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.
"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.
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.
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".
Not the OP, but it has recently come to light what lots of people had already suspected, i.e. that Bellingcat is laundering information provided to them by various Western intelligence companies. From here [1]:
> Paul Mason Says Bellingcat Launders Information For Western Intelligence
> "Just as Bellingcat get a steady stream of intel from Western agencies, I suspect the attacks on you and others are fed by Russian and Chinese intel," Mason is seen telling Khan, who has been the subject of a previous Grayzone exposé.
They're not the only OSINT group doing it, but they're the most obvious.
All you need to do is look at their financial accounts[0]
Bellingcat is indeed pure propaganda. A lot of their Russia claims during the recent conflict have been pure propaganda. They were also baselessly perpetuating the lie that the Ukrainian negotiators and Abramovich were poisoned ahead of their talks in Turkey, which turned out to be complete BS, but they didn't back down after it was proving BS either[1].
He also made ridiculously outrageous claims about Russian resources for the war which he at least walked back a little bit from[2]. Which have been echoed in such a way that people in the west seriously believed that Russia is a third world army that can't handle basic logistics, so that we could funnel more weapons to Ukraine in the hopes of crippling Russia for the future. Everyone that questioned this completely absurd narrative was insulted, attacked and called a Putin shill.
People would like to believe that Bellingcat is not propaganda, because they have been the primary source for certain bigger events that gave a lot of legitimacy to the 'Putin is Hitler' narrative and if it was propaganda, we would have to reevaluate those narratives.
Another one of these propaganda shills is Anders Östlund who was calling for the dismantling of Germany and France along the way. “The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA)’s mission is to ensure a strong and enduring transatlantic alliance rooted in democratic values and principles with strategic vision, foresight, and policy impact”[3]
It's not really surprising that these groups are funded by the national endowment for democracy, BAE, lockhead martin, etc.. But surprising to me is a bit that there are Microsoft and Google in some of these groups donor lists.
I remember a fake FUD "anonymous letter from FSB officer" which surfaced on HN in early March, for which Bellingcat was quick to issue a "seems legit". Needless to say, in a week most sources deleted the letter as its non-authenticity became too apparent.
So basically, they're reposting/legitimizing war propaganda.
"We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal aSorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -"
Reading the letter, you see that they don't say that the laptop is misinformation, or that the emails are fake. Only that, without attempting to verify the evidence available, they suspect it is fake because it is Russia's MO.
Why would people who make their career from verifying intelligence evidence not look at the actual evidence? Not attempt to verify before assessing it. So they don't have to lie about it.
Great point! It’s great to be aware of this, and I would argue that it is still better than a lie, you just have to know you are observing a black hole (seeing something due to the effects around it)
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
> Watchdog raised $340,000 from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which let it hire full-time staffers ...
Edit:
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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.