It makes me super proud that he used Panoramio, a site I created 9 years ago. Nowadays with the prevalence of Google Street View is less useful than it used to be for this kind of stuff, but there are still places that the GSV guys have not (yet) covered.
Anyone who is impressed by this should seriously check out Andrew Sullivan's view from your window contest. Most weeks a reader submits a photo from their window, literally anywhere in the world. And people track it down with very similar techniques, to the exact window. And a lot of the contest photos offer much less to go off of than this [namely, only 1 photo, low res, country/context unspecified].<p>Here is the winners archive.<p><a href="http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/vfyw-contest/" rel="nofollow">http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/vfyw-contest/</a><p>Some of photos aren't too crazy or offer a landmark that is recognizable if you'd seen it before. But most of them offer very little in terms of knowing where to start unless you've got a huge body of contextual knowledge you can draw on.<p>A couple ones that I had absolutely no idea where to start with:<p><a href="http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2010/08/17/the-view-from-your-window-contest-winner-11/" rel="nofollow">http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2010/08/17/the-view-from-your...</a>
<a href="http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/08/19/the-view-from-your-window-contest-winner-218/" rel="nofollow">http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/08/19/the-view-from-your...</a><p>I imagine the CIA/NSA has a crack team of a couple dozen people doing this exact job.
I'm sure the government is on this as well but its pretty incredible what a citizen journalist can do from his home computer with a few basic web sites. Some of the other projects that he has worked on (finding a russian training camp, authenticating an Egyptian revolution movie, etc..) are worth a read as well
Interesting that as it's getting easier & easier for "normal" people to do stuff like this - our media is getting worse and worse at it. They've essentially given up on reporting or investigating anything original and simply spew back "opinions", "tweets" or PR releases.
I like this, but probably worth mentioning that this isn't a covert group so it seems somewhat akin to reporting where the Donetsk separatists are.
This is pretty awesome! I wanted to do something similar with the video of James Foley, but I figured there was people smarter than me already doing that and I really didn't want to watch that video.
What an odd introduction: "Have you ever wondered what it would be like to go through training as an ISIS terrorist? Or better yet, where you would go to find such advanced training?"<p>Nope.
This is cool and all, but I can't help but be reminded of the hunt for Boston Marathon bombers. Sure, maybe the author's heart is in the right place, but Random Person On The Internet could easily have gotten something wrong, that seems intuitively correct to the author and a general audience (us), but is in fact incorrect. Which makes me inclined to instead leave stuff like this up to the professionals. (appeal to authority, i know, but... getting this stuff right is important.)
I read an interesting article a while ago about who they have tried (unsuccessfully) to track<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayman_al-Zawahiri" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayman_al-Zawahiri</a><p>from land artifacts. I supposed it is a bit more difficult as google maps didnt make it to Waziristan yet.<p>It sort of reminds me of this article from a while back<p><a href="http://reason.com/blog/2014/04/03/crowdsourced-amateurs-outperform-cia-at" rel="nofollow">http://reason.com/blog/2014/04/03/crowdsourced-amateurs-outp...</a>
Such an interesting analysis, and seemingly a very nice site too. A shame the comments are so headless.<p>It's a travesty communities and discussions devolve so quickly on the internet (though I of course know from PGs eternal struggle how hard it is to prevent). Whoever can solve this problem (nice try disqus etc) will certainly claim fame.<p>Up and down votes won't cut it. It will require a serious inquiry into psychology, sociology and behavioural studies I believe.
Western governments didn't know this already?<p>I have a hard time believing they didn't. There are (in my opinion) strategic reasons ISIS was allowed to get as far as it did. And reasons they were allowed to appropriate large amounts of cash and US weaponry.
What totally shocks me here is the whopping ignorance and lack of even the least bit of effort of understanding shown in the pathetic comments. Are really so many Americans brainwashed to such a crazy extent? Well anyways it makes me sick.
Wait, so is the "new construction" around the tower the training camp? The article doesn't seem to say explicitly. Or is this more finding where they do training marches?
When looking for new apartments in NYC, a combination of Google Street View and the Flyover feature in Apple Maps does wonders to validate how truthful brokers are in their listings.