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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

An online "open source intelligence" group has released a report implicating Russia [npr.org] in the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 in July 2014:

Russian officials are trying to discredit a new report that implicates the Russian military in the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 [bbc.com]. Nearly two years ago, that attack in the skies over eastern Ukraine killed 298 people.

The latest report comes from a U.K.-based organization called Bellingcat [bellingcat.com], which bills itself as a group of citizen investigative journalists. Much of their work is done by volunteers, who sift through open source information on the web, using social media and satellite imagery. The group was launched with a crowd-funding campaign, and says it now receives a grant from Google.

[...] "We discovered quite quickly that the soldiers there were using a lot of social media, posting photographs of each other, posting photographs of the base," Higgins says.

The photographs included pictures of their equipment, such as their Buk missile launchers. The launcher that was believed to have shot down the Malaysian airliner had an identification number that was partly worn away, but the researchers were able to pick out other unique characteristics. They included a dent in the side of the launcher and even the pattern formed by soot around the exhaust pipe.

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