Today's links

• Amazon illegally interferes with an historic UK warehouse election: "One click to quit" for unions, but not for Prime.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Amazon illegally interferes with an historic UK warehouse election (permalink)

Amazon is very good at everything it does, including being very bad at the things it doesn't want to do. Take signing up for Prime: nothing could be simpler. The company has built a greased slide from Prime-curiosity to Prime-confirmed that is the envy of every UX designer.

But unsubscribing from Prime? That's a fucking nightmare. Somehow the company that can easily figure out how to sign up for a service is totally baffled when it comes to making it just as easy to leave. Now, there's two possibilities here: either Amazon's UX competence is a kind of erratic freak tide that sweeps in at unpredictable intervals and hits these unbelievable high-water marks, or the company just doesn't want to let you leave.

To investigate this question, let's consider a parallel: Black Flag's Roach Motel. This is an icon of American design, a little brown cardboard box that is saturated in irresistibly delicious (to cockroaches, at least) pheromones. These powerful scents make it admirably easy for all the roaches in your home to locate your Roach Motel and enter it.

But the interior of the Roach Motel is also coated in a sticky glue. Once roaches enter the motel, their legs and bodies brush up against this glue and become hopeless mired in it. A roach can't leave – not without tearing off its own legs.

It's possible that Black Flag made a mistake here. Maybe they wanted to make it just as easy for a roach to leave as it is to enter. If that seems improbable to you, well, you're right. We don't even have to speculate, we can just refer to Black Flag's slogan for Roach Motel: "Roaches check in, but they don't check out."

It's intentional, and we know that because they told us so.

Back to Amazon and Prime. Was it some oversight that cause the company make it so marvelously painless to sign up for Prime, but such a titanic pain in the ass to leave? Again, no speculation is required, because Amazon's executives exchanged a mountain of internal memos in which this is identified as a deliberate strategy, by which they deliberately chose to trick people into signing up for Prime and then hid the means of leaving Prime. Prime is a Roach Motel: users check in, but they don't check out:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

When it benefits Amazon, they are obsessive – "relentless" (Bezos's original for the company) – about user friendliness. They value ease of use so highly that they even patented "one click checkout" – the incredibly obvious idea that a company that stores your shipping address and credit card could let you buy something with a single click:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent

But when it benefits Amazon to place obstacles in our way, they are even more relentless in inventing new forms of fuckery, spiteful little landmines they strew in our path. Just look at how Amazon deals with unionization efforts in its warehouses.

Amazon's relentless union-busting spans a wide diversity of tactics. On the one hand, they cook up media narratives to smear organizers, invoking racist dog-whistles to discredit workers who want a better deal:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/amazon-chris-smalls-smart-articulate-leaked-memo

On the other hand, they collude with federal agencies to make workers afraid that their secret ballots will be visible to their bosses, exposing them to retaliation:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/amazon-violated-labor-law-alabama-union-election-labor-official-finds-rcna1582

They hold Cultural Revolution-style forced indoctrination meetings where they illegally threaten workers with punishment for voting in favor of their union:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/business/economy/amazon-union-staten-island-nlrb.html

And they fire Amazon tech workers who express solidarity with warehouse workers:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-fires-tech-employees-workers-criticism-warehouse-climate-policies/

But all this is high-touch, labor-intensive fuckery. Amazon, as we know, loves automation, and so it automates much of its union-busting: for example, it created an employee chat app that refused to deliver any message containing words like "fairness" or "grievance":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/05/doubleplusrelentless/#quackspeak

Amazon also invents implausible corporate fictions that allow it to terminate entire sections of its workforce for trying to unionize, by maintaining the tormented pretense that these workers, who wear Amazon uniforms, drive Amazon trucks, deliver Amazon packages, and are tracked by Amazon down to the movements of their eyeballs, are, in fact, not Amazon employees:

https://www.wired.com/story/his-drivers-unionized-then-amazon-tried-to-terminate-his-contract/

These workers have plenty of cause to want to unionize. Amazon warehouses are sources of grueling torment. Take "megacycling," a ten-hour shift that runs from 1:20AM to 11:50AM that workers are plunged into without warning or the right to refuse. This isn't just a night shift – it's a night shift that makes it impossible to care for your children or maintain any kind of normal life.

Then there's Jeff Bezos's war on his workers' kidneys. Amazon warehouse workers and drivers notoriously have to pee in bottles, because they are monitored by algorithms that dock their pay for taking bathroom breaks. The road to Amazon's warehouse in Coventry, England is littered with sealed bottles of driver piss, defenestrated by drivers before they reach the depot inspection site.

There's so much piss on the side of the Coventry road that the prankster Oobah Butler was able to collect it, decant it into bottles, and market it on Amazon as an energy beverage called "Bitter Lemon Release Energy," where it briefly became Amazon's bestselling energy drink:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

(Butler promises that he didn't actually ship any bottled piss to people who weren't in on the gag – but let's just pause here and note how weird it is that a guy who hates our kidneys as much as Jeff Bezos built and flies a penis-shaped rocket.)

Butler also secretly joined the surge of 1,000 workers that Amazon hired for the Coventry warehouse in advance of a union vote, with the hope of diluting the yes side of that vote and forestall the union. Amazon displayed more of its famously selective competence here, spotting Butler and firing him in short order, while totally failing to notice that he was marketing bottles of driver piss as a bitter lemon drink on Amazon's retail platform.

After a long fight, Amazon's Coventry workers are finally getting their union vote, thanks to the GMB union's hard fought battle at the Central Arbitration Committee:

https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2024/04/26/amazon-warehouse-workers-in-coventry-will-vote-on-trade-union-recognition/

And right on schedule, Amazon has once again discovered its incredible facility for ease-of-use. The company has blanketed its shop floor with radioactively illegal "one click to quit the union" QR codes. When a worker aims their phones at the code and clicks the link, the system auto-generates a letter resigning the worker from their union.

As noted, this is totally illegal. English law bans employers from "making an offer to an employee for the sole or main purpose of inducing workers not to be members of an independent trade union, take part in its activities, or make use of its services."

Now, legal or not, this may strike you as a benign intervention on Amazon's part. Why shouldn't it be easy for workers to choose how they are represented in their workplaces? But the one-click system is only half of Amazon's illegal union-busting: the other half is delivered by its managers, who have cornered workers on the shop floor and ordered them to quit their union, threatening them with workplace retaliation if they don't.

This is in addition to more forced "captive audience" meetings where workers are bombarded with lies about what life in an union shop is like.

