their lives to post videos online we will be there to look at what were doing is writing the history of that conflict and at some point in the future not now well be able also to call to justice and accountability those responsible then to National Courts have used for the 1st time in history the social media material is just published on on facebook in order to show wanted to feel less against or it can mean and maybe for us in syria this is a huge milestone our work is focused on making sure that this material is preserved for the next 30 years and more i. Mean interior shows lots of things in this. Because it shows the perpetrators that were responsible for these attacks and shows buildings and hospitals and schools and bakeries that were targeted. In order to force people to want to migrate thats why this is really important for the future of syria this is why we keep doing this work. And as we heard that archiving the war the revolution is about so much more than just telling thierry a story right now its about collecting the evidence upon which this conflicts history will be written ok thanks to our daniel your report on open Source Research of the shin jang story in china how does the work there compared to what weve just seen on syria the main difference is in the method in the case of shin jang research is a relied mostly on official documents as opposed to video as investigators in syria have before the reeducation camps became the global story they are now chinese officials have been putting government tenders online were talking here about potential contracts for private companies to build and stuff the camps a couple of researches adrian zens a german academic who i interviewed in stuttgart and sean john was a Chinese Student based in canada they found the documents and before long they were using google earth to actually locate photograph and provide evidence for hundreds of changing scams. In the most heavily surveilled probated of one of the most surveilled countries on earth. Most every movement is monitored whether you are a local or a journalist on assignment. The 1st thing you notice is the extreme level of Police Presence on every intersection on every block there is. Its often a multistory Police Building their security checks everywhere and if you add to that the fact that there are also surveillance cameras on every Street Corner get it out with facial Recognition Technology and then you very quickly get to feel the sense of being surveilled of being watched wherever you are. According to a report published by the Foreign Correspondents Club of china last year 9 in every 10 foreign journalists working in shin john spoke of interference from the or thirties some were detained by Police Others forced to delete data remember phones and other devices almost all the reporters 96 percent say they were visibly followed. Because then there were the fog grave dangers that face local sources in 2018 journalist james palma formerly based in china spoke about his personal experience trying to cover the should. All of my we go sources of our. Cash i dont talk to people because. I cant reach them when we look at the lists of reasons theyve been given for people to be sent to concentration camps having had contact with phone as is the single most common reason. I have certainty of one of my sources being sent to a camp with the others i dont know whether they. Just cut off contact for their own safety or whether theyre actually imprisoned i stopped trying to reach weaker sources in the middle of last year because the risk to them was much greater than any possible benefit of talking to them. There is no such thing as. Growing body of evidence suggests otherwise with reporting inside changing stunted by surveillance and intimidation news outlets have relied heavily on outside help to cover the camps. Now i cant find it. Much of the media reporting is the result of investigations done from a distance independent research is using the simplest of open source methods for instance the chinese Search Engine by do construct digital gold a trove of official documents detailing chinas mass incarceration program. Making sense of these documents requires a specific skill set for start you need to be fluent not just in mandarin but in the jargon of chinese officials you also need to know what to look for adrian zens is a german academic and hes one of the pioneers of open Source Research about the camps. In early 2018 he began annotating the documents and we publishing them online so youre one of the 1st researches to use open source methods to investigate these counts and changing what made you think you would succeed using these tools where conventional journalists had failed the big advantage of this open Source Research that you can uncover. Its to speak of systematic policy where the government itself says were doing this and every local government under us is also supposed to be doing to us and often times i was able to find this kind of document. Was this particular dog so this is the main suppose it Legal Foundation for reeducation so when the chinese say we have a step the extremist cation sent us based on the law this is the document to refer to. Another document that i found talks about the goals of transformation through education and even very blatantly says that transformation through education and chinese joey trying to cleanse us to brain from evil thoughts from the thoughts of religion thats a piece of evidence that speaks as much or more than 100. 