Live, “Le Monde” celebrates its 80th anniversary | Do you know OSINT? Ask your questions to our journalists

The video investigation unit, initiated in 2019, continues to develop around an observation: most conflicts, disasters, uprisings or almost all are filmed by a telephone, strategic data is always more easily accessible and millions of people document their daily on social networks. A hubbub difficult to decipher, sort and above all verify.

For the six journalists of the team, the objective is to unearth an image in all this, a rare document which allows us to reveal new information on the major issues of the news: police violence, security of the President of the Republic , war in the Middle East, in Ukraine, drug trafficking, among others.

Because the images we investigate are sensitive and often filmed by witnesses, they are subject to extensive authentication: we determine their precise location, their date and even their time using multiple clues and proven methods.

We can create a corpus of dozens of images that reconstruct a very specific event, or document human rights abuses in conflict zones on a larger scale, for example. This approach has a nickname: the« OSINT »pour “open source intelligence” in English. It allows us to investigate the digital world, but also and above all to go where reporting comes up against impassable borders, areas that are too dangerous or confidential environments.

We strive to render our work in the most transparent and educational way possible, thanks to maps, diagrams and 3D reconstructions produced by specialist motion designers and to accompanying documents detailing our sources and our methodology. Don’t hesitate to ask questions, I will try to answer them as best as possible.