Crowdsourced and Patriotic Digital Forensics in the Ukrainian Conflict

Abstract

The Ukrainian Conflict is the first European war to be fought with the ubiquitous presence of the Internet, and has thus produced thousands of hours of video, tens of thousands of online witness accounts, and hundreds of relevant satellite images that are freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection. With this information comes a vacuum of analysis that must be filled, and this has largely come from online communities of volunteer analysts, many of whom have ideological missions to fulfil through their analysis of the open source materials produced from the ongoing conflict. This chapter examines some of these online communities that have emerged from the Ukrainian Conflict from all sides of the conflict: Ukraine, separatist-controlled territory, Russia, and the West.