Multitudes Journal nº89, december 2022 – Open source counter-investigations, edited by Jacopo Rasmi, Allan Deneuville and Gala Hernández López

In 2014, the investigative media Bellingcat manages to prove that the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 7 in Ukraine was the responsibility of the Russian Federation. It worked for this mainly on open access digital data. In 2019, the research agency Forensic Architecture publishes the results of an investigation both on the ground and remotely that demonstrates herbicide-based chemical attacks on Gaza by Israel. In 2022, Elon Musk, one of the richest men on the planet, offers $5,000 to stop having his private jet rides tracked by a Twitter account that disseminates public aeronautical information. Each of these examples belongs to the field of civil investigative practices that appropriate open access information according to intelligence strategies born in the police and state domain. These investigators have developed OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) methods that take advantage of the proliferation of multimedia data made publicly accessible by the web of platforms, leaks and social networks. They elucidate geopolitical and criminal cases beyond the officially established narratives. These bottom-up and networked investigations deploy powerful capacities for critical understanding of what is happening near and far.