My name is Malachy Browne.

I'm a senior producer on the Visual Investigations team

here at the 'Times.'

Thanks for tuning in and sending questions in advance.

We've got dozens of questions from viewers and readers

of the 'Times,' which we're going to go through.

First of all, we're going to introduce the team."

"I'm Haley Willis."

"Hey.

I'm Evan Hill.

I'm a visual journalist on the team."

"I'm Barbara Marcolini."

"Christoph Koettl."

"And Christiaan Triebert."

"And one of the first questions that we got

is what is open-source investigation?

So Christiaan, have a go."

"Yeah, so basically, open-source investigation

is it's reporting, but using any kind

of openly-available source.

So think of a Facebook post, or a tweet, a YouTube video,

or just a database-- anything you can find online, openly,

and for free.

So this is the opposite of closed source.

Like if a source tells me something or tells

my colleague something, you will

need to believe that source.

But the strength of open-source reporting

is that anyone with an internet connection

and a laptop can access that same source

and can take the same steps for verification.

So that's what we do here--

a lot of open-source investigation."

"And a lot of the process, if there is an event

that we're investigating, it involves, as Christiaan said,

collecting as much evidence as we possibly can,

you know, from the open web.

There's so much documentary visual evidence out there now

that allows us to get to the truth of an event

to break it down and really analyze it moment by moment.

And so that could be video satellite imagery,

a timestamp from a tweet, but it also

involves turning those open sources who

are witnesses into primary sources,

and finding secure ways to get in touch with them,

and find out more about what they saw,

very often get the raw imagery as we did in Syria.

Do you want to talk about that a little bit?"

"Yeah, I think that was an interesting one

because that combined sort of traditional reporting

methods with the open-source stuff

that I've been learning as a new member of the team.

But for that story for Syria, we

needed to get a wealth of material."

"Do you want to explain what the series was about just

for a second?"

"Yeah, so it was a series of stories about Russian bombing

of hospitals in Syria and other civilian targets that

came out over the course of last year.

And we needed to get a bunch of material

from the ground-- videos and photos

from Syrian journalists.

And so that was basically who we

can find through WhatsApp networks,

through activist networks, people

we can reach out to and expand our sources on the ground

speaking in Arabic a lot of the time."

"And the key was using the material

to identify the minute that a strike happened."

"Yeah, and that included metadata analysis, so

going into the actual files, explaining

to the sources on the ground the best way

to send the files to us so that we can extract

the information from the file to confirm,

oh, yes, we heard the airstrike occurred

at 5:00 PM.

We'll the file tells us, yes, it did occur at 5:00 PM."

"And by establishing the very minute of those attacks,

then we obtained access to thousands

of intercepted recordings of Russian pilots

carrying out their missions.

And so by understanding the time that something happened

on the ground, we could then examine

what was going on in the skies at that time, and then,

you know, basically apportion blame

to specific pilots for attacks on hospitals, on an IDP camp,

a busy commercial street in Syria.

So the evidence that witnesses are collecting

and that we're managing to verify through our processes

here can be really valuable to the journalism.

How did you get your start in OSINT?

OSINT is Open-Source Intelligence.

It's a term that lots of people

use to describe this work.

We call it visual investigations

or open-source investigations.

Choose your term, but how did you get your start

in it, Barbara?"

"I actually started working at Storyful.

Storyful is an agency that verifies

content on social media.

So that's how I started, just working at this agency

and learning from their experience

there, which by the way, Malachy

used to work for them."

"I came from Storyful too.

That was where I got my start too.

Haley?"

"I got my start working with a student collective

actually at the University of California, Berkeley

at our Human Rights Center.

We had a lab that did this kind of work

for human rights legal cases and for advocacy groups.

We had a partnership with Amnesty International

and their Digital Verification Corps.

So that's kind of how I started this work is using

the same open-source techniques

that everyone's been talking about,

and we applied that to kind of human rights issues."

"Christoph?"

"I got my start at Amnesty International in 2007,

so quite a while ago.

And back then, I think when I started at Amnesty,

it's the first time that a human rights group started

using satellite imagery.

So that was my-- well, that is my speciality.

