Hi everyone, good to see you back here! 

How did you find last month’s challenges? We’re back with a brand-new series created by a guest contributor who has manipulated a series of images. The challenge, should you choose to accept it, will be to look beyond those modifications. 

We’re also looking back at last month’s challenges, highlighting the great blogs and write-ups we’ve received from community members. 

Many open source investigations start with a photo or video. But as the quality of AI image generation and editing software improves, researchers need to be increasingly careful about verifying the authenticity of an image. This was a challenge we faced in a recent investigation into an image posted in De Telegraaf, the largest newspaper in The Netherlands.

This month’s challenges were created by Gisela Perez de Acha, an open source investigator, reporter and a member of the Bellingcat Volunteer Community. Gisela regularly shares videos with OSINT methods on her Instagram feed. She also organises online trainings to help people to learn open source research methods. Make sure to check out her work!

Get started with the challenges here. 

Don’t forget to join the #BellingcatChallenge channel on our Discord server, it’s the best place to ask questions and collaborate with others working on the challenge.

SPOILER ALERT: From this point on, we’ll be discussing last month’s challenges. If you still plan to complete them, you may want to skip this section.

Here are the answers to the ‘After the Blast’ challenges:

In ‘Shattered Glass’, the goal was to find the minimum peak overpressure required to shatter glass after an explosion. On our Discord server, a user shared a resource explaining a method called the ALOHA (Areal Locations of Hazardous Atmospheres) Default Overpressure Levels of Concern. This program identifies threshold levels of pressure from a blast wave, usually the pressure above which a hazard may exist. It states that 1.0 pounds per square inch (psi) is the minimum level to shatter glass. Converting psi to kilopascal (kPa) gives you the correct answer. 

The ‘Charge Size’ challenge was a follow-up to ‘Shattered Glass’. Here we needed to find the minimum amount of TNT required to shatter windows 30 meters away. There are some online tools available that can help  answer this question, like this one from the UN. In the calculator option of this tool, you can add the type of explosive, the charge weight and the range. From the previous challenge question we know that the minimum kPa to shatter glass is 7. Testing different values in the calculator allows us to see that you need at least 4.75 kg of TNT to shatter windows at this distance.

For the ‘Point of Origin’ challenge, the ‘Clear Cast’ blog provided a great breakdown of the solution (impressive as they note it was the first Bellingcat challenge they had undertaken). The challenge can be broken into two sections, identifying the location and then finding the direction that the munition was fired from. Using Google Lens, the AI overview repeatedly suggested to Clear Cast that the sculpture in the background is located in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine. Going through photos of churches in this region, Clear Cast found one that matched the image. Assessing the direction the munition came from can be approached in more than one way. Nezr Kaan noted that one section of the crater shows uplifted asphalt, which tells us something about the direction of the munition. 

The Clear Cast blog takes another approach and looks at the markings around the crater. Dirt and fragmentation form an arrow shape where the tail of the arrow indicates the direction from which the weapon was fired, according to Global Security’s Crater Analysis and Reporting.

Both Nezzr Kahn and Clear Cast  managed to correctly conclude that the munition came from the North, despite approaching things in different ways. 

Solving ‘In the Ruins’ is all about finding a good reference photo. A website like the Open Source Munitions Portal is a great resource in such scenarios. You can find more information about this database in the Bellingcat Toolkit. By comparing features of the munition to images available in the Open Source Munitions Portal it was possible to identify the remnant as a Joint Direct Attack Munition. For this challenge, you did not need to narrow down the specific variant of this munition. 

In the last challenge of this series, ‘Remnant Recovered’, the key clue to identifying the munition type and manufacturer was the code visible on the remnant. The first five numbers are a CAGE code, a unique 5-character number assigned to a manufacturer. This specific code refers to Lockheed Martin. In the source of the image, mentioned in the challenge description, you can find more information about the specific munition type that was shown. 

Bellingcat is a global collective uncovering facts to hold power to account. We share everything, including our methods, because the truth belongs to everyone. Support our work by joining our membership program: https://www.bellingcat.com/donate  

That’s it for this month’s Bellingcat Challenge Newsletter. We’d love to hear your feedback on the challenges. You can also join us on Discord and let us know if you have ideas for future challenges.

Before we go, here are some links to other current projects from Bellingcat: