
Armchair Investigators at Front of British Inquiry into Spy Poisoning - danso
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/09/world/europe/bellingcat-skripal-poisoning.html
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Normal_gaussian
From what the article says it doesn't seem like they are armchair
investigators, they've been working on such things since 2014 in a very
serious manner.

It looks like good old investigative journalism, and not conducted by the
usual heavyweights.

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gandhium
Just the reminder - most (if not all) Bellingcat investigations about MH-17
proved to be true.

So 'armchair' investigators apparently beat thousands of 'professional'
Russian FSB/DoD investigators.

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tarcyanm
I find Bellingcat about as credible as Crowdstrike... a lot of solid,
interesting evidence, and then a tail end of questionable conclusions that
seem out of character.

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criley2
The conclusions they draw about the Russian spies are so fundamentally basic
that to question them would be a shocking assault on truth.

These spies used GRU HQ address on their undercover passports. They registered
over 300 sequential vehicles all to spies. They used their real names! This
wasn't a "Bellingcat isn't credible" situation but a "GRU failed at basic
spycraft" situation.

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ausbah
This smells like Reddit and the Boston bombings all over again.

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close04
There is some value in this but it’s buried beneath a ton of stupid
vigilantism.

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poiu345
Questions need to be asked about how the data was obtained in order to obtain
more data, like how do you get to mass email classmates? Take the July 2014
Malaysia Airlines attack, who knew Putin had flown over the area in a near
identical near looking aircraft before hand? Was the missile attack supposed
to take Putin out?

Remember there are always at least two sides to every story and to question
everything because everyone has an agenda.

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simonh
Sure, but sometimes that agenda is simply to uncover facts. Worrying about the
agenda can obscure things more than it clarifies. It isn't always about the
agenda.

On emailing classmates, that's probably trivial. Lots of school classes have
Facebook pages or WhatsApp groups, or mail groups or such. These can be
trivially easy to join.

These people are Russian military officers, they traveled to Salisbury, they
did these things, they went back to Russia. They lied about who they are and
why they went there. It doesn't really matter what the agenda of the people
uncovering this is, as long as the information is valid. The question is, what
should be done about it?

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poiu345
Do you think the military, any military, would require employees to remove
their social media profiles? I think so otherwise it seems to be poor planning
considering the UK military used to get their squaddies to DoD wipe their hard
drives before bringing any computer equipment back from Germany to the UK in
the 80's/90's.

I wonder if the Russia rhetoric is just a Cold War 2.0 rhetoric designed to
stimulate economic activity and innovation, whilst testing relevant bodies in
the UK. Its nearly ten years since the SEC was caught watching porn before the
financial crisis kicked off. Familiarity breeds contempt etc etc.

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simonh
>Do you think the military, any military, would require employees to remove
their social media profiles?

Oh come on, someone recently compiled detailed information on US military
bases from the publicly available fitbit data of all the soldiers running
round them. you can even figure out deployment patterns from it. Most
militaries, even the big ones, are desperately naive about this stuff.

~~~
poiu345
>Oh come on, someone recently compiled detailed information on US military
bases from the publicly available fitbit data of all the soldiers running
round them. you can even figure out deployment patterns from it. Most
militaries, even the big ones, are desperately naive about this stuff.

I know and so we have to trust them to make the right decisions when taking a
country into war. Jeeze we really are run by amateurs!

