Latest / Show & Tell from Indicator / How an OSINT Investigator Documented the Israeli Army’s Destruction of Southern Lebanon
Transcript
- Alexios Mantzarlis: Hi everyone, welcome to Show and Tell, the podcast from Indicator that takes you inside digital investigations by leading journalists, OSINT investigators, analysts and researchers. My name is Alexis Matsarlis. Craig Silverman: And I'm Craig Silverman. We started Indicator to give professionals and engaged citizens a resource for investigating and understanding digital deception. And if you're not familiar with us, we publish reporting, in-depth investigations, practical tutorials, as well as a monthly workshop. And we built a tool called OSINT Navigator that you can check out in the show notes. Alexios Mantzarlis: You should 100 % sign up to our free newsletter using the link in the show notes or by going to Indicator.media. You can also hit subscribe wherever you are listening or watching to us so you don't miss any future episodes of Show & Tell. Craig Silverman: Yeah, and look, we want to welcome our first and our founding sponsor, Lead Stories. Lead Stories is a global fact-checking organization. They've got journalists working in a dozen languages around the world. Their slogan is, just because it's trending doesn't mean it's true. Lead Stories combines old-fashioned journalism skills with technology to find and debunk false claims on social media. For Lead Stories, fact-checking is about adding information, not censorship. Alexios Mantzarlis: Yes. Craig Silverman: If you want to check them out, you can go to leadstories.com. Thanks again to the folks at Lead Stories for signing on as our founding sponsor for Show and Tell. And for this episode, we're super excited. ⁓ We have Barbara Marcolini, a visual investigator with Amnesty International's evidence lab. ⁓ And before joining Amnesty, Barbara was a founding member of the vaunted visual investigations team. ⁓ at the New York Times where she won five news and documentary Emmy awards and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Barbara also has an interesting background of how she got into kind of the world of visual investigations and OSEN. Barbara, it's great to have you here. Welcome to Show and Tell. Barbara Marcolini: Thank you for having me. Alexios Mantzarlis: Yay! Craig Silverman: Yes, awesome. And look, you're joining us from Brazil, which is wonderful. ⁓ And we're going to talk about a really interesting, fascinating investigation that you did with your colleagues at Amnesty. But as I mentioned, you had sort of an interesting path into the world of visual ⁓ investigations and journalism and OSINT. I noticed kind of on your resume that you worked at Storifil, which was a company that was kind of a pioneering effort and practitioner of visual verification ⁓ ⁓ know became pretty important in the early days of OSIN and digital verification work. So I'm curious, how did you end up working there and how did you get interested in and started doing this type of work? Barbara Marcolini: So that's actually a great question, Craig. As you said, I'm originally from Brazil. I was just a regular reporter working at a newspaper here in Rio ⁓ where I'm based. ⁓ ⁓ received a scholarship to do a master's degree in New York. So I was one fall afternoon at school ⁓ the... ⁓ then news editor for Storyful, Mandy Jenkins, was going to my school to talk about the work they were doing at Storyful. And I was like, well, this is interesting. I went and I listened to her talk and I was just fascinated by the kind of work they were doing. This was back in 2015. That was before misinformation and AI and all of this. And she was just showing how Their team was verifying videos and other content from social media, doing geolocation, chronolocation. And after her talk, I just went up to her and I asked, do you take any interns? I really want to learn what you're doing. I really want to do this. She gave me her card, told me to send her an email, and eventually we went out for coffee. And after the coffee, she said, well, listen, I actually don't have an internship program, but I'm going to create one for you. And that's basically how I ended up at Storyful. And I worked there first as an intern while also doing my master's. And then eventually, I went to the New York Times, where the Vision Investigations team hadn't ⁓ been created yet. So Maliki Brown, who was the founder of the Vision Investigations team, had You know, I think he had been less than a year working at the Times and he was looking for people with some sort of like that sort of skills to to yeah, to do something that eventually would become a visual investigation. So actually, I didn't know that what I was doing was called OSINT