All warfare is deception. But militaries can't deceive their enemies without also deceiving the citizens they’re tasked to protect. In this 30-minute feature, I wanted to explore the question: If the internet looked in 2003 the way it looks today, could the Bush administration’s bad intelligence have been more thoroughly challenged before the invasion of Iraq?
I had been watching this community of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) researchers sharing maps, marked up satellite images and photos scoured from social media with salient geographic details in the background, to piece together a verifiable, objective, near real-time account of things going on around the world, in some of the most challenging settings, like war zones and disaster areas.
I spoke with some members of this community about their work, and present it in The Boat Watchers, which explores the analogy of ‘The drums of war”: What they sound like in practice, how we’re better now than ever at listening for them, and how that act of listening might actually change the beat.