Again, the contrast couldn't be more stark. If you want to quit a union, Amazon makes this as easy as joining Prime. But if you want to join a union, Amazon makes that even harder than quitting Prime. Amazon has the same attitude to its workers and its customers: they see us all as a resource to be extracted, and have no qualms about tricking or even intimidating us into doing what's best for Amazon, at the expense of our own interests.

The campaigning law-firm Foxglove is representing five of Amazon's Coventry workers. They're doing the lord's work:

https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2024/05/02/legal-challenge-to-amazon-uks-new-one-click-to-quit-the-union-tool/

All this highlights the increasing divergence between the UK and the US when it comes to labor rights. Under the Biden Administration, @NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo has promulgated a rule that grants a union automatic recognition if the boss does anything to interfere with a union election:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

In other words, if Amazon tries these tactics in the USA now, their union will be immediately recognized. Abruzzo has installed an ultra-sensitive tilt-sensor in America's union elections, and if Bezos or his class allies so much as sneeze in the direction of their workers' democratic rights, they automatically lose.

(Image: Isabela.Zanella, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400+ Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years https://www.pcmag.com/news/firefox-power-user-keeps-7400-plus-browser-tabs-open-for-2-years (h/t Slashdot)

• An Oil Price-Fixing Conspiracy Caused 27% of All Inflation Increases in 2021 https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-oil-price-fixing-conspiracy-caused

• After private equity firms gobbled up wheelchair makers, users pay the price in long repair times https://www.statnews.com/2024/05/01/wheelchair-repair-delay-numotion-national-seating-mobility/

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This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago EFF’s cognitive radio comments to the FCC https://web.archive.org/web/20040707154407/https://www.eff.org/IP/Video/HDTV/EFF-ET03-108.pdf

#20yrsago RIAA: Control your P2P kids! https://craphound.com/areyourkids.txt

#20yrsago Command-line pizza-orderator https://web.archive.org/web/20040508090713/http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/pizza_party/

#15yrsago London cops catch and search a potential terrorist every three minutes https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/8034315.stm

#15yrsago EU kills “3-strikes” Internet rule, affirms Internet is a fundamental right https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2009/05/06/amendment-138-46-adopted-again/

#15yrsago EFF sues Obama administration for promised access to secret copyright treaty documents https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/05/06

#15yrsago Homemade Hollywood: book about fan-films and the obsessives who make them https://memex.craphound.com/2009/05/06/homemade-hollywood-book-about-fan-films-and-the-obsessives-who-make-them/

#10yrsago Comic strip etched into a human hair https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urxflpkY8n8

#10yrsago Review: This One Summer https://memex.craphound.com/2014/05/06/review-this-one-summer/

#5yrsago Evil Clippy: a tool for making undetectable malicious Microsoft Office docs https://www.outflank.nl/blog/2019/05/05/evil-clippy-ms-office-maldoc-assistant/

#5yrsago Big Tech lobbyists and “open for business” Tories killed Ontario’s Right-to-Repair legislation https://www.vice.com/en/article/9kxayy/right-to-repair-bill-killed-after-big-tech-lobbying-in-ontario

#5yrsago Twitter users answer the question: “When did you become radicalized by the U.S. health care non-system?” https://memex.craphound.com/2019/05/05/twitter-users-answer-the-question-when-did-you-become-radicalized-by-the-u-s-health-care-non-system/

#1yrago Look at all the great stuff we lost because of inflation scare-talk https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/05/wmds-two-point-oh/#or-your-lying-ears

#1yrago On the Media on the enshittification (pt 1) https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/06/people-are-not-disposable/#otm

#1yrago Hollywood is the single best example of mature labor power in America https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/06/people-are-not-disposable/#union-strong

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Tartu Prima Vista Literary Festival, May 8-10
  https://tartu2024.ee/en/kirjandusfestival/

• Tim O’Reilly and Cory Doctorow on “Enshittification” and the Future of AI, May 14
  https://www.oreilly.com/live-events/tim-oreilly-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification-and-the-future-of-ai/0642572001651/

• "Finding the Money" screening (LA), May 15
  https://www.laemmle.com/film/finding-money?date=2024-05-15

• Media Ecology Association keynote (Amherst, NY), Jun 6-9
  https://media-ecology.org/convention

• HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY)
  https://www.hope.net/talks.html

• American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21
  https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Come sfuggire al “Merdocene” e costruire un Internet migliore (Torino Biennale Tecnologia)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5NC2EZCYBg

• Show Me The Money Club (The Rideshare Guy)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCETi3XqSds

• NUOVO BARETTO UTOPIA
  https://videoteca.kenobit.it/w/azRmQBCenVwjSRz9WCp8JS

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Latest books (permalink)

• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

• Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025

• Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

• Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

Latest podcast: Precaratize Bosses https://craphound.com/news/2024/04/28/precaratize-bosses/

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This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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How to get Pluralistic:

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Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://twitter.com/doctorow

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https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

As Israel prepares for its Rafah offensive, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza continues to deteriorate. But the lack of media access inside the Gaza Strip means the full extent of worsening conditions are not always seen. Using open source imagery Bellingcat and our partners Scripps News examined widespread destruction of property inside the Gaza Strip and looked at deteriorating conditions there.

Meanwhile, conflict in the West Bank has continued to escalate despite being overshadowed by events in Gaza. Bellingcat and Scripps News used satellite imagery to identify ongoing expansion of West Bank settlements and reveal the heightened tensions on the ground.

You can read Bellingcat’s coverage of IDF demolitions in Gaza here and full coverage by Scripps News, here.

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Carlos Gonzales, Lucy Swinnen, Nick Waters, Annique Mossou, Michael Sheldon, Natasha Pereverzina, Miguel Ramalho, Fraser Crichton, Arsen Drobakha and members of the Global Authentication Project contributed research to this documentary.

Bellingcat is a non-profit and the ability to carry out our work is dependent on the kind support of individual donors. If you would like to support our work, you can do so here. You can also subscribe to our Patreon channel here. Subscribe to our Newsletter and follow us on Instagram here, YouTube here, Facebook here, Twitter here and Mastodon here.

The post The Hidden War in Gaza and the West Bank appeared first on bellingcat.

When news breaks and the internet is aflutter with activity and speculation, many turn to open source accounts and experts to make sense of events. This is truly a sign that open source research — using resources like satellite images to flight tracking websites and footage recorded on the ground — is seen as credible and is increasingly sought after. It’s free, publicly available and anybody can do it.