until I entered the Times. Like, it's like, ⁓ actually, OSINT. OK, so this is what I do. ⁓ Yeah, and that's how I ended up in this area, in this field of work. Craig Silverman: That's so I had no idea that Mandy Jenkins helped you kind of bring you into this. So we should say the late great Mandy Jenkins, who unfortunately passed away a few years ago, was somebody who was very early kind of in this space as well. I think she and I did a workshop at ONA in like 2012 or something like that together. Alexia, I thought I saw a flicker of recognition in your eyes too when she mentioned Mandy's name. Did you ever interact with her? Alexios Mantzarlis: Yeah, yeah, I mean, it was impossible to be in this space and not kind of follow Mandy. it was warm and sad memory, but of course, built a lot of stuff that kind of always benefit from. Also just story-fold, I kind of graduated a bunch of wonderful, incredible journalists, investigators, et cetera. So shout out to Mark Little and Ko and Anuha, et came out of there. Craig Silverman: Yes, lots of great folks pass through the story full doors. It's obviously still active. It's now owned by News Corp ⁓ and still out there doing verification work for clients and that kind of thing. There's lots of different ways that people get into this. ⁓ And also, I think for who's kind of wondering how you crack in, whether you're in journalism school or not, the reality is, you know, ⁓ reaching out to somebody and hey, Can I learn more? Can I talk to you? Do you take people? I think all three of us do teaching and workshops and things like that. And most people don't ask, right? And Barbara, you asked and look what it ended up for you. Barbara Marcolini: Yeah, I'm actually super grateful for, Mandy's. She was just such an amazing human being, not as just as a professional, ⁓ ⁓ a super strong like leader. ⁓ And yeah, I think I was pretty shy, I guess I was just so fascinated by that work that ⁓ I just like. managed to cross that boundary and go up and talk to her. And she was so kind, ⁓ and warm and And yeah, I think ⁓ it is common people will ⁓ like maybe reach to you ⁓ and, ask how did you get into this field of work? And I know nowadays it's much harder than at the time, like. there weren't so many people doing this and it didn't require that many skills nowadays. I see people's like resumes and I'm scared. I'm like, oh man, I'm like, I'm falling behind. Alexios Mantzarlis: I feel the same way about trust and safety. think people like the problem of new fields is that then they become fields and there's like skills. so like maintaining that openness that actually makes for a rich diversity of backgrounds and kind of new points of view, but also kind of formalizing maybe some of the methodologies. So it's a little bit of a mixed feeling when your field becomes a quote unquote real field. Craig Silverman: Yes, and the sort of industrialization of OSIN as an industry and becoming a much bigger thing is kind of an interesting thing I think we've all been living through ⁓ now. Some of us like you Barbara for a decade or more. ⁓ so let's, one of the things obviously that we are focused on is really looking at how investigations get done and the approaches that people use. And so we've got an investigation that we're going to kind of go through with you that we're excited to talk about. ⁓ And one of the things that I think was really interesting about this investigation is it mixes some of the kind of social media sleuthing and searching with video verification, geolocation work, satellite imagery analysis, but also one of the things that Amnesty does is on the ground sourcing. Amnesty is often finding people, talking to people, and mixing that with the kind of ⁓ digital investigative work. And so the investigation that we're going to look at today which of course we'll put in the show notes. Everybody, it's called Israel's Extensive Destruction of Southern Lebanon. It was published last summer as the war in Gaza had expanded to include Israeli military operations in Lebanon. ⁓ And, know, Barbara, I recently sort of met you in person for the first time at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. And one of the things during your workshop that you kind of walk through, which I think is a good way to start for anyone who's not super familiar with, why Amnesty does investigations is that know, amnesty is very focused on documenting evidence of violations of human rights, international law. ⁓ And so, with that as kind of a starting point and sort of shaping, but also deciding, suppose, you know, which investigations you undertake or not, could you talk a little bit about, that approach, amnesty's approach in this case, what led you to look into this ⁓ particular