In one hour and thanks to freely accessible facial recognition tools, the French company Tactical Systems Académie was able to identify a Chechen fighter sent to reinforce Russian troops on the Ukrainian battlefields. One example among many others of what an Internet user can do from home to document this war.
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With a cellular connection remaining operational in almost all of Ukraine and thousands of videos and photos posted in real time on social networksthe war in Ukraine is fertile ground for the development of the so-calledOSINT (Open Source Intelligence), i.e. open source intelligence. With the data available and a few tools available to everyone, anyone can reveal information about the loss of equipment or men, or the location of units and areas bombed by the Russian army. This is what made the site famous. Bellingcatthe work of the investigators of which has made it possible to establish that it is indeed a missile Russian who shot down the flight MH17 of Malaysian Airlines over the Donbass in 2014, and to identify the perpetrators involved in this tragedy.
One of OSINT’s tools during this conflict relies on facial recognition. Some services are accessible to the general public, such as FindClone, which makes it possible to recognize the faces of certain Russian soldiers and find them on the Russian equivalent of Facebook, VKontakte. This is how French society Tactical Systems Academy was able to identify in about an hour, Hussein Mezhidov, a Chechen commander sent to the Ukrainian front. The facial recognition of FindClone made it possible to find a photo of this fighter near Chechen President Kadyrov on his Instagram account. This French company, which works in particular for the French army, has also used several other tools, such as the face search engine PimEyes for confirmation. Asked by Wiredone of the leaders of Tactical Systems Academy specified that this research carried out by the OSINT community makes it possible to follow the movements individuals and that if they know they are being hunted, this could prevent them from committing war crimes.
On its Twitter feed, Tactical System explains how the team managed to precisely identify a Chechen commander involved in the war in Ukraine alongside the Russian army. © Twitter
Watch out for look-alikes!
While this facial recognition work was previously reserved only for the intelligence services, today everyone can do it from home. The concern is that authentication is sometimes risky and some people can be misidentified by OSINT enthusiasts. In this case, and since the data is shared openly, this can have consequences for people and their families who have nothing to do with the target. This is why, to counter the errors of the algorithms of facial recognitionthe use of several research tools as well as the attention of an experienced human eye are essential.
But these facial recognition tools also make it possible to limit certain acts of propaganda. Thus, a Ukrainian media recently claimed that a fighter pilot captured by the Ukrainian military was identified in a photo while alongside Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad in Syria in 2017. Using a powerful reconnaissance engine developed by MicrosoftBellingcat concluded that it was not him, even though there was a strong resemblance.
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