Me, @emilkastehelmi, @eerikmatero and our wonderful team have been following the ongoing war in Ukraine for the past 3 months now, and unlike the vast majority of the OSINT community, we've done it with our own faces.
Some thoughts on doxxing ourselves, a thread. 1/17
To get it out of the way, in the long term using our own faces has brought us national recognition, appearances in national media, invitations to talk in seminars, and, in my case, a job at @HSfi. Cool stuff.
However, gloating's not the point so let's move on to other things 2/
As the war started the OSINT scene exploded and brought with it a ton of people both doing it and following it. I've said before that OSINT was the r/wallstreetbets of this February, but the ongoing war has also been the first real-time social media war. 3/
The social media accounts following the war can be mostly divided into two categories. Experts, "experts", and other public figures who use their personal accounts to comment on the war, and the masses of unknowns working behind accounts with names like @OSINTdestroyer420. 4/
With the propaganda, misinformation and often unclear reports coming from the front, there have also been a lot of mistakes made and a lot of RUMINT. Some Twitterists, basing their self-esteem on clicks, have re-tweeted anything, as long as it sounds good. 5/
We have taken a different approach to this, where we mostly try to spread confirmed or at least plausible information. This means that, especially during the early weeks of the war, we've often also spread information about Russian successes. 6/
Some sources that do this have been accused of being Russian shills, bots, or working for Moscow. We also got a lot of that, to the point that when we drew the Russian breakthrough from the east towards Kyiv on the map, some finnish forums were disappointed in us. 7/
However, as time has gone on, and the aforementioned public media appearances have happened, we've gotten less and less of that. It's easy to claim that @OSINTdestroyer420 is a Russian shill, but it's much harder to do that to people who have their own faces on the line. 8/
When people can research your background and determine that you are literally a bunch of 20-30 something with nothing to gain from shilling Russia, it's harder to spin conspiracy theories. Then again, nutjobs don't care and I've been called a CIA plant at least once. 9/
The other thing this all brings is accountability. It's tied to the previous point, but at this point the things we do also personally affect us. This has in turn led to a larger need to be careful and factual, and arm ourselves with the "we'll see" attitude. 10/17
Of course, not everyone cares, and some of the worst RUMINT-aggregators are people, especially politicians, working through their official accounts. However, none of their future careers are affected by spreading RUMINT. Ours might (except Eeriks, he's a happy accountant) 11/
@EerikMatero also likes to remind me of his philosophical stance of "even on the internet you should only say stuff you can stand behind", which, despite my constant desire to do some trolling on the map, I do agree with. 12/
It's of course easy for us to appear with our own names and faces. There are very few dangers in it for us, being Finnish with no desire to, for example, visit Russia in the next 15 years. 13/
However, some of our team members have legitimate reasons not to appear with their own names, some of them personal, some of them work-related. We imagine the same is true for even many of our trusted social media sources. 14/
And of course some people still use a username although they associate with it openly due to multitude of reasons. 15/
And of course, I've nothing to lose personally, because the goddamn *redacted* leak already happened so everything about me is out there anyhow. I feel no fear nor shame at this point. I have gotten a single weird phone call though. 16/
So that's been my mostly pointless thread on doxxing myself. I can heartily recommend trying it for everyone. You've nothing to lose but your shackles, and your personal information 17/17