topic and and what were you looking for evidence of as you kind of started gathering material? Barbara Marcolini: Sure, just two things. before we start, like lots of people, when I say that I'm working at Amnesty, they say, ⁓ so you left journalism. And I say, well, the outlet that is publishing my investigations is not a news organization anymore, but I feel like the work is pretty much the same, right? The kind of work that we are doing, we are doing investigations that are pretty much the same. The only difference is what you, just said, it is the framing. So while before I was looking for what's the story, Alexios Mantzarlis: Hmph. Barbara Marcolini: Now I'm looking for what is the violation? What are the violations that are happening there that we must report and ⁓ bring to light? So ⁓ this investigation into Lebanon, and I should just another ⁓ parenthesis, we are currently working on a follow up to that investigation. So it is something that It continues happening in southern Lebanon and we are trying to work on something that just follows on what is happening right now in 2026. But we are having a hard time accessing satellite imagery because as lots of ozone people know, ⁓ most of the satellite imagery providers are effectively blocking ⁓ Craig Silverman: ⁓ Barbara Marcolini: journalists and activists access to ⁓ high resolution satellite imagery, which is essential for us to monitor what is happening on the ground. parenthesis is over. ⁓ Craig Silverman: And just a quick note on that, mean, how widespread is your experience of the blocking out of it? Because I have heard it referred to in different ways of like generalized as the Middle East, or talking about specific countries. I mean, we're talking about Southern Lebanon right now. We're not talking about Gaza. We're not talking about, know, Strait of Hormuz or what have you. Like, what's your experience for you guys? Are you just like lacking visibility all across the broader region? Or what is the reality now? Barbara Marcolini: Yeah, we basically just have like a blackout. don't, we're... I cannot say about other countries because I'm personally not involved in investigating other countries, but I know there is a blackout in Iran. I know there is a blackout in Lebanon and I'm pretty sure it's a blackout throughout the region. So it is really hard for us to access imagery that is high. We still have access to lower resolution imagery, which tells us, okay, something is happening here. can measure there is. there is change ⁓ in southern Lebanon, but we cannot see in detail what is happening. And this is happening throughout the region. it really is essentially a blackout. We had experienced ⁓ similar. ⁓ similar limitations in the past, but we've never seen this level of blackout that it's just indefinite because before maybe we wouldn't have. No, please go ahead. Alexios Mantzarlis: And remind me, like this is, sorry, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. would like remind me it's like a US government pressure on the commercial providers not to share the stuff. that, uh, okay. Barbara Marcolini: Correct. Yeah, because the US government is the main ⁓ client of these satellite imagery providers. And so they ⁓ force them, they pressure them not to share ⁓ imagery with others, which we sort of, it could be understandable if you had boots on the ground. So if you had American troops on the ground. And they would argue that this could threaten them in some way. But when we're talking about southern Lebanon, we don't have US troops on the ground. So why are you blocking ⁓ imagery for that region of the world? There is really no justification. But this is what we are facing right now. Craig Silverman: Yeah. So let's rewind to kind of, roughly about a year ago, ⁓ we have this challenge. ⁓ What sort of started, looking into what ended up becoming this investigation? Barbara Marcolini: Yeah, actually this investigation ⁓ is, I wouldn't say it's a follow-up, but it is also, it was born out of a previous investigation that we did back in 2023 and 2024 in Gaza. So my colleague, Mike F. Harfur, who's the remote sensing analyst at the evidence lab at Amnesty, started noticing just a different kind of destruction in Gaza that and she said I remember her quote perfectly she's like I've covered the wars in Iraq and Syria, and I've never seen this level of destruction. And that, as a journalist, really struck me. So I went to her and I was like, what is it that you're seeing? And she mentioned to me that she was seeing, especially in neighborhoods and villages near the border between Gaza and Israel, she was seeing this general destruction, these like, large swaths of destruction that didn't look like were created by airstrikes. So