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

Minds Behind Maps

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.

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Episode Sponsor: Element84
Dan Pilone’s appearance on the podcast

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About Jeffrey:
- Twitter
- LinkedIn

Shownotes:

• Dino Brugioni
• Seeing the Secrets Growing the Leaders
• HawkEye 360 GPS Interference
• Yandex changing the borders on maps
• Jeffrey’s Tweet announcing the invasion of Ukraine an hour before it happened
• Jeffrey’s podcast: Arms Control Wonk
• Books & Podcast Recommendations:
  • The Mapmakers by John Noble Wilford
  • The Essentials of SAR: A Conceptual View of Synthetic Aperture Radar and Its Remarkable Capabilities by Thomas Ager
  • BBC Witness History

Timestamps:

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 Recommendations

Feel free to reach out!
- Website
- My Twitter
- Podcast Twitter
- Previous Newsletter: Why I want to do more interviews in person
- Sponsor the Podcast