Meet the new intel analysts. Welcome to the age of the selfie war, where intel analysts and armchair military watchers scrape the open Web for news of troop movements, ship transits, and planeloads of weapons being shipped to suspect regimes around the world. FP's Elias Groll surveys the new landscape, and finds that some longtime intel analysts are as surprised as anyone by the amount of information that ordinary Russian grunts in Syria and Ukraine regularly share on social media. The explosion in publicly available satellite imagery has gone a long way in making this kind of intel gathering possible, but it also comes with a downside.
Ruslan Leviev, a 29-year-old Russian who founded what he calls the Conflict Intelligence Team, leads a half-dozen staffers in trying to piece together the digital dust being left behind by Russian service members in Syria. "We are not journalists. Are we combatants? It certainly seems so," he told FP, admitting that he has received death threats, and calls from Russian authorities looking to find out more about what he's doing.