it was massive destruction that didn't seem ⁓ caused by an airstrike. And she gave me the coordinates of those locations, of those areas. And I went and looked into what was happening on the ground. What were what could be causing that destruction in Gaza. And I started finding these videos of Israeli soldiers just blowing up buildings, just blowing up sometimes like entire ⁓ blocks, residential blocks. They would be filming themselves and laughing. And I'm sure most of you have already seen those videos and they're like lighting a cigarette and then there's an explosion behind them. And it was something that really caught our attention. We were like, okay, something must be happening here. This must not be legal. And of course we found that you know, just checking with legal experts at amnesty. We wanted to, as I said, we were looking for the violation. So ⁓ we understood that within international humanitarian law, there is the concept of ⁓ imperative military necessity. What that means, that means that If you are on the ground, let's say you're a soldier and you are on the ground in Gaza and there's someone shooting at you from a building, from a civilian building, international law, IHL, allows you, says that you may destroy that building in order to protect yourself. So that would mean it's an imperative military necessity. It is necessary to protect your life. to destroy that building. ⁓ But what we were seeing in those videos is that these areas were completely empty. There were no residents or potentially fighters in there. ⁓ The soldiers were able to go inside these buildings, manually place these explosives inside the buildings, and then go out and from a safe distance blow them up. And in other videos, we would see them destroying civilian structures using bulldozers and excavators. And again, if there was an imminent threat to your life, you wouldn't get that close to a building so that you can destroy it with an excavator or with a bulldozer. So we published this ⁓ first investigation into this extensive destruction in Gaza back in 2024. And then just after we published or as we published, I started seeing the same pattern, the same sorts of videos coming from Southern Lebanon, from soldiers who are based in Southern Lebanon. And so again, Micah and I joined forces, she started looking at a satellite imagery, satellite imagery from, you know, that area in Southern Lebanon, where I was seeing I was geolocating some of the footage. And we were seeing that they were doing pretty much the same. It was the same tactic that they were doing there, but in a much wider area. So they were doing this throughout southern Lebanon. I forgot what your first question was. Craig Silverman: Just, yeah, I mean, look, just the sort of how this started. And so it sounds like, obviously, you had seen a pattern in Gaza, and then the same pattern starts to emerge in Southern Lebanon. And that seems to be the kind of spark to start looking somewhere else. Barbara Marcolini: Yeah. Alexios Mantzarlis: Yeah, and I'm curious, one thing that struck me ⁓ you mentioned it is ⁓ videos are actually not necessarily from ⁓ the victims from ⁓ the folks their ⁓ own ⁓ as destroyed by actually by the perpetrators. ⁓ they're pretty videos in that, the war is followed by a kind of celebration and seemingly lighthearted ⁓ celebration of the destruction. ⁓ how do you, on the one hand, it suggests that there's kind of like a willingness to share this content from, ⁓ from the perpetrators. And I wonder whether that's also kind of part of the, ⁓ almost an information warfare element, broadly, where do you start? Right? Like you had the satellite imagery, you knew where to focus, but are you, are you going on YouTube? Are you going on telegram? Are you going on social media and searching by location? Like how. How did you start before we even get to like how you actually fact check and confirm where they are, but how do you get your initial sweep of potential videos to include in your story? Barbara Marcolini: So the first most obvious thing to do is to look for the names of the villages or the areas where you see the destruction is happening and search for them in Arabic and Hebrew. So one very simple thing that I would do is just type on Google the name of the village in English, and then I would find the Wikipedia page for that village. in and and within the Wikipedia page they always have like the different spellings. So this is a good tip for like when you're looking for places that may have several spellings. So I go on Wikipedia and check for all the different spellings not only in ⁓ English or ⁓ Latin but also in Arabic and Hebrew. ⁓ But is really just the the tip of the iceberg because Alexios Mantzarlis: Mm-hmm. Barbara