But such success comes with drawbacks. In monitoring events from Iran and Ukraine, this surge in credibility allows the term ‘OSINT’ to be easily abused, either knowingly or unknowingly, by users who don’t actually follow the best practice of open source research methods. In fact, since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, there has been a spike in verified ‘OSINT’ Twitter accounts which create additional noise and confusion with poor open source analysis.

Conducting open source research properly isn’t about being ‘verified’ or having a huge following. It isn’t about expecting people to take your word for things. It’s about collaboration and sharing the skills necessary to independently verify what you see online. It’s about showing your working and the origin of your data so that anybody can replicate your methodology.

As Bellingcat’s Giancarlo Fiorella indicated in the Financial Times in December, open source research is critical in the long term when it could come to play a role in prosecuting those responsible for atrocity crimes. That raises the bar significantly — not just for the sake of the open source research community as a whole, but also for that of accountability for the victims of armed conflicts.

Here are a few mistakes we’ve noticed from open source researchers in recent years. Many examples are relevant to monitoring armed conflict, but could broadly apply to any genre on which open source research shines — such as natural disasters or organised crime.

We work in a young and rapidly evolving field, facing a deluge of information. Mistakes should be no cause for surprise or shame. Everybody makes them. But a good open source researcher is open about doing so – they correct their errors quickly and vow to do better next time.

If you’re a reader, looking out for these ‘Seven Sins’ (listed in no particular order of gravity) will help you independently judge the quality of open source research you encounter online. If you’re also an open source researcher, looking out for them will help improve the quality of your own work.

1. Not Providing the Original Source

The main tenet of open-source research is that it’s ‘open’: ideally the information is publicly accessible and used in a transparent way. This allows anyone to verify the sourcing and veracity of a piece of footage, without having to trust the person who posted it.

In the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many “OSINT aggregator” accounts developed large followings on Twitter, mostly reposting videos from Telegram, often without linking to the video’s original source. When someone posts a video without saying where they got it from, verification becomes much more difficult; researchers can’t just follow a chain of links to its origin. 

Without any clues as to who originally uploaded that video, we lose potentially crucial information about its content. Though most social media platforms strip metadata, for some platforms such as Telegram and Parler retain it. Such image metadata has played important roles in Bellingcat investigations on subjects from QAnon’s origins to Russian disinformation in Ukraine. This means that first instance of a photo or video may also contain metadata which is lost when the content is reuploaded, shared or compressed.

Bear in mind that there are circumstances when it can be ethically fraught to provide a link, such as if doing so would amplify hateful accounts or drive traffic to graphic content content. Nevertheless, a rule of thumb is to share when you can.

That’s because sharing the origin of a piece of content is a greater contribution than keeping it to yourself — the better to hoard future ‘discoveries’.

2. Letting Cheerleading Undermine Your Work

While everyone has bias, it’s important for open source researchers to attempt to separate these biases from the evidence that they examine. Though many open source researchers or communities clearly use these techniques in aid of a certain cause, they should still acknowledge when their sources or research don’t support that cause, and always be transparent about the level of uncertainty.

Confirmation bias is our tendency to accept as true any new information that confirms what we already ‘know’ to be true, and to reject new information that contradicts our beliefs. Just as everyone has bias, everyone is liable to fall victim to confirmation bias.

Nevertheless, the quality of open source research can be judged independently of political or social position. This is why the caveats are so important. Open source information doesn’t show everything, and may not prove whatever larger point you would like it to.

Acknowledging what you don’t know and what you can’t know is crucial for building trust — even if you have very clear and very public positions. Failing to do this can result in erroneous and self-serving investigations.

3. Not Archiving Material

Online content is often ephemeral: the internet is littered with links to pages that no longer exist. This could be because the owner of the web domain stopped paying their bills. It could be because the website changed how they organised pages. A content hosting platform could have decided to delete large amounts of their files, whether on purpose or by accident. Social media posts are often deleted, whether by the account who created the post, or by the social media platform’s moderation team.

That makes the work of open source researchers much more difficult. It’s why Bellingcat frequently emphasises the importance of archiving online content and has developed tools for making this easier.

The most trustworthy way to archive content is with third-party archiving platforms like the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine or archive.today, though they often fail to correctly archive content from several social media platforms, as well as videos in general. If all else fails, a screenshot is better than nothing.

4. Lacking Context for Occurrences, Common or Otherwise

Particularly in the context of conflict monitoring, events that occur on a regular basis are often taken out of their original context and overblown. For example, researchers unfamiliar with reading NASA FIRMS images and data, may interpret regular, planned and controlled fires or other thermal changes as something more malicious. But in moments of tension, people unfamiliar with such common events may give them undue significance.

A recent example of this trend was when famous baseball player Shohei Ohtani was going to join a new team, leaving the Los Angeles Angels. In December 2023, a private flight leaving Anaheim in the US state of California for Toronto, Canada spurred online sleuths to believe that this was evidence of Ohtani meeting and potentially signing with the Toronto Blue Jays. when In reality, the flight was carrying a Canadian businessman and had no connection to Ohtani or baseball in general. 

Distinguishing between common and uncommon events can take a lot of domain-specific expertise, whether that field is conflict monitoring, natural disasters, or any other area of research. Many researchers do not have this specific expertise regardless of how well they have mastered a tool or method.

5. Incorrectly Using Tools and Interpreting Data

There are many different open source tools out there, and we even try to keep a list of useful resources in Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit. However, as with any new tool, users often need some guidance, experience and training to master it.

We often see new users not being aware of these tools’ limitations. New tools aren’t silver bullets and they often come with many caveats. For example, for facial recognition software, there are strengths and weaknesses for different services and results provided by those tools should not be treated with complete certainty. Usually other data points and context is required to show why the match is credible. Depending on the photo and the particular case, it is possible to pursue false leads and come to incorrect conclusions based on the limitations of that software.

Tools which detect photo manipulation are another example. Last May, Colombia’s president retweeted an account who had improperly used one such tools, drawing overconfident and incorrect conclusions.

Even when such tools have been mastered, it takes time to learn how to interpret the data or results they generate. In one example, drone footage of a fast moving object was interpreted as a UFO when in reality it may have just been a balloon.

In another, a user mistook clouds on satellite imagery for craters.

6. Editing Footage

While usually not done maliciously, OSINT accounts sometimes edit footage in an unhelpful way, such as placing an audio track over the video, making a compilation of clips, or trimming down the original footage.

For example, one habit of ‘aggregator’ accounts is to overlay their channel’s watermark over videos and images. If we can’t find the origin of a video, we generally perform a reverse image search of frames from the footage. But thanks to watermarks, this useful technique becomes more prone to error.

