In this episode of NeedleStack, hosts AJ Nash and Robert Vamosi engage with James Villenueve, a geospatial intelligence expert, to explore the world of GEOINT and its intersection with open source intelligence (OSINT). They discuss the importance of understanding geospatial data, the ethical implications of its use, and the challenges of protecting personal information in a data-rich environment. The conversation also highlights positive applications of geospatial intelligence, including environmental monitoring and humanitarian efforts, while addressing the risks associated with data misuse and the evolving role of AI in the field.
[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to another edition of Needle Stack. Brought you by Authentic8. I'm one of your hosts today, AJ Nash. I'm a digital intelligence advocate over here. Got a long history in intelligence, intelligence, community, and all sorts of fun stuff like that. Most people probably know that. Rob, you wanna introduce yourself as the cohost today?
[00:00:32] I'm Robert. And I've got a background in security, so, we make an interesting pair and I'm really excited about this topic because as a journalist I've covered how you can take a photograph and glean all sorts of insights as to where and how that photograph was taken. And so our guest today is gonna start talking about that aj.
[00:00:52] Yeah, exactly. So Geoint is what we're gonna talk about today, right? And we're joined by an expert ames Villenue ve. James right now is founder and principal consultant for Percepta consulting. But he has a long history in geography and anthropology. He's got, you know, cool degrees from University of Victoria and British Columbia Institute of Technology, and I'm really excited to have this conversation too about all the things that go along with Geoint and just.
[00:01:15] You know what we can learn from this. So, James, I didn't give a lot of details, so you could fill in, you know, more of your background, talk to us about where you came from, and then we'll jump into the topic. Yeah. Thanks for having me, guys. I'm really excited to jump on here and, and have a, a really fun conversation about all things geospatial and also that kind of intersectionality of open source intelligence and geospatial.
[00:01:36] Yeah, I've got a pretty unique background. I usually have a hard time boiling it down into the elevator pitch. Definitely have more of an educational and kind of initial kickoff point in that world of remote sensing, satellite imagery being kind of the core, you know, area of my, my focus and then over the years, over the last eight years or so, I've spent most of that time in the open source intelligence arena working for a few different vendors.
[00:01:59] Probably the core one being Echos sec, in which I was one of the, you know, initial hires that joined the organization there to help. Scale the company. And, you know, it was, I would say one of the earlier pioneers that took geospatial intelligence, geospatial information, really strongly fused it with osint data sources.
[00:02:19] So, happy to dive into it and looking forward to today's conversation. Yeah. Very cool. So listen, let's let's level set a little bit for folks who are just jumping on and saying, well, what, what's geoint? Right? So we, we kinda mentioned a little bit, I know you talked about it as well, but just for everybody in the audience when we talk about geoint, like what are we saying specifically, what is geoint.
[00:02:39] Yeah. I feel like you could have that conversation. That could be the whole, the whole podcast episode. You know, GEOINT geospatial intelligence to me is really just that understanding of the where behind information. So, you know, that's about using maps, it's about imagery, location, data, and kind of putting that context around events or patterns.
[00:03:01] You know, whether that's detecting changes in terrain infrastructure, activity patterns, whether it's. You know, analyzing movements and deployments in a critical conflict zone or adv, you know, adversary movements. And then also maybe it's a time-lapse data set time series data. So you're looking at you know, anticipation of actions or, or looking at historical trends.
[00:03:23] And then Rob, you, you kind of mentioned as well, one of the more I would say. Unique and novel sources, which is, you know, interpreting the actual location within the pixels of an image, which seems to be where a lot of geoint and osint kind of fusing is taking place these days. So I wanna pick up on that.
[00:03:41] One of the stories that I've written about is of a Japanese actress who had photographs on her social media site, and somebody used the reflections in the mirrors, even in her eye to determine like what building she was in and what floor she was on, et cetera, et cetera. That type of stuff is real.
[00:04:03] Yeah, I, I mean it's real in a variety of different sources. I think, you know, one of the best ways to think about it, it is not always as you know, big budget movie as the twinkle in somebody's eye, or the reflection in somebody's eye. Sometimes it's the metadata of a photo and you're picking up, you know, lot long coordinates.
[00:04:20] I. You know, the origins of a lot of, you know, geo referencing in open source intelligence has been metadata. That being said, I think we do see, you know, a pretty impactful element of geo. And right now being the, the analysis and AI is obviously a huge help out here around the content, the pixels of an image, and being able to actually reference a specific.
[00:04:46] Place in the world based on maybe the background of an image specific, you know, mountain range in the background. You see these kind of super locators online as kind of maybe the, the far end of it or the human element of it. And then I think there's also a huge technical component as well. So in photographs, there are exif data and you can turn that off like on your mobile phone, so it's not there.
