Kind: captions
Language: en
[Music]
hey guys
and welcome back to this series on how
to do open source investigations from
home
i'm ben this is part six and let's get
started
in this video we're going to answer the
question of when using publicly
available information
so for example when was this photo taken
where we can see this village fire
and when was this video taken where we
can see this large smoke plume coming
out in the background
we're going to do that using three
simple tools
the first one which is one of my
favorites is google earth
and we're going to see just exactly what
google earth can do
we're going to use google maps which we
looked at in a video before
and we're going to use another platform
called sentinelhub which also provides
satellite
imagery and we're going to use these
three together
and fuse them together to get the
smallest window of time
so we can start to assess exactly when
the damaged occurred
or narrow it down within the space of a
few days so that we can not only take
when the date was when they were
uploaded or when we received these
images but rather we can actually
understand
just by using satellite imagery to
verify
visually when these things might have
occurred and when they might have been
filmed
or when the photo was taken
first up we're going to use google earth
google earth is one of the most powerful
tools you can use
in open source research for a number of
reasons of course it's a
satellite platform it's a way to view
different satellite images
to leave pins on a map and to
identify different locations
specifically for geolocation
and having a look at other data on a map
as well one of the benefits about google
earth in comparison to google maps
is the fact that we can slide back in
time
we're currently looking at uluru which
is also called asrock and it's in the
middle of australia
and we have a village near ezrock which
we can have a look at
if we scroll back in time and see how it
looked quite a number of years ago
what i've done is i've clicked the
little wheel the little time wheel
up in the top of google earth and we can
use this slider
to slide back in time and view buildings
as they were in the past and we can view
imagery from as early as 2005
of just this village of course other
areas we can view much earlier
and other specific areas or more updated
areas
we'll have more imagery available here
you'll notice that when i skip through
here sometimes it'll skip through in two
years
and sometimes it'll skip through in the
matter of days or months or
weeks as well so it depends on when the
imagery is actually updated as well what
you'll also notice
is that when i scroll back in time
shadows change
and views change and this is because a
satellite image is always taken at a
different
angle so for example we can see the
shadows in the side of the rock here
on air's rock but if we scroll back in
time
we can see other views where there may
have been more shadows
where the view may have been more clear
and as we go back in time we can see
various imageries and it also goes to
show
different angles another way to view
this is to take a look at one of my
favorite cities in the world khatum
in sudan khartoum has some amazing
architecture
but if we look at the marketplace we can
notice some of the shadows that we can
see here
when we scroll back in time we can get a
good idea of how
some of these buildings look on each
side
notice these buildings in the middle
we can see this side of the building
and we can see other sides as well this
just goes to show the different angles
that satellites take images at this is
really important to remember for
not only looking back in time but also
having a look at the sides of buildings
if we're trying to geolocate things
if we're trying to look for a sign if we
may have seen a building that's been
destroyed or new development or things
like that
we can simply do that just by having a
look at the alternative side
of a building in one of the other videos
you might remember that when we were
sent
this image we were told it was in
nigeria and that after doing an image of
earth search we found
articles that mentioned that it was
actually in myanmar
in one of the other videos we also went
through geolocation and we actually
geolocated this village
but we'll do that quickly now just by
having a look at the emraku township
so we had this place and going through
the geolocation quickly we had these
mountains
at the right at the back here and we had
this straight road as well
so if we identify our mountains that we
can see on google maps
and we follow the straight road up
we should be able to identify our
village
about here and just again before
we went through and actually narrowed
down our village
so one of the ways is by identifying
small patterns in the photo
that represent the same patterns on a
satellite image
for example we can see this brown
tinted building here this blue one and
this red one
we can also see those here so we know
that this village
was the same as the one in this photo as
well
so let's take this location and i'm
going to copy these coordinates
down in the bottom of the screen here
what i'll do is i'll just click on them
and double click there and i'm going to
copy those
and take them over to my google earth
and drop them in and this will take me
straight to that location
where we just geolocated that photo and
here we are we can see that image there
so let's click our wheel which is at the
top of google earth
to view new satellite imagery so what
have we got
well we've got something from the 14th
of october 2019
but remember in one of the past episodes
when we went through and found this
photo
during an image of our search we found
that actually the photo was taken in may
2020 we don't have that satellite
imagery available to us
the most recent satellite imagery we
have for this town
is in 2019. this is where we can use
that third tool that i mentioned
in this video which is sentinel hub
sentinel hub has very regular imagery
and you'll notice that as you click on
the dates but what you'll also notice is