Marcolini: an Israeli soldier may not even know the name of the village where they are, or even if they know, like, they're not going to film themselves like, hey, this is me destroying another building in village so and so. So ⁓ I started creating I started following some of these ⁓ soldiers on ⁓ on Instagram. Many were published on Instagram. ⁓ One parenthesis here. I don't use my personal Instagram account to do these sorts of ⁓ searches because you don't want to put yourself at risk. But I also don't work with fake accounts. So I just have a blank account that doesn't state who I am. What I do is just like a blank account. don't have any posts in it. And that's how I usually work with Instagram. So I started following some of these ⁓ soldiers on social media. I also use Telegram a lot. There's so many Telegram ⁓ accounts, not only of Israeli journalists who are also sharing this footage, but also ⁓ Lebanese residents, people who are from those villages and may find these videos and then republish them saying, ⁓ this is my home or this is my village. So this is really like the first way into finding these videos. First, you go and type the different spellings of these villages names and start looking for it. As you start, like, I really like doing like screenshots and doing a reverse image search of the video so I can see where other places where they were posted. And so I can find, maybe I find a telegram channel through that. video and then, you I started finding more stuff. ⁓ So Telegram and Instagram, I think, were the main sources of footage. And also this ⁓ Palestinian journalist, his name is Yunis Tiraoui, he's very active on acts. And he made a bid for himself of just following all of these Israeli soldiers and investigating their actions. ⁓ Even though many soldiers nowadays are much more conscious about what they publish and they maybe close their accounts or they cleaned, ⁓ made a cleansing of their followers, ⁓ Yuni still is in the Instagram accounts of some soldiers and he's still doing amazing reporting ⁓ through this. Craig Silverman: It's, I mean, it is remarkable, pretty much every military in the world, I think, at this point has rules about, when you're actively engaged, you should not be posting on social media. And yet, I remember back in, you know, the 2014 era in Ukraine, Russian soldiers were doing it like crazy while the government, Russian government was saying, we're not in Ukraine. and the soldiers were like, hey, we're in Ukraine. ⁓ And yet here we are all these years later and it obviously can be a helpful thing for investigators. ⁓ It would be great if you actually gave us a bit of a case study. Maybe you could choose a video, show us sort of the video you came across and then the workflow you did to kind of verify it and geo-locate it. And as part of that, I am curious, you'd mentioned doing reverse image search just very quickly. Which reverse image search engine do you go to first? Do you have one in particular that you always use first or you sort of whatever you feel in that moment? Barbara Marcolini: Google Lens. I think Google Lens is ⁓ the most effective these days. ⁓ Whenever I can't find anything on Google Lens, I'll try a different one. But still, I think Google is the for reverse image search, at least. It's the best ⁓ search engine. I use it a lot. ⁓ Craig Silverman: Yeah, it's nice what happens when Google decides to invest in a product. Reverse image search really just sort of stayed kind of the same for many years, and then was like a light bulb went off in Google. was like, ⁓ this could help with e-commerce. And suddenly, they have done really awesome work in improving Google image search into Google Lens. And yeah, it's becoming quite powerful, and it's evolving, which is kind of, I think, the critique that a lot of people had of Google over the years. like, You won't even sort by oldest first for us, you know? Well, you do something and now, obviously, it's a much more full-featured thing. So it took a while, but it's nice to see that change, right? Barbara Marcolini: Yeah, I was just going to say just a fun fact. It's pretty funny when I do a reverse image search and Google starts trying to sell me military gear and outfits. I'm not actually looking for. Alexios Mantzarlis: The shirt, the shirt and the photo, yeah. the amount of time with a Zelensky photo and you get like a camo shirt and you're like, nope, still not interested. ⁓ But in testing we did, saw that lens on photos actually, we did see that lens was more accurate and more willing to refuse matches than even Google's other tools, which you can use for image visualization, but are not kind of dedicated. interesting to hear. Craig Silverman: ⁓ Yeah. Yeah, so is there a