When interpreting and sharing open source content, it is critical that we do not edit the footage in a way that diminishes, removes, or obscures useful information contained in that content. Even if you think you are not obscuring critical information, there is no way to know if the information you altered would be helpful later.

For example, the audio contained in the footage of the shooting of Columbian journalist Abelardo Liz contained vital clues that allowed us to geolocate where the gunfire came from. If this footage was edited over with a dramatic audio track, it would have concealed a vital component of this investigation. 

7. Racing to be First at Any Cost

It is easy to get wrapped up in the whirlwind of breaking news, especially around terror attacks and military conflict. The incentives of social media platforms, where the bulk of public open source research is carried out, encourage this behaviour. There is a big temptation to be the first person to make a ‘breakthrough’ in a developing story, or to quickly generate an analysis on an event. 

However, validating content should always take priority over speed. 

Some of the most high-profile and damaging examples of this are the many times that amateur investigators misidentified innocent people as the perpetrators of terror attacks. This occurred recently with the Bondi Junction stabbing, as well as the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013 and the Allen, Texas mall shooting in 2023. These kinds of mistaken results have been based on the innocent person having the same name or a similar looking face as the perpetrator — neither of which is sufficient evidence alone given the gravity of such identifications.

Too often, verification gets overlooked when the desire for speed is prioritised which can create more harm and confusion about an unfolding situation rather than bringing the facts and clarity needed.

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Bellingcat is a non-profit and the ability to carry out our work is dependent on the kind support of individual donors. If you would like to support our work, you can do so here. You can also subscribe to our Patreon channel here. Subscribe to our Newsletter and follow us on Instagram here, X here and Mastodon here.

The post OSHIT: Seven Deadly Sins of Bad Open Source Research appeared first on bellingcat.

You can read the version of this article published Lloyd’s List Intelligence here

Last year Bellingcat revealed that Russian ships were making calls to the Port of Sevastopol in Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, transporting grain from other occupied parts of the country. The quantity of grain exported from occupied Crimea has reportedly massively increased since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and its seizure of Ukrainian territory.

Ships involved in the scheme are violating international maritime guidelines by turning off location trackers in an attempt to hide their whereabouts — an act known as ‘going dark’. As previously reported by Bellingcat, two ships, the Mikhail Nenashev and Matros Shevchenko, sailed from Sevastopol directly to Iran. 

Bellingcat can now reveal that in recent months, the bulk cargo ships Zafar and Zaid have also joined the grain-plundering fleet, sailing under the Russian flag. 

These ships are operated by a different company, but they serve a similar route — they transport grain from the Russian-occupied port of Sevastopol and export it through the Bosphorus and beyond.

The Zafar and Zaid were observed making the trip from Sevastopol to Iran last year and to Syria this year. Since last year they have been operated by the Astrakhan-based Salmi Shipmanagement.

Some of these previously unreported voyages could be seen through open sources. Bellingcat has obtained satellite images showing the Zafar and the Zaid docked at a grain terminal in Sevastopol and several weeks later docked at Bandar-e Emam Khomeini, a major port in Iran on the Persian Gulf. AIS data provided by Lloyd’s List Intelligence allowed us to monitor the position of the vessels on their voyages to Iran, allowing us to obtain photographs of both vessels passing the Bosphorus fully laden. Data from Lloyd’s List on the change of the ships’ draught indicates that they unloaded cargo at the Iranian port. This is the same route taken by the Mikhail Nenashev and Matros Shevchenko in July 2023.

Bellingcat also used satellite images to establish that the Zafar docked at the same Sevastopol grain terminal in January and February this year. These images, as well as AIS data, appear to corroborate elements of Russian state documents published by a Ukrainian website which claims that both ships have also exported grain to Syria.

These revelations come at a time of enhanced scrutiny towards Moscow’s relationship with Tehran. Bellingcat also discovered that a senior figure at the stevedoring company of this Sevastopol terminal has made visits to Iran where he met state officials involved in transport.

On March 29, Ukraine’s Prosecutor for Crimea announced that the captains of the Zafar and Mikhail Nenashev were wanted by Ukraine on suspicion of illegal exit from and entry to Ukraine, referring to their voyages from the occupied peninsula. On April 24 the prosecutor announced that the captain of the Zaid was wanted on suspicion of the same crime.

The Zafar Sets Sail for Iran

The Zafar, a 37,300 deadweight ton (DWT) bulker, has a few recognisable features. According to websites such as VesselFinder and SeaSearcher, it is 180 metres long and 30 metres wide.

The Zafar is distinguished from the Zaid by its four cranes, as well as its accommodation block with the bridge. All of these are of a faint yellow colour. Both features are easily spotted in satellite images.

Bellingcat used open sources to tracked the Zafar’s clandestine voyage to Iran last October. Here’s what we found.

As is common for vessels involved in Russia’s grain plundering operation, the Zafar ‘went dark’ in the Black Sea on October 15 after transiting the Bosphorus on October 13. Going dark is a maritime industry term used for vessels that deliberately hide their whereabouts by turning off Automated Identification Systems (AIS), in violation of the International Maritime Organisation’s best practices guidance.

Automated Identification Systems (AIS) provide open source information on the positioning and movement of ships. The deliberate disabling of AIS without legitimate cause is considered a deceptive shipping practice. 

The Zafar transmitted a signal on October 15, 2023 at the coordinates (44.82294333, 36.63565333) on its approach to the Kerch Strait, which connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov.

As previously reported by Bellingcat, the Kerch Strait has played a role in maritime grain plundering as the site of ship-to-ship transfers during which smaller ships sail to open seas to transfer cargo to bigger vessels.

The screenshot below from Lloyd’s List Intelligence platform SeaSearcher shows the ‘AIS GAP’ — the point at which the Zafar stopped transmitting its coordinates.

Although it had turned off its AIS system, open sources can tell us about Zafar’s next movements. On October 17, a ship with the same dimensions, features and colour as the Zafar appeared at Sevastopol’s Avlita Grain Terminal – about a day’s sailing time from the Kerch Strait. This is the same terminal at which Bellingcat found that the Mikhail Nenashev had loaded grain in June 2023.

The ship seen in this satellite imagery is distinctive. Note its yellow cranes and the shape of its bridge, which all match those seen in photographs of the Zafar.

Furthermore, the angling of the satellite imagery means that markings are visible on the hull of the vessel. While the word itself is not fully legible, we can count eight letters on the hull — the same number as in the word ‘shipping’, seen in higher-resolution photos of the Zafar. 