We did a lot of work around satellite imagery

for a few years, and then around 2011,

it became just extremely important with the Arab

Spring to verify YouTube videos, photos,

and similar materials.

So we had to teach ourselves, basically, how to verify that

and how to integrate that into human rights reporting."

"Yourself?"

"So I was an aspiring journalist as a student,

so I tried to do photo reports in Iraq, and Syria,

and Ukraine, but I felt like I'm not

the best writer there is in the world

and I'm also not the best photographer.

So I felt like what am I doing?

What am I contributing to what is already out there, right?

Anyone with an internet connection

can find stories that are better

written, have better photos.

And I was intrigued by a guy called Eliot Higgins, who

started Bellingcat, an open-source investigation

group.

And I just started tweeting.

Literally on Twitter, I started tweeting out

my findings because in Iraq, I saw airstrikes

in the distance, but I didn't know much about it

except for I could say, well, an airstrike happened.

But by using that same kind of satellite imagery Christoph

was talking about, I could figure out

when did the airstrike or what did it

target, who was in control of the village.

And I started tweeting out those findings and got

involved in 2015-- so wow, five years ago--

with this group called Bellingcat.

And I've been doing that ever since before I joined

the 'Times' last year."

"A great question to get started on the practices

from Natalie in Toronto and Sena in Tehran--

how do you verify a video?

There's lots of different ways you can verify video,

but maybe we'll cut to a show and tell.

We have one from recently when the Ukrainian airliner

crashed down outside Iran.

Iran was denying that it was shot down.

There were reports at the time that it was allegedly

due to technical malfunction.

And over the course of a few days,

we had started mapping out the evidence related

to the downing of that airliner.

It killed over 170 people on board.

Maybe we'll just walk through that.

You've got a slide show that I'll cut to here.

Sorry, not that one.

It's on Keynote.

Bear with me for a second.

Yeah, there we go."

"Right, so let's just start with it right?"

"Yeah."

"So PS752, it basically started for us

with a Slack message from a colleague,

who was like, whoa, a plane has been crashed in Iran.

And we were all on high alert.

It was the evening here in New York.

Basically, the whole team was still in the office

because Iran had just launched those ballistic missiles

onto military targets in Iraq.

So we were all on high alert.

And then this message comes in and we're like,

O.K., whoa, let's investigate it.

So one of the first things we're doing with this

is open-source reporting.

We explained it in a lot of words,

but it's an actual example.

This is a plane crash.

Now, any commercial airliner nowadays is being tracked.

And anyone with an internet connection

can track those flights through websites

like Flightradar24, RadarBox24.

And here, we see the actual flight path

of the plane that allegedly crashed near Tehran.

And we can see how it's here on the--

it's starting to take off.

It's departing the International Airport

near Tehran, the capital of Iran.

And we can see how it flies away.

And we can also see the flight path is not that long.

It basically stops right here.

Now, the great thing is that we can also

download this flight path for free

and put it in a program that's called Google Earth.

And Google Earth is just basically

Google Maps on steroids.

It's, as you can see here, this is the same flight path

that we just saw on the website.

It's now on Google Earth and you can see it's also in 3D.

The height is also visible.

And we can see exactly where the last transponder sign

of that flight was spotted.

That's the first start for us, just

to have basic information about the incident

and have a sense of time and space.

Now, it started to get morning already in Iran.

And before people started uploading photos

from the crash site, people saw that plane going down.

And you can see it here.

There are different videos.

Here, we see the plane, but we couldn't verify those videos

at first.

But what we did is we matched them up with this explosion

to be sure, hey, that they are showing the same incident.

So these videos seem to be from the same plane crash,

so it's a first step.

We hadn't verified the location of this,

but the crash sites were--

sorry-- anyone nowadays has--

usually, a lot of people have a mobile phone, right?

And Tehran is a massive city.

So if something like this happened what you just

saw in those videos is that people start filming

something when it happens.

I mean, think of yourself.

Imagine something big is happening.

And here, we can see a video from the actual crash site

when the morning has broken already.

And one method we use, usually as a first step for verifying

a video to come back to the question,

is a process we call geolocation.

And geolocation is determining where a photo or a video