video? We'd love to sort of walk through that with you. Barbara Marcolini: Yeah, so. Yeah, so I wanted to talk about the case of Daira. Daira was a village that was almost, I mean, almost, no, it was wiped out in southern Lebanon back in 2024. As I said, the Israeli army are back in southern Lebanon and destroying more villages, but Daira was one that was wiped out. almost entirely back in 2024. And there were just many videos showing just documenting that destruction. the first video, one of the first videos I found of destruction in southern Lebanon was this video that showed a mosque being destroyed. And I dislocated that video. Yeah, I think I geolocated that video and then ⁓ I found this other video that also showed ⁓ the destruction of mosque ⁓ and the caption that that was in Daira. And I remember it had already geolocated one video in Daira. So I was like, OK, maybe this is just another angle of the same destruction because I already had. the structure of a mosque there. So, and I went and I looked before I even tried to do the geolocation, I just looked for the mosque's minarets, so that little tower that every mosque has. And when I compare them, I was like, well, actually these don't look similar, they are different. And when I tried and of course I geolocated it and then I found that these were two different mosques. And later I found another video of another mosque being destroyed in Daira. And I'm like, okay, I already have two. So I tried to compare them in it and it's yet another ⁓ within this ⁓ very tiny village, I don't know how many people live there, but it was very small. They destroy these like three religious sites. And then ⁓ once you start like, geolocating going through these ⁓ villages, it's almost like you've been there. You create this weird, ⁓ you have this weird feeling like you've physically been there. You know that place. So I had already geolocated all these three different mosques within Daira. So I sort of knew that village a little bit just by going on Google Earth and trying to find these mosques where they were. ⁓ And then there was this one video that was just like this massive explosion. And there were these soldiers celebrating and cheering and saying woohoo and stuff. And I see that video. It wasn't of a mosque. It was just like this massive explosion. And I think the captions had something like, it was shared think, an Israeli journalist. he says something like, our military destroys another like terror village or something like that. That's how they refer to the villages in southern Lebanon. ⁓ And I look at that and I'm like, I think I know this place. And of course it is another video showing the same village, Daira. And that explosion had, I had three different angles. So it had three different videos showing the same destruction. And it is really impressive ⁓ how they just completely wiped out that one village. And afterwards, so our... colleague, Sahar Mandur, who's the Lebanon researcher for Amnesty. She was in charge of finding ⁓ residents of those villages. Of course, it was too dangerous for people to go there. The residents had already left. So she was in charge of finding people who had left, who had been ⁓ displaced from those villages to understand what was happening with them and about their experiences. And she talked to this woman from Vyra And actually have her quote here because it's ⁓ it's ⁓ I felt it was so strong. ⁓ said. I watch this video every day and each time I tell the young man, yes, what an accomplishment. It didn't cost you effort and money to build it. And when she said this, when I saw that quote from her interview, I knew exactly what video she was talking about. I knew exactly. And that is when the ⁓ open source reporting meets the you know, traditional reporting, you know, ⁓ are not just rubble. These are not just videos of explosions. This is ⁓ someone's home. This is someone's village. These are, you know, ⁓ efforts of a whole community to build a village that now has been wiped out from the earth. Alexios Mantzarlis: And how do you think about kind of organizing all this stuff that you're collecting, the interviews with your colleagues, the videos that you find, ⁓ both to understand what the story is for yourself, but then also to kind of fragment the right bits, because it's potentially overwhelming, right, in terms of just how much stuff you can find in a ⁓ kind of verified solid representation for the public. Barbara Marcolini: Yeah, so we usually have weekly meetings. So whenever we're working on a project, we have weekly meetings to just talk about what we are doing. And we have very specific roles. So I was looking for ⁓ the source material, the videos, the photos, ⁓ the statements also from both the Israeli