00 newspaper articles because it basically proves that this is a systematic policy. The document that sends uncovered evidence of state policy but proving the camps had actually been built enough of them to hold hundreds of thousands of people required another open source tools satellite imagery. Thats where sean jang a Chinese Student based in bangkok came into the picture. Was. Started by searching a few keywords online and found lots of information such as government tender notices for the camps to be built these documents contain the addresses of nearly 100. 00 camps so i searched on google earth and found the satellite images. Look very different from civilian facilities for example there were barbed wire fences the watchtowers structures that youd expect in prisons i found more and more information and so published on my blog. Satellite imagery for mission collected by a researcher. Has recently undergone Major Construction documents found by mr. Psychological counseling the children of parents taking to the camps a lot of Mainstream Medias coverage has built upon work you see in adrians using government documents and hiring information to show the extent to which the Security State has grown and changed. And sean has used satellite imagery to show the compass being built almost in real time. Financial times weve also used satellite imagery to look at the location and size of the canvas weve also used research by engines and the contracts that governments are using to buy new materials for other counts and i think the really important thing about these kinds of Research Collaborations is that because the data is open the journalist can also check what the research is looking at and if needed you know challenge whether the data theyre seeing is representative of the region or how the data was chosen. Communist Party Officials not usually known for their transparency gave open Source Research is a helping hand by leaving the evidence in plain sight now beijing is in damage limitation mode trying to delete documents before investigators in stuttgart bank and elsewhere in repose. And online game of cat and mouse over one of the worlds biggest stories. The set of documents that disappeared basically described the details of the camps the security features watched how big they are and what they cost a lot of that disappeared and so on we were a few versions starting to archive websites and spent almost entire days archiving hundreds of links but i think in some sense they put it too late we already had the information. By staying one step ahead of beijing open Source Research on earth the evidence about the camps that journalists on the ground and she could not. But going up against a superpower magnifying scrutiny of an already notorious human rights record comes with consequences. All of them also in this case if you are chinese citizen. Actually and you know since i started my research i felt a lot of pressure from the Chinese Government for example theyve contacted my family in china so in the near future. I think ill avoid going back home despite all this i think doing this work is worth it because there are so many we give people the time theyve lost contact with their families. At least my research can raise awareness of this problem and help pressure the Chinese Government into finding a peaceful solution for the country they feel. And even if the chinese authorities are successful in shutting down an individual like sean jang there are more open Source Researchers like him out there and thats beijings challenge on this story as it is for the Assad Government in damascus its not the reporters doing this kind of work its the technology that makes this kind of work possible and thats a much more difficult if not impossible thing to suppress youve been watching a special edition of our program on open source journalism well see you next time here at the listening post. Millions of workers a big in slaved in the bridge killings of india one i want to waste explores how Satellite Technology is now helping to set them free. 0. Violence is power. Tools is the political wildcard the town timidly shapes world order the structure that is defended at all cost. The edge with the support of the people fall through the crushing of their will. People in power exposes the use and abuse of power around the world. On aljazeera. We understand the difference is in similarities of cultures across the wound sentimental value taking out. The names and Current Affairs that matter to lean. Down to 0. 0. The is the the end. Aljazeera. Hello im fully back people this is the news hour live from our Global Headquarters in doha coming up in the next 60 minutes iraqs want to votes to expel foreign troops after a call from the Prime Minister to act over the u. S. Assassination of costs and silly money at the same time the leader of lebanons hezbollah warns the u. S. Military across the middle east will pay the price and in iran hundreds of thousands fill the streets to mourn as some of manis body is brought home also this hour indonesias sinking capital massive flooding increases worries joe concha could become the 1st big city submerged by Climate Change and the people seem to hold a sport its over and out for the reigning super bowl champions of the new England Patriots lose in the playoffs. Thank you for joining as the u. S. Assassination of Senior Iranian command simpson a money is causing major reverberations. Crossed the region with every passing hour Iraqs Parliament has just passed a resolution telling the government to expel foreign troops early a rock scared take a Prime Minister action from parliaments well no youd use the logic what no foreign troops are to do military actions in iraq i saw has been defeated and now the government of iraq must make a timetable to schedule the withdrawal of foreign troops