Jeffrey Lewis: The Work of an Open Source Intelligence Researcher: Keeping Goverments Accountable - MBM #27

Jeffrey Lewis is a Professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and one of the most influential people in the Open Source Intelligence Community. He is also the host of the "Arms Control Wonk" podcast.--- Episode Sponsor: Element84Dan Pilone’s appearance on the podcast---About Jeffrey:- Twitter- LinkedInShownotes:Dino BrugioniSeeing the Secrets Growing the LeadersHawkEye 360 GPS InterferenceYandex changing the borders on mapsJeffrey’s Tweet announcing the invasion of Ukraine an hour before it happenedJeffrey’s podcast: Arms Control WonkBooks & Podcast Recommendations:The Mapmakers by John Noble WilfordThe Essentials of SAR: A Conceptual View of Synthetic Aperture Radar and Its Remarkable Capabilities by Thomas AgerBBC Witness HistoryTimestamps:00:00 Introduction 02:42 Conversation begins: Jeffrey is an Open Spy 05:05 The appeal of doing Intelligence Analysis in Public 09:36 Jeffrey's OSINT early days: the War in Irak 16:49 An example of 'bad OSINT' 20:49 The Tricky Nature of Confirmation Bias 25:05 How an OSINT Story Starts 28:10 Being Right, or at least Wrong for the Right Reasons 30:30 Reputation in reporting, especially in the Open 35:55 Monitoring for news 39:26 Machine Learning in OSINT 41:37 The Difficult Yet Informative Nature of Synthetic Aperture Radar 47:58 Partnering with Satellite Image Providers 59:22 Satellite images yes, but they're only 1 component 01:06:40 The use of Open Satellite Imagery Data 01:17:55 Teaching OSINT 01:25:07 The ever faster increase in our access to Data 01:29:40 Filtering out the crap 01:33:20 Knowing who to trust: The Ukraine use-case 01:37:43 How Jeffrey's team called out the Russian Invasion 1h before it happened 01:43:21 The power of Companies 01:48:52 Funding & How to Stay Independent 01:52:51 Advocacy 01:59:00 The tools used for OSINT 02:07:48 The Surprising Impact of Ukraine on the Public's View of Nuclear Dissuasion 02:10:54 Nuclear weapons are not fun, like really not 02:14:18 Working with a Community 02:17:37 Jeffrey's podcast: Arms Control Wonk 02:22:51 Books & Podcast RecommendationsFeel free to reach out! - Website- My Twitter- Podcast Twitter- Previous Newsletter: Why I want to do more interviews in person- Sponsor the Podcast