By using QGIS software, we can measure the the dimensions of the vessel in the satellite imagery. It is 180 metres long and 30 metres wide — just like the Zafar.

Multiple images of the vessel uploaded to MarineTraffic show that the Zafar’s hull is painted red below the waterline. Fortunately, the angling of the satellite which took this photograph allows us to see that this red paint on its hull is above the waterline.

This indicates that the Zafar had not yet been fully loaded with cargo when the image was taken.

Two days later, the ship’s hatches opened. Satellite imagery taken on October 19 shows that the Zafar was being loaded with a substance matching the colour of grain.

The Zafar had its AIS transponder off for 20 days (from October 15 to November 4). Lloyd’s List Intelligence data shows the ship’s draught was 6.7 metres prior to its Sevastopol port call.

The draught is the vertical distance from the waterline to the baseline; a change in the draught generally means a change in the ship’s weight and cargo. According to Lloyd’s List, as draught data is a manual input done aboard a ship it is not always a reliable source of information. However, there are certain instances where draught data must be accurate for safety reasons, such as passing through major chokepoints. Therefore, it can be used as supporting evidence when drawing conclusions in conjunction with other information — such as the depth of the hull in our photographs of these vessels transiting through the Bosphorus. 

New draught information appears to have been inputted during the Zafar’s stay at the Avlita terminal.

When the ship resumed transmitting its coordinates (at 44.88906333, 36.79853333) after visiting Sevastopol, its draught was at 10.2 metres. This suggests that the ship was loaded with a significant quantity of cargo.

On November 11 it headed south and transited the Bosphorus strait, where it was photographed fully laden by co-author Yörük Işık.

According to AIS data obtained from Lloyd’s List Intelligence, the Zafar transited the Suez Canal on November 18 towards the Red Sea. At the time it was using the destination field within the AIS data to indicate “TO ORDER”, rather than stating a next port of call.

The Zafar anchored off the coast of Iran in early December. On December 12, it finally docked at the Bandar-e Emam Khomeini terminal. AIS data shows that the Zafar was docked at 30.43933333, 49.04966.

In the immediate vicinity there was only one ship with the same dimensions. The other features, such as the yellow cranes, also stand out.

Data from Lloyd’s List Intelligence shows that the ship’s draught dropped considerably from 10.7 metres to 6.7 before it left on December 18. As the maximum draught of the Zafar is 10.67 metres, this suggests that the ship was operating at full capacity and had unloaded a large quantity of the substance seen in the satellite images from Sevastopol.

The Zaid Heads to Iran

The Zaid, a 37,349 DWT bulker, made the same trip just a few weeks before the Zafar. According to VesselFinder, the Zaid and the Zafar’s dimensions are virtually the same (180/30 metres).

The main visible difference between the two ships, at least currently, is the colour of their cabins. Where the Zafar’s cabin is yellow (except for the lower part of the cabin), just like its cranes, the Zaid’s cabin is almost completely white.

On October 9, 2023, the Zaid transited the Bosphorus in Istanbul, sailing onto the Black Sea. The ship then travelled to an area near the Kerch Strait and its AIS ‘went dark’ after October 11.

On October 13, Planet Labs satellite images captured the ship at the Avlita terminal in Sevastopol.

Let’s take a closer look at this satellite image.

In the GIF image below, the yellow boxes highlight the Zaid’s four yellow cranes, the blue boxes its cargo compartments, the orange its the antenna and the red the chimney.

Later, the magnifications shown in the circles to the left highlight the brown substance being loaded into the cargo compartment.

We can compare all these features to a photo of the Zaid taken by co-author Yörük Işık on October 30, 2023. The cranes are shown in the yellow boxes. The blue arrows show the cargo compartments. The orange box shows the antenna and the red box shows the chimney.

For further verification we can again measure the ship using QGIS. The dimensions match those of the Zaid — 180 metres long and 30 metres wide.

By October 14, Planet satellite imagery showed that the remaining compartments had been filled with the same substance.

The ship began transmitting AIS positions again on October 18 near the Kerch Strait (44.82354333, 36.63712667), according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence data shown in the map earlier in this section.

On October 30, Yörük Işık photographed the Zaid transiting the Bosphorus, this time headed in the direction of the Mediterranean.

It would take until November 28 for the ship to berth at the dock in Bandar-e Emam Khomeini, where AIS data shows that it stopped at 11:30 am UTC.

Although commercial satellites did capture this area on the same day, they did so prior to the Zaid’s arrival.

Bellingcat was unable to obtain satellite imagery of the port on November 29, but on November 30 AIS data from Lloyd’s List Intelligence shows that the Zaid was docked at 30.43954333, 49.04959333 in front of a row of warehouses in Bandar-e Emam Khomeini. This is approximately same location where the Zafar was moored.

On December 2, the ship’s draught went from 10.3 metres to 6.6 metres according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence data, suggesting it unloaded a considerable amount of cargo. 

According to Lloyd’s List data, the ship stayed in the same position until December 3 when it then re-berthed towards the northwest and then departed the port on December 4.

There are no bills of lading (i.e. documents acknowledging the receipt of cargo for transportation) for the Zaid’s and Zafar’s shipments to Bandar-e Emam Khomeini.

These would be needed to establish the sender and the receiver of the shipments and to ascertain the type of cargo that was transported with more certainty.

Owners and Operators

According to open source shipping data, Zafar and Zaid’s owners have at times been associated with the GTLK group, Russia’s State Transport Leasing Company.

The vessel ownership tracking database Equasis lists Zafar’s owner as AM Asia M6 Ltd. since August 2023.

The summary of a UK commercial court ruling from that January states that AM Asia M6 was part of the GTLK group, which is owned or controlled by Russia’s Ministry of Transport.

AM Asia M6 is mentioned in a list of companies which have changed their names published by the Hong Kong Companies Registry in November 2022. When inputting the corresponding company code from this list, the company appears under the name GTLK Asia M6.

GTLK was sanctioned by the UK government in April 2022. Its entry in the UK Treasury’s list of financial sanctions targets describes GTLK Asia as an ‘associated entity’.

Equasis does not list Zaid’s current owner. The ‘registered owner’ field reads “RPTD SOLD UNDISCLOSED INTEREST”.

Maritime data website Lloyd’s List Intelligence, however, keeps track of vessels’ ownership history. The Zaid’s last known registered owner was GTLK Asia M5 Ltd, a Hong Kong-based company.

Over the same period of Zaid’s ownership by GTLK Asia M5 (i.e. from December 7, 2020 until September 12, 2023), its beneficial owner was listed as the Russian state-owned parent organisation GTLK PJSC.

