How an OSINT Investigator Documented the Israeli Army’s Destruction of Southern Lebanon
Show & Tell from IndicatorShow Notes
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.
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 How good are generalist AI tools at identifying public figures in videos? - Indicator Follow Barbara on X and Amnesty International on Instagram
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.
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