[00:05:11] So in the past that was the easiest way because exif gives you a whole bunch of rich stuff to work with. But you're saying that you can just take it from the pixels and, and go from there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's some really interesting companies out there, you know, I'll give a one shout out to, to Geo Spy.
[00:05:31] I think a, a pretty novel and, and up and coming company within the, you know, law enforcement and national security space that is doing exactly that. They're able to geo reference. A specific location solely based off of the pixels in the image. There's no background metadata taking place. They're not going and looking at the, the profile location of a Twitter account to then add to the enrichment.
[00:05:55] It is solely off of the image itself, but it does open up some interesting opportunities for people who want to go a step further. You know, listen, I, I'm an old school Intel guy, as, as you know, as, as most people do. There's a lot of folks, whether we're from the agencies and, and do some of that, or, or there's just hobbyists out there.
[00:06:10] O centers or professional o centers, not from the agencies, not to slight anybody who do this in their free time, just 'cause it's like a fun challenge, right? There's, you know, all sorts of challenges on social media. Like, here's a picture, find where I am, right? And people start digging around it and then.
[00:06:22] Those where I put out there, normally there's be a metadata to work off of. You really have to look for landmarks. You know, I, I'll give an example of, I watch a, a television show. I won't name the show because I don't wanna be advertising for anybody. But it wasn't that long ago I was watching a show and it was a very cool penthouse you know, apartment.
[00:06:36] It was gorgeous. Like, gosh, we, we couldn't, we couldn't barrel what it was. So I told the person I was with us, I think I can figure it out. I looked out the window, I froze it, looked out the window, found a landmark, did some digging around, and eventually was able to go back and find the exact location of where that was.
[00:06:49] And, and then I backtracked it, you know, checked the predict production and turns out, yes, that was exactly where it was filmed. It's just kind of a fun hobby to do. So you can do it for fun, but you know. What about the nefarious sides of this? How do, how do people protect against that? How do you keep companies like like you were just talking about from becoming part of a larger problem in, say, stalking for instance, or, or you know, nation state threats or criminal enterprises, whatever it might be.
[00:07:12] Yeah, I think that is a really interesting dialogue around the ethics of open source intelligence. And publicly available information. You see a lot of these technologies as they get started, I think kind of lock their use case down to an approved you know, type of company or an approved type of users.
[00:07:31] They might have some, you know, freeform utilization of it for, you know. Basic advertising and to kind of get the impact and value proposition out there into the sphere. But at the end of the day, these are really powerful technologies, and if they are not utilized appropriately, there can be some pretty drastic results.
[00:07:50] When it comes to open source intelligence and, you know, the, the, you know, the novel data sources and technologies behind it, I think, you know, it's always important to remember if we are doing it, then somebody else can be doing it. You know, nefarious actors. Absolutely have access to breach data sources online.
[00:08:08] They absolutely have access to, you know, your public Instagram page that has your profile locations or geotag photos on top of it. And if somebody is able to leverage artificial intelligence to reference, you know, in, I would say decent precision, the location of an image, those individuals are also very likely leveraging artificial intelligence to do the same thing.
[00:08:31] I think there's a very interesting conversation around accountability and, and ethics and, and how we utilize these data sources. Some, some of that's un, you know, beyond your control because in, in film we talk about Maison song, which is what is in the scene, and directors will deliberately put things there.
[00:08:50] But if you're I, I'm just thinking of a demo that I watched prior to this broadcast. It was basically looking over someone's shoulder and seeing a building out. Car window and then blowing that up and finding that home in the city in which it was located. And it's like oftentimes you don't have that much control over the environment.
[00:09:11] You just snap a picture, you put it up there, and you have no idea that that becomes the anchor that somebody is going to use to try to find you. Yeah. I think, you know, the longer you spend in this industry, the more jaded you become about your online footprint and, and what you're putting out there. I, you know, my, my social media profiles are, are nil at this point, after spending many years in, in open source intelligence, and there was a while there, I remember I I did a, a.
[00:09:43] Conference and then we, you know, some publications around access to alt-right, you know, communities Online. And my name and my photo was kind of on the author page and it was talking about gab and Parler. And, you know, this was probably 2020 timeframe as things were starting to pick up across those communities.
[00:10:02] And all of a sudden I noticed. You know, my password resets on my Gmail, on my Instagram started booming. You know, you, you put your face against, you know, the tracking or collection of some of these communities and you become, I think, a bit of public enemy number one. And, and you know, people don't want to be tracked online.
[00:10:21] And I think when it comes to Telegram or some of these non indexed communities online, they really have a false sense of security. They think. 'cause I'm on four chan, nobody, you know, can track who I am or because I'm, you know, I've moved off of Twitter or I've been banned from Twitter, or maybe not Twitter anymore.