OpenCorporates’ page for GTLK Asia M5 provides a company registry number. This number also appears in the aforementioned list published by the Hong Kong Companies Registry, where it refers to the company AM Asia M5.

The current beneficial owner of both vessels is not known.

Equasis also shows the Astrakhan-based Salmi Shipmanagement as the International Safety Management (ISM) manager for both ships — since September 22, 2023 for the Zafar and since May 15, 2023 for the Zaid.

The ISM manager plays an important role in the practical operation of a ship, explained Salvatore Mercogliano, a maritime historian at Campbell University in the US. “In contrast to its owner, a ship’s manager handles the crewing, husbanding, fuelling, and day-to-day operations of the vessel for the owner and potential charterer”, Mercogliano told Bellingcat.

New Year’s Voyages to the South

Iran may not have been the only destination for these two ships. The Ukrainian activist websites Myrotvorets and Kiborg News claim that both the Zaid and the Zafar sailed to Syria twice in January and February of this year.

As Bellingcat previously reported evidence of a link between the Avlita Grain Terminal and Syria, we sought to investigate the websites’ claims using open sources. 

Lloyd’s List Intelligence AIS data shows that on December 28, 2023 the Zaid ‘went dark’ near the Kerch Strait. The vessel would only reappear on AIS tracking websites on January 5, 2024, in the same area.

The red arrows on the map below represent the known AIS coordinates of the Zaid in January 2024. Exclamation marks represent ‘AIS gaps’.

Once again, we looked for signs of the Zaid at the Avlita terminal during this period.

Planet Labs satellites captured the Zaid on January 1 docked at the Avlita terminal. The length and the breadth of the ship correspond with the Zaid’s as well, for reference see this tweet by MT Anderson.

The Zaid’s AIS signals resurfaced in the Black Sea on January 5. Once again the Zaid ‘went dark’, this time north of Cyprus on January 10.

In their articles about the Zaid and Zafar, Myrotvorets and Kiborg News published four certificates from Russia’s Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance. This state watchdog, usually known as Rosselkhoznadzor, is responsible for checking agricultural products and livestock — including those sent by Russian companies for export.

This certificate published by Myrotvorets concern a shipment of ‘soft bread wheat in bulk’ aboard the Zaid destined for Syria, specifying the point of entry as either Latakia or Tartous.

This document’s date of issue is given as January 3, 2024 — two days after satellite imagery showed the Zaid at the Avlita terminal in Sevastopol and two days before its AIS signal resurfaced in the Black Sea.

This process would repeat itself in February. Lloyd’s List Intelligence data shows that the Zaid went dark on February 12, again near the Kerch Strait.

Yet again, Planet Labs satellite imagery would capture the Zaid docked at the Avlita terminal during the period of its absence from AIS systems, on February 16.

The Zaid reemerged on February 21 near the place where it disappeared in the Black Sea. This ‘AIS GAP’ is represented by an explanation mark in the map below.

Lloyd’s List data also shows that the Zaid’s draft changed from 6.6 to 10.7 on February 21.

The Zaid went ‘dark’ again after March 1, when it was last seen north of Cyprus.

Once again, a document published by Myrotvorets concerning the Zaid’s activities in February gives the same details: it was carrying ‘soft bread wheat’ destined for Latakia or Tartous in Syria.

This document’s date of issue is given as February 19, 2024 — three days after satellite imagery showed the Zaid at the Avlita terminal in Sevastopol and two days before its AIS signal resurfaced in the Black Sea.

When scanned, the QR code included in the bottom right-hand corner of these documents brought up a page on Argus-Fito, a Rosselkhoznadzor service for monitoring and issuing certificates issued by the institution. This page loaded the same PDF certificates published by Myrotvorets; all details were identical. The status of these two certificates is given as ‘issued’, which appears to indicate that they are authentic.

In both cases, satellite imagery confirms that the Zaid was berthed at Avlita a few days before these certificates were issued but not before it had again switched on its AIS systems. The documents do not refer to Avlita or Sevastopol, naming simply the ‘Russian Federation’ as the point of origin of the shipments.

However, open source information indicates that Pallada has at times played a role in supply chains involving the Avlita grain terminal in Sevastopol.

A December 18, 2023 court document from the Arbitration Court of Rostov Oblast names Pallada as a third party alongside Aval, the company which oversees operations at the Avlita terminal. The case concerned two Crimea-based companies and an allegation that one had delivered substandard grain. Both Aval and Pallada testified as to the quality of the grain, claiming that it had been returned to the provider.

The document does not mention Pallada’s customers nor where the grain was destined. However it does give the address of a Pallada warehouse in Sevastopol at 2 Primorsky Street — the same address as the Avlita terminal.

We cannot say for sure whether the Zaid reached Syria or if that was indeed its final destination, as satellite imagery for Tartous and Latakia ports for the dates after it ‘went dark’ in the Eastern Mediterranean is either unavailable or too cloudy.

Lloyd’s List also provided AIS data showing that the Zafar took a similar route to the Zaid twice during the same timeframe, ‘going dark’ in roughly the same locations. Myrotvorets also published two documents from Rosselkhoznadzor concerning the Zafar. However, Bellingcat was not able to corroborate the end points of the Zafar’s purported journey with satellite imagery — neither in Crimea nor in Syria.

Iranian Escapades

As mentioned earlier, bills of lading and similar documents are not available for the Zaid and Zafar’s trips to the Iranian port of Bandar-e Emam Khomeini. However, these voyages take place in a context of ambitious plans for deeper economic and transport ties between Russia and Iran. 

The ships’ ISM is a small part of this picture. Salmi Shipmanagement was established in 2019 and its director is a man called Nikolay Yegorochkin. Russian business websites indicate that Yegorochkin was associated with other shipping companies, including a role as a director at Stal-Flot, a maritime shipping firm based in Astrakhan, Russia. 

Astrakhan is a major port on the Caspian Sea which plays an important role in Russian trade with Iran — it is a much shorter option than transiting the Bosphorus and Suez to the Persian Gulf. Salmi has some prior involvement in Russian trade with Iran via this route. 

Bellingcat found a document from the Russian Caspian Sea Ports Administration with a list of ships that requested ice-breaking services in January 2024. It shows that Salmi ships have also been active between Astrakhan and Bandar-e Anzali on Iran’s northern coast. 

The ships belonging to Salmi were all empty when returning from Iran and loaded on their way there. While the document does not specify what the ships were carrying, they are listed as bulk carriers or dry cargo ships (Сухогруз in Russian), indicating a likelihood that the cargo on board was a raw or bulk commodity of some sort.

