[HN Gopher] Watchdog uses open-source research to investigate Sr...
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Watchdog uses open-source research to investigate Sri Lanka's
ongoing crisis
Author : gbseventeen3331
Score : 70 points
Date : 2022-06-14 16:18 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (restofworld.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (restofworld.org)
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| "We want to help people understand the infrastructure they use.
| The concrete, the laws, the policies, and the social contracts
| that they live under. We want to help people understand the
| causality of how they came to be and how they operate."
|
| We could learn a lot in the "West" from these people.
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| Perhaps the most famous OSINT collective is Netherlands-based
| Bellingcat, which has used such techniques to investigate
| conflicts in Syria, Mexico, Iraq, and Ukraine. Wijeratne
| described Watchdog deferentially as "a junkyard version of
| Bellingcat."
|
| It seem to me that "these people" have a high opinion of the
| west as it stands.
| [deleted]
| djbebs wrote:
| Bellingham is pure propaganda
| Fatnino wrote:
| Bellingcat.
|
| Why do you say that? Their analysis of the Beirut
| fertilizer explosion was spot on.
|
| And their work on MH17 was very good too.
|
| Of course that pointed a finger at the Russians who were
| claiming not to be operating in Ukraine at the time so
| maybe I actually see why some would prefer to baselessly
| brush away the whole site as "propaganda".
|
| Takes one to know one.
| 99_00 wrote:
| Saying it's pure propaganda is obviously false and you
| are right to counter that.
|
| They aren't a neutral observer who is simply interested
| in facts and truth. They have an agenda and are not
| transparent about it.
| googlryas wrote:
| I'm confused by this post. Do you believe that quote is some
| unique "East" perspective, or that there aren't people in the
| "West" doing the same thing?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > I'm confused by this post. Do you believe that quote is
| some unique "East" perspective, or that there aren't people
| in the "West" doing the same thing?
|
| Sorry, I think the brevity of my offhand post has let it be
| misunderstood. The other commenters seem to think I am
| talking about the OSINT concept, Bellingcat and the like. I
| do not mean that.
|
| What "we in the West" can learn, as ordinary citizens, is to
| care more about the machinery that increasingly affects our
| day to day lives and politics, its ownership, function,
| explicit and implicit values.
|
| Although single issue taglines like "privacy", "e-waste" or
| "right to repair" are gaining visibility I think, at least in
| Anglophone countries, US/UK/CA/AUS etc, we are complacent.
| Countries impacted by more severe political crises seem
| quicker to catch on that it's technology behind the
| machinations, and are more ready to question it.
| 99_00 wrote:
| I don't know anything about this group, but I lost all faith in
| fact checkers some time ago.
|
| I see this too often:
|
| Fact checkers take a valid claim add some false exaggeration to
| it, debunk the false exaggeration and pretend that the kernel of
| truth was also debunked.
|
| They also do a lot worse.
|
| We lack neutral observers. The best we can do is have both biased
| sides fight it out in a neutral arena and allow the public to
| judge. But we don't even have that.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's spooks all the way down, you can tell by their annoying
| insistence of referring to run-of-the-mill thinktanks with
| blogs with the codename-styled "OSINT." They piggyback off of
| the media obsession of "crowdsourcing" from a decade back, and
| abuse the software term "open source" to refer to these weird
| private groups.
|
| The question is the same as it always was: who benefits from
| maintaining 12 educated full-time professionals and an office
| in order to claim (and publicize) that they have the most
| accurate view of the degree and character of protests against
| the Sri Lankan government? Somebody is spending a million
| dollars a year minimum on it; it is the opposite of the
| crowd/public.
|
| Groups like this have two functions:
|
| 1) To launder false information. "Legitimate" outlets can
| spread information pushed by these thinktanks, but disguise it
| as reporting on the thinktanks themselves. If the funder of the
| thinktank is the state, they can then use that _secondary_
| reporting to justify the action it wants to take.
|
| 2) To launder illegitimately obtained information i.e. parallel
| construction. Come up with another theoretical way that some
| information that was actually discovered in an illegal or
| immoral way _could have been_ discovered. Create fake artifacts
| of that discovery, and have one of these thinktanks release it.
| Now you can act on the information that you shouldn 't have
| had.
|
| I agree (as far as I understand) that the Sri Lankan government
| is awful, and maybe I agree with spook goals in this case, but
| their funders aren't doing this for moral reasons. They surely
| just want to get rid of these despots to put a friendlier set
| of decisionmakers in.
| Ayesh wrote:
| As a Sri Lankan affected by the crisis, been part of the Galle
| Face Green movement mentioned in the article, and know Watchdog
| and Wijerathne, this is a good story and a summary of their work.
|
| A few weeks ago, most of the hospitals in Sri Lanka ran out of
| medicine because imports were restricted due to regulations and
| lack of foreign reserves. Watchdog quickly setup tooling and
| infrastructure for hospitals to request the medications they
| need, and for providers to arrange them. To make the picture more
| clear, almost entirety of the population relies on free
| healthcare provided by the government, but poor management and
| years of politics that lead to this crisis had left hospitals
| having to ration their medication available.
|
| The Galle Face movement, a series of peaceful protests that
| started several protests throughout the country, was attacked by
| a group of civilian mobs. This is widely believed to be lead by
| Mahinda Rajapaksha, the former president and prime minister. The
| current president is a younger brother of him; Mahinda's son is
| an MP, and there are several positions held by Rajapaksha family,
| including in parliament, the state airline, and more. Mahinda had
| to step down from his role as PM because of the massive backlash
| from the public following his violence against the Galle Face
| protestors.
|
| Watchdog was one of the only unbiased organizations to actively
| track and document the incidents by aggregating all social media
| and news after verifying them properly.
|
| Very impressive work by the team Watch Dog.
| baybal2 wrote:
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| This is fantastic. How can western software engineers help?
| yorwba wrote:
| They have a GitHub https://github.com/team-watchdog
|
| They also have a list of ways to donate to other organizations:
| https://longform.watchdog.team/data-projects/how-to-donate-t...
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