military and from Hasbolam. ⁓ Maika was doing the satellite imagery analysis. She did this amazing count of over 10,000 structures that were destroyed just between late 2024 and early 2025. Then Sahar was going to the... displaced residents of these villages and trying to talk to them and interview them. And we usually have a shared folder where we are based. Each one of us is based in a different country, in a different time zone even. Sahar is in Lebanon, I'm in Rio, Micah is in the United States. we have a shared document where we... put everything in there. I am an Excel spreadsheet freak. Like I have a spreadsheet with everything, the link of the footage, the source, the time when it was posted, the time when it was filmed, the geolocation and all that. And so just to make things easier, as you said, like I was just looking at my spreadsheet and I had like over 100 entries for that project. everything ⁓ that visual is there. And I also like to work with a shared document, just a master document where we will, in this case, we had divided the investigation by village. So we had. Craig Silverman: Yeah. Barbara Marcolini: I think initially we had eight or nine villages that we were looking into. And at the end, I think we chose to focus on five. But we had this master document where we would put everything that we have for each village so everyone can see and add information as they're finding. So I think just simple shared folder and shared documents is really how I like to work. Craig Silverman: And obviously, as you get sort of towards the end of the investigations at Amnesty, I guess the goal in the end is kind of making a case that some legal violation has occurred. You've got the spreadsheet, you've got all the documents, and at a certain point you have to kind of, like whether you're doing it for a human rights reporter, as you said, or you're doing it for like a journalistic story, you kind of have to look at what you have and figure out, what's our strongest evidence here? How can we talk about this? What would we say we have? What's the process like for you, but also within Amnesty of kind of weighing the evidence, figuring out what you have, what you don't have, avoiding confirmation bias, all of those kinds of things that we all try to grapple with. Barbara Marcolini: So as a journalist coming to a human rights organization, I think my main surprise and shock, cultural shock, was the review process. Like when you're a journalist, you work on your piece, you write your article or you make your video, and your editor will look at it, depending on your organization, have like two editors looking and waiting in. ⁓ At amnesty the review process is painfully long. It can take months. you have a legal review. have so when when you're working on on something you have, what would be your editors, right? So the people above you who are sort of monitoring and mentoring you as you're going through, they usually have more of a legal background. ⁓ In my case, I have Milena Marin, who's the head of digital investigations at Amnesty. So she will be mentoring me more for the digital investigation side of it. And when I'm working, for example, so I'm partnering with the team in Lebanon. I have ⁓ Christine Beckerle, who's the head of the ⁓ Lebanon team. And she's mentoring us more from the ⁓ legal perspective. after we have our investigation done, we have the piece done, we've written it. ⁓ Or sometimes even before we start writing, we have these meetings with the legal team. who are legal experts who will just help us frame, as you said, we have to frame the evidence. You, okay, have all this evidence. ⁓ What is the violation that this evidence proves? And then we would have for this piece, we would have several meetings actually with the legal experts at Amnesty to understand what was the threshold that we had to meet in terms of evidence in order to prove. that a war crime had happened. And of course you were blaming a country of committing a war crime. So this threshold is really high and you have to go through several rounds of reviews. And in every round of review, people are really asking you the most detailed questions. what if there was this or that and you have all these different hypotheses that you have to really bulletproof your ⁓ piece and your research in order to publish and say, yes, this ⁓ is a potential war crime. ⁓ I think the other thing that is ⁓ important to say is that with Amnesty, we're not saying that this is a war crime. We're saying this is a potential potential war crime. ⁓ So we have gathered all the material, we have gathered all the evidence, we have all of the legal analysis and we are publishing this so the society can judge and take legal action if they think