How an OSINT Investigator Documented the Israeli Army’s Destruction of Southern Lebanon

Описание: In this episode of Show & Tell, hosts Craig Silverman and Alexios Mantzarlis talk with Barbara Marcolini, a visual investigative journalist with Amnesty International.

In this episode, Marcolini shares her journey from journalism to human rights work, highlighting her expertise in geolocation, video verification, and reverse image search. Barbara discusses Amnesty’s work documenting destruction in Southern Lebanon through a combination of on-the-ground reporting and open-source intelligence.

What you’ll learn:
📍 How to find footage for location-based videos: Use a town or city’s Wikipedia page to check for every spelling variant across different languages and alphabets.
📍 The site:t.me Google dork: Pair any keyword with site:t.me to surface Telegram channels relevant to your investigation. Telegram is where a lot of conflict footage lives and isn't easily searchable from inside the app.
📍Building geographic intuition through Google Earth: Repeated geolocation work in a small area creates a working mental map. After enough passes you can recognize a village from a new video before formally geolocating it.
📍Using reverse image search as a discovery tool, not just for verification: Screenshot a frame from a video and run it through Google Lens — not just to confirm what it is, but to find other posts featuring the location.

We'd like to thank Lead Stories (https://leadstories.com/), the founding sponsor of Show & Tell. Lead Stories is a global fact-checking organization with journalists working in a dozen languages around the world. Their slogan is "Just Because It's Trending Doesn't Mean It's True." Lead Stories combines old fashion journalism skills with technology to find and debunk false claims on social media. Fact checking is about adding information, not censorship.

About Barbara Marcolini:
Marcolini is a five-time news and documentary Emmy Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist. As an accomplished visual investigator, Marcolini was a founding member of the visual investigation team at The New York Times and is now an OSINT researcher with Amnesty's Evidence Lab, investigating human rights violations and crafting visual stories.

Links mentioned in this episode:
📍 Israel's extensive destruction of Southern Lebanon - Amnesty International (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/res...)
📍 How good are generalist AI tools at identifying public figures in videos? - Indicator (https://indicator.media/p/how-good-ar...)
📍 Follow Barbara on X (https://x.com/babimarcolini) and Amnesty International on Instagram   / amnesty  

ABOUT SHOW & TELL: Show & Tell from Indicator takes you inside digital investigations as leading journalists, OSINT investigators, threat analysts, and researchers walk through real cases they've cracked. Each episode features a recognized figure in the digital investigations community. They don't just tell us what they did — they show us.

Hosted by Indicator co-founders Alexios Mantzarlis and Craig Silverman. Produced by Ethan McCarthy.

Subscribe & Follow:
Newsletter: indicator.media
Indicator on Bluesky: @indicator.media
Hit subscribe to never miss an episode