OPEN SOURCE IT ALL:

Peden, who goes by "Intel Crab" on Twitter, scours the internet for satellite images, flight trajectories and TikTok videos. He then shares his findings with his 255,000 followers, posting analyses of troop movements or the exact coordinates of a missile attack.

Kyle Glen also has two lives. During the day, the Welshman works in the field of medical research. In the evening, he also conducts "open source intelligence," OSINT for short. "Open source" because the sources the Twitter sleuths work with are all publicly accessible.

The core piece of this detective work is geolocation, because it's so simple and effective. Whenever they get a hold of a video or image of a conflict, OSINT hobbyists comb through the material for landmarks and particularities with which to determine the exact location of the shown event. This allows them to verify the accuracy of the material or to debunk false reports.

Back in 2014, the OSINT network Bellingcat used only freely accessible sources such as satellite and cellphone images to prove that the passenger plane MH17 was shot down by a Russian anti-aircraft unit.

Since then, the community has grown even more resourceful. At the start of the war in late February, OSINT fans tracked the movements of Russian military convoys using videos from Tiktok. Others signed up on dating portals like Tinder to catfish members of the Russian military near the border in Belgorod, using false personal profiles to deceive them into revealing information.

"OSINT has really taken off in the last six months," says Glen, who notes that after eight years of never being asked for interviews by the mainstream press, it's now happening every day.

Governments and intelligence agencies also appreciate the value of this new type of swarm intelligence. Through a Ukrainian government app called Diia, citizens can now upload geotagged images and videos of Russian troop movements. "We receive tens of thousands of messages a day," Ukrainian Digital Transformation Minister Mikhailo Fedorov recently told The Washington Post. "They are very, very useful."

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