this is necessary. Craig Silverman: And that in a way is kind similar with journalism as well. We may think we have found evidence of a crime, but obviously we don't charge people with crimes. We don't prosecute people for crimes. ⁓ similar in that sense of, ⁓ basically of raising the alarm or the awareness about something and hoping that the relevant authorities will take some steps. ⁓ Well, look, thank you for talking through that. It's, you know, super interesting and super fascinating. We're going to wrap up just by throwing ⁓ a few ⁓ quick kind of lightning round questions at you. ⁓ so are you ready to be put on your toes here for a second? Barbara Marcolini: Yes. Yes. Yes. ⁓ Craig Silverman: Yeah, very hesitant, yes. I will note that. Yes. ⁓ All right, so we'll just do a few of these. ⁓ first one is, if you only get to keep one tool to use in your work, which tool is it? Barbara Marcolini: Google Maps. Craig Silverman: ⁓ makes sense. ⁓ So which, if any of these, do you use? Gemini, ChatGPT, or Cloud? Barbara Marcolini: ⁓ So at Amnesty we have to use Microsoft tools. That means for work, we're not allowed to use any of these. ⁓ We actually use Copilot. I do use ⁓ ChatGPT for personal things, just like... Craig Silverman: Yeah, right. Barbara Marcolini: helped me choose my, ⁓ actually Gemini. I used Gemini to help me choose my new hair color and that was very helpful. Alexios Mantzarlis: Ha ha ha. Ha ha. Craig Silverman: Making Google Lens and Jim and I work together on that one maybe a little bit. Nice. Do you have a favorite search operator? So of all the advanced search operators out there, know, ⁓ file type colon or what have you, do you have one that you find is your favorite you use the most? Barbara Marcolini: ⁓ side column, ⁓ t.me to find Telegram channels. ⁓ as I said, you know, Telegram is super helpful for investigation. So I always try, ⁓ any keyword and side column t.me and see what comes up. Craig Silverman: Nice, not only did you give us a search operator, you gave us a dork. You gave us a recipe, so thank you. All right, two last quick ones. ⁓ Of all the tools that have died ⁓ over the years and gone away, if you could bring one of them back, what would it be? Barbara Marcolini: Yeah. Alexios Mantzarlis: Okay. Barbara Marcolini: I think I really, kind of miss TweetDac. ⁓ Free TweetDac, yeah, yeah. Alexios Mantzarlis: Hmm. For tracking people and places. Craig Silverman: Retweet deck, yeah. Yeah. ⁓ Yeah. Barbara Marcolini: Just for monitoring different themes, I remember when we were at Storyful, we had all of these search operators, because we used to do a lot of breaking news, right? So we had all these search operators and all of these columns for you know, one column for ⁓ demonstrations and protests, one for like... ⁓ Alexios Mantzarlis: Yeah. Yeah. Craig Silverman: Yes! Mm-hmm. Barbara Marcolini: weather stuff, another one for explosions and was super helpful to find stuff. So I do miss TweetDeck. Craig Silverman: Yes, I remember back in the day getting access to like a dashboard that Storeful would sometimes give to clients or other people with all of Storeful's curated Twitter lists that you guys were all looking at in TweetDeck. All right, final question here. Getting out of this whole digital realm, what's your favorite thing to do away from your computer and away from your phone? Barbara Marcolini: Ummm hiking. Alexios Mantzarlis: Very nice. Lots of options around Rio too. Craig Silverman: Nice. Barbara Marcolini: So whenever, yeah, and whenever I have time off, I'm always like going somewhere where there is no cell service, no internet, and I can just like hide in the mountains in the middle of nature and forget about everything. Alexios Mantzarlis: Amazing. Before we wrap up and close the episode, what's the best way to follow you and your investigations? Barbara Marcolini: I'm terrible with social media, so I'm not super active, but I do still have a Twitter account or an X account, ⁓ So I do post ⁓ the investigations that we do there. Amnesty has a really good following on Instagram, but I don't have a public Instagram account, But ⁓ yeah, so I guess Twitter or X. ⁓ is the best way to follow my work. And we are hoping to publish some more Lebanon investigations soon. Craig Silverman: Awesome. We will look out for those. ⁓ And for folks who are watching and or listening, ⁓ you can also get more episodes from us by hitting subscribe on your preferred channel. And we also, of course, have a free newsletter at indicator.media. Alexios Mantzarlis: Thanks everyone who watched, listened or a combination of the two. Thank you Barbara for joining us. This was extremely interesting. And thanks again to our founding sponsor, Stories as well. We'll see you all next time.