is that when you zoom in on sentinel hub
it's not as clear
especially not as clear as google earth
let's take a look
at our location in sentinel hub and see
what we can see
so here we are zoomed in as far as we
can be
on the image of sentinel hub over
the village that we geolocated this
photo of
we can't zoom in any further than we
actually can
on sentinel hub here but we can
definitely start to have a look and see
if there are any changes
around that may 20 date that we saw in
the news articles
just to verify the time so what i'm
going to do
is i'm going to go forward to
may 2020 now i'm on the third of may
you'll notice that sometimes there's a
little bit of cloud cover
and we can also see that represented up
here in sentinel hub
as well so let's keep going forward and
see if we can get a day
when there's less cloud cover okay so
there's no change on may 8
may 13 may 18 there appears to be change
between may 13 and may 18. one of the
reasons why sentinel hub is so useful
is because we have this satellite
banding over here which essentially is a
combination
of different colors in the satellite
image so i'm going to use the
infrared banding of bands eight four and
three
all i have to do is click on that and
it'll bring my satellite image up with
that
now let's use that and scroll forward in
time again we can see that there's been
evident change
between the 18th and the 13th of may
if we want a comparison side by side a
simple way that i like to do
is just make a quick screenshot so we
can double verify that
so here we have an image from the 13th
of may
on the left and an image of the 18th of
may on the right
we can see clear change between the two
dates specifically we can see this
darker patch
that is down here where buildings have
either been burnt
or destroyed something that i often like
to do
is scroll forward in time and backwards
in time just to rule out any negatives
and we could see the change indicated
between the 13th
and 18th on the right here if we scroll
further in time which i've done
we can identify that the burnt area has
actually changed
and that grass or greenery is starting
to grow
back through that area so what we can
say for sure
is that that photo was taken around that
time
and we verified a little bit more in
that imagery
by actually having a look at perhaps the
size and scale
of destruction that happen in that
village around that time
and this also adds to the visuals of the
news article that we looked at before
so repeating this for our next case
study that we're looking at which was in
syria
and we remember from looking at the
youtube video when we actually
geolocated this video
that it was in eastern aleppo at the
thermal power plant
and that was the thermal power plant
that we identified when we made that
panorama that we can actually see in the
background there
with the the smokestacks or the the
small sort of
cylindrical towers right next to where
that smoke was coming out of
so if we go to that power station now so
here i am at the
eastern aleppo thermal power plant that
we identified as
the location that was burning in the
background
and already we can see that these things
have been destroyed
we knew those were the things or the the
uh
tanks that were destroyed because they
were just
on the left of this image here that we
can see
just behind the walkie-talkie we can get
a clearer version of that
uh over here and so that was just on the
left of these five pylons that we can
see here
so the first thing we can do is just
scrolling back in time
we knew that the video was uploaded in
so i'm already going to scroll back to
and just see when
these containers weren't destroyed
so already we can see between the
21st of june and december 11
we have in december 11 they weren't
destroyed and in 2016
june 21 they were destroyed so that's
our window of time that we have in
google earth
now we can replicate this same
area in sentinel hub and see if we can
identify or
narrow down that time there so what i'm
going to do is
click on view in google maps this will
bring up my location in google maps
i'm just going to click on this with a
slow click
and again i'm going to get my
coordinates i'm going to
copy and paste these ones and i'm going
to put them into sentinel hub over here
okay so we're looking at eastern aleppo
thermal power plant
in syria the one that we were just
looking at
on google earth over here so first of
all
on google earth we knew that between
june 2016
and december 2015 was the window period
when these were destroyed
so let's go back to 2016. specifically
we want to go to june okay
so i want to go through all of the dates
in that window of time to see when it
may have been destroyed
so i'm going to start doing that now
so what we've done here is we've gone
back in time
and we found a date on february 16
2016 and what we can see is a very large
smoke plume coming out of those
containers there
on that exact date now if we go to the
day before
we can see okay it's very cloudy and
then 17th of january
so 17th of january 2016 these containers
were not destroyed
but on february 16 2016
they were on fire or they were very much
smoking
and on the 7th of march they were
destroyed
this smoke plume is fairly significant
just like the one in this video that we
have here
on the video on the youtube channel the
date that it was uploaded
was march 18 2016.
so we can say that after we've
geolocated that
that this smoke plume that was evident
on february
16 was the smoke plume that we're seeing
in the back there
now it could have been burning for one
or two days
it's likely that this may have been on
the same day
we can definitely say that we can narrow
down that window of time
just using some of that visual evidence
that we found right here
over the past few minutes just using
freely available
information that you don't need to pay
for you don't need a premium account
for you can use it for free and identify
these sorts of things just using that
freely available information
i hope you enjoyed this session if you
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[Music]
you