Russian firms also use Astrakhan’s port to export grain. Last October, Astrakhan’s governor announced that freight turnover for grain transshipment from the port had risen two and a half times compared to the previous year.

Why then would Russia have not sent the Zafar and Zaid’s 2023 shipments across the Caspian Sea? According to Nicole Grajewski, a Nuclear Security Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the longer route taken by the Zafar and Zaid is more logical. The port facilities on the Caspian Sea are “unable to handle larger types of ships and larger transfers of goods, whereas Bandar Khomeini is a large port which can handle container ships”, she explained. “It’s also probably more convenient because Russia has already taken these routes, stopping off at Turkey and Syria”, said Grajewski, who is the author of a forthcoming book on Russian-Iranian relations.

“Since the war in Ukraine, Iran and Russia have really ratcheted up their efforts at economic coordination”, said Nicole Grajewski, the Carnegie Endowment expert. “In general their trade ties have been weak, but there has been a consistent relationship when it comes to grain. Iran has been a major importer of Russian cereals”.

Bellingcat also discovered several visits to Iran made by Igor Rudetsky, whom Russian corporate registries describe as one of the founders of the Aval company whose Sevastopol-based branch conducts operations at the Avlita grain terminal. Rudetsky apparently holds or has held leading roles in a number of maritime companies including Sea Maker and PLC Caspy, which according to Russian state media is involved in port infrastructure in Astrakhan.

Rudetsky’s accounts on Instagram and Russian social network VK include several photos with Savchenko, a member of the Russian State Duma who is sanctioned by the US government (Rudetsky has also been quoted by Russian media in the capacity of Savchenko’s assistant). These photos also show that Rudetsky and Savchenko visited Iran together.

On October 26, 2023, Rudetsky shared a picture of the two of them on his Instagram page, with the caption ‘archive 2021’.

The men are standing in front of a replica of an ancient Persian statue inside a building. Two weeks before, he had shared another picture of a similar statue.

Matching features in the lobby allowed Bellingcat to geolocate the two images to the Espinas Hotel in central Tehran. These features are highlighted in the two screenshots below, taken from Google Maps’ Street View service.

This was evidently not the first visit. Rudetsky’s account on Russian social network VK is full of photos of business meetings with Iranian officials, Tehran street scenes, and videos and photos at meetings in the Mazandaran province, on the shores of the Caspian Sea.

On October 9, 2023, Rudetsky shared pictures taken at the port of Amirabad on Iran’s Caspian coast. He also posted photos in front of the office of Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Line Group (IRISL) in Tehran (35.799205, 51.474973).

Rudetsky also posted pictures of himself at business meetings.

The man standing on the right in the image to the left bears a striking similarity to Mohammed Reza Emami, an Iranian transport infrastructure official. In 2021 news website Purson.ir referred to Emami as the former Vice President of Development of Iran’s Ports and Maritime Organisation (PMO). Ten years ago the Bandar-e Anzhali and Chabahar ports also referred to him in that capacity. In 2018 Iran’s Ministry of Urban Development referred Emami as an official at the state air navigation company.

A number of clues in this series of photos posted by Rudetsky — namely a sugar pot and a view of a mosque — allowed Bellingcat to geolocate the meeting to the offices of Mostazafan Foundation in Tehran (35.740714, 51.420887).

The aforementioned Purson.ir reported that Emami was a member of the Board of Directors of the Mostazafan Foundation, using its full name: the Foundation of the Oppressed and Veterans of the Islamic Revolution. In 2020 the US Treasury sanctioned the foundation, describing it as an “ostensible charitable organization” serving the interests of Iran’s leaders.

“The Mostazafan Foundation operates as a financial conglomerate controlled by the IRGC”, said Afshon Ostovar, a professor at the US Naval Postgraduate School in California and an expert on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). “[It] is involved in myriad schemes and business, invests in domestic and foreign ventures, and plays an obscure role in the importation of various products and services from abroad. It’s entirely unsurprising for directors with MF to meet with foreign counterparts, especially Russian. The IRGC does extensive business with Russia already, and one could imagine that there’s deep interest in both sides for expanding that relationship”, wrote Professor Ostovar in an email to Bellingcat.

We do not know what was discussed at these meetings nor if it had any connection to grain exports.

When asked about this meeting in a VK message from Bellingcat, Rudetsky told us that the meeting was part of a delegation led by the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs including about 40 people from “shareholders and managers of the Caspian, Black Sea and Baltic Ports”. He continued that delegation visited multiple organisations and was shown ports and management facilities by the Iranian side. The meeting “was neither of an intergovernmental nor of a state nature”, Rudetsky said.

A Growing Ghost Fleet

Cargo ships continue to appear at the Avlita terminal in Sevastopol, usually after the deceptive practice of ‘going dark’ somewhere nearby in the Black Sea.

“What can this tell us? Only that the Russians have started to steal grain in large quantities from newly-occupied territories”, said Ukraine’s Prosecutor for the Autonomous Republic of Crimea Ihor Ponochovnyi when asked about the appearance of more ships at the Avlita terminal in Sevastopol.

“Before the full-scale invasion the harvests in Crimea were not large… But after the full-scale invasion and the occupation of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, the amount of grain supposedly produced in Crimea grew to an unrealistic amount. It’s understood that this is not Crimean grain. It physically can’t be in such volumes”, said Ponochovnyi in an interview with Bellingcat at his office in Kyiv. Ponochovnyi also claimed that Sevastopol’s port and the Avlita Terminal were on the verge of closure before February 2022.

When approached by Bellingcat for comment in a message on VK, Igor Rudetsky said that Aval has no relationship to the grain trade nor to any financial transactions concerning the transfer of grain overseas. He asked us to direct our questions about the shipments detailed in this article to the companies or ship owners responsible for purchasing grain.

“Aval only loads grain, provides stevedoring services and nothing more and there have been court cases where we have proven that we are not responsible for the quality of grain, which grain was brought to us or which grain we offloaded”, continued Rudetsky.

When asked whether he knew the origin of the grain loaded at the Avlita terminal, Rudetsky responded:

“No. Any trader who is interested in this or that quality of grain mixes different batches. Therefore a laboratory can’t determine its origin. It is profitable to transport grain by road up to distances of 1,200-1,400 kilometres. Draw a circle and you’ll understand that includes Astrakhan, Samara, Lipetsk. Along the Crimean bridge by railway to Altai and Orenburg. All these are grain producing regions with a surplus of about 30 million tonnes of grain for export. It’s hard to comment”.

Bellingcat also reached out to Salmi Shipmanagement, the director of Pallada Ltd., GTLK, the Mostazafan Foundation, the Iranian Ports Authority and Aval’s Moscow office but did not receive replies by the time of publication.

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Youri van der Weide, Yöruk Işık and Maxim Edwards contributed to this report alongside Bridget Diakun of Lloyd’s List Intelligence. With thanks to Ross Higgins, Michael Sheldon and Annique Mossou.

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The post From Crimea to Iran: Two More Ships Join Russia’s Grain-Smuggling Fleet appeared first on bellingcat.

On Monday, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a date had been set for a large-scale Israeli military offensive in Rafah, a city in the far south of the Gaza Strip. 

This is despite the fact that approximately 1.5 million people are now sheltering in Rafah, having relocated there following previous orders to evacuate the North of Gaza.  

Israel’s top military spokesman Daniel Hagari has said Israel has plans to evacuate Rafah, of which US officials have said they are sceptical. US President Joe Biden has urged Israel against the offensive.

This comes two and a half weeks after the UN Security Council passed a resolution, from which the US abstained, demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Ramadan ended on Wednesday and will be marked by many in Gaza with Eid al-Fitr.

Bellingcat has geolocated several strikes carried out in Rafah by Israel in the days after the UN resolution. These include strikes in Al Shaboura —  an area of Rafah to which the Israel Defense Forces previously instructed displaced people from elsewhere in Gaza to relocate.

Strikes Follow Ceasefire Resolution: Al Shaboura

On the morning of March 27, two days after the ceasefire resolution, images surfaced online showing the aftermath of an early morning strike in the Al Shaboura neighbourhood.

The minaret of Al Farouk Mosque can be identified in the distant background of the images.

Rafah’s Al Farouk Mosque was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in February, but the minaret remains standing. A video obtained by Reuters and published on April 10 shows that Eid al-Fitr prayers were subsequently held at the site.  

Using the minaret in the distance and surroundings of the house, we managed to geolocate the aftermath of the strike here, to 31.288320, 34.252926 (Strike 1).

Gaza-based journalist, Rabie Abu Noqaira reported that a house belonging to the Al Hamayda family in Al Shaboura neighbourhood was hit in the early hours of the morning of March 27. Whether there were casualties, or their number, remains unclear.

Another location in the Al Shaboura neighbourhood was reportedly hit early on March 27. Footage filmed by Al Kofiya TV showed a severely damaged building located on the corner intersection of two streets. 

We matched the facade of the damaged building and the apartment located across the street seen in Al Kofiya’s footage with satellite imagery and located the building here: 31.284967, 34.271340 (Strike 2) roughly two kilometres from the Al Shaboura neighbourhood.

A survivor of the attack interviewed by Al Kofiya TV said that both his parents had been killed, as well as a family of displaced people who were staying there. According to Palestinian news agency Wafa a total of 11 people were killed and several people were injured in the strike. 

Al Shaboura is a neighbourhood in Rafah which the Israel Defense Forces previously instructed internally displaced persons from elsewhere in Gaza to relocate to, according to the UN. 

According to the UN, on December 3 the Israeli military designated about 20 percent of Khan Younis city for immediate evacuation. Residents of the area, including approximately 50,000 internally displaced persons who had already moved there from elsewhere in Gaza, were instructed to move to Al Fukhari, east of Khan Younis and Ash Shaboura and Tell As Sultan neighbourhoods in Rafah. The UN reported that these neighbourhoods were already overcrowded.

Strikes Near the Egyptian Border

A video published by Reuters on March 27 shows the aftermath of an airstrike in the west of Rafah. Bellingcat geolocated the footage and identified the targeted building here, at 31.285613, 34.249152 (Strike 3).

The building outlined in red can be seen again in this video from Al Arabiya. The woman interviewed said her daughter was killed in the strike. The number of casualties in the strike remains unclear.

Bellingcat located an additional strike in the vicinity of the Egyptian border on April 2. 

A video posted by Al Jazeera Palestine showed rescue efforts by the Palestinian Civil Defence forces at the scene of a strike on April 2.

Footage shows people carrying away a body from the scene. Several Palestinian news outlets reported that 10 bodies were retrieved from the site. 

We were able to geolocate the strike site using a building in the back left of the frame (yellow box) another building (green box) and an alleyway (red box), locating it here: 31.296399, 34.242196 (Strike 4). 

Rafah’s Population Swells with Internally Displaced People

The conflict has seen many people relocate to Rafah, under instruction by the IDF. 

While displaced people initially gathered around the United Nations facility and schools in the area north of Rafah, those quickly became overcrowded. Open spaces in northern Rafah started filling up with tents and temporary structures in December. 

A previous Bellingcat investigation showed how this surge in displaced people corresponded with the disappearance of trees in areas where makeshift tents had been set up.

An April 9 satellite image from Planet Labs shows that the tents and temporary structures continue to expand near the UNRWA logistics base north of Rafah. In the past two weeks, almost 600 tents have been set up north of the UNRWA facility in the area near 31.326647, 34.251648.

Despite Netanyahu announcing on April 9 that a date had been set for a large-scale Israeli military offensive in Rafah, Israel is yet to share clear plans about how the population will be evacuated. 

Israel’s defence ministry reportedly said it had purchased 40,000 tents for the evacuation. Satellite imagery from April 3 and April 9 shows a small collection of new tents organised north of the UNRWA warehouse in Rafah, though it is unclear whether these are the tents referred to by the defence ministry.

The ceasefire agreement passed by the UN last month called for “an immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan respected by all parties leading to a lasting sustainable ceasefire.”

Israeli ministers dismissed the resolution, with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stating that Israel has “no moral right to stop the war in Gaza until we return all the hostages to their homes.”

During this time Israel has continued to carry out strikes in Rafah. The area now holds approximately 1.5 million people, many who have moved from elsewhere in the Gaza strip. It remains to be seen what options remain for them in the event of a large-scale Israeli offensive.

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Jake Godin, Logan Williams and Carlos Gonzales contributed research to this piece.

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The post In Rafah, Israel Continues to Strike Despite UN Ceasefire Resolution appeared first on bellingcat.

Der Filmemacher Paul Trillo nutzte das generative Videotool Sora von OpenAI, um das Musikvideo zu „The Hardest Part“ des Singer-Songwriters Washed Out zu erstellen und ich wette, dass das nicht das letzte Musikvideo dieser Art sein wird. Das steckt ja alles erstmal noch in den Kinderschuhen.

(Direktlink, via The Awesomer)