[00:10:38] But, you know, this is earlier days you know, censored from these communities. I've moved elsewhere online. And that then becomes an expectation of privacy. And the reality is there's very little privacy online at this point. Okay. So I mean, they're really positive or po powerful technologies that we're talking about here.
[00:10:57] Right? Again, I'm an old school, you know, Intel guy. When I was growing up in Intel space, the technologies we're talking about didn't exist. It was all nation state. You know, you could, you couldn't get maps, you couldn't get satellite imagery, you couldn't get all these things. And then companies started bringing that out commercially.
[00:11:10] I know Google was one of the big ones. They were Smothers, I'm sure, but, and then everybody started being able to see that. And then you see where we are today and the kind of technologies we have available on our phone. Again, are things that used to be just, you know, at the nation state level. Now they're cheap or free for anybody.
[00:11:23] And of course, other nation states who don't have the technology now have access as well. And it makes for a really dangerous world, right, where you can't, you know, as you said, you can't really protect yourself. Nothing's safe. You know, you've talked about not, you know, being on social media anymore. I, I've never had a Facebook account in my life other than, you know, for targeting purposes, you know, Intel versions, but not one of me, of course.
[00:11:41] So I guess the question I have is like, what do you have for advice or thoughts on how do people protect themselves against this? If this is everywhere and it's free and it's easy to get ahold of, you know, what do people do to keep themselves safe? Not everybody's obviously gonna be a target of, you know, criminals or, or countries or whatever, but there's, there's danger of all around us.
[00:11:56] So what do you suggest? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, good data hygiene, good social media profile hygiene is really what this boils down to. As much as I wanna be going around begging my drum that you shouldn't have social media, the reality is people wanna engage in these communities online, and I think a, a really solid understanding of the metadata that is associated with what you're sharing online.
[00:12:19] How each of these social media. Communities and, and apps on your phone are accessing your data. You know, location data being, you know, as we're talking about geospatial and geospatial intelligence, probably the biggest one here. We can take a look at some of the most recent changes on mainstream apps like Instagram that you know.
[00:12:37] By default now within the application are sharing location tags when somebody posts a public story, and now that's accessible. You know, well beyond I think somebody's initial understanding, which in history, when posting a story on Instagram and tossing a place tag on was. You know, not something that was creating a latlong of where you publicly are when you post that story.
[00:13:00] Twitter in a similar sense or x I should say in the golden age of publicly available information by default was attaching a latlong metadata. To every post that evolved over time. And now back in kind of 2025 x, there's three different versions of location intelligence on somebody's account.
[00:13:22] Their account location does have metadata with the kind of home location provided on their public profile. Tweets that have a place tag also have metadata attached to it, and there is the ability now, again to tweet with a specific lat long point coordinate attached to it. All of that is managed solely by somebody's utilization and, and kind of education of social media.
[00:13:49] I, I think there's a whole other dialogue on the backend too, of kind of location privileges of apps. Particularly as it relates to commercial telemetry or ad tech data on your phone. Maybe it's not as obvious to somebody that they're posting a photo on Instagram and putting a place tag on it, but maybe you've allowed your location data to be collected by an app like Amazon or you know, one of the other dozen apps that are doing it on your phone and, and they're selling that data and that data is then collected and sold to other individuals online.
[00:14:22] Hopefully it's for marketing purposes only, but at the end of the day, the reality is there's, you know, signals, data sets out there for sale on the market that do collect. Mobile device location data, your pattern of life, your movement history, your bed down locations, if you're, you know, taking it from a targeting perspective.
[00:14:40] That's probably, again, there's, there's kind of the user, what are we posting online, and then there's, you know, what are we actually sharing with our location data and what's happening to it when we add these kind of location privileges to apps on our phone. You kind of touched upon it a little bit getting beyond the nation state nefarious uses of this.
[00:15:00] Tech. There are some, I'm gonna qualify it by saying positive uses of GON. Can you talk a little bit about that, like in the commercial space? Yeah, absolutely. I think as we're talking about geospatial intelligence in, you know, open source intelligence vendors or, or plat, you know, software as a service platforms you know, when I say geospatial, I think there's some really fantastic geospatial data out there in kind of the earth observation.
[00:15:29] There's imagery, there's radar, there's marine, you know, sensor data. But signals intelligence oftentimes has a geospatial component to it that is now being kind of bundled into geo intent Osint on the lower side or maybe more crowdsourced side of that. It could be something like wg l which is gonna be crowdsource wireless networks, wifi, Bluetooth cellular tower triangulation can be a really interesting data source.
[00:15:55] Maybe a little less. Entity or person based, but it's still got, you know, lap long location of somebody's wifi router and that does the security risk in, in and of itself. But the commercial telemetry ad tech side, yeah, I mean this is mobile device data from, you know, an SDK on your phone that.
[00:16:13] Is deeply capable of building really impactful pattern of life workflows and analyses on an individual. It can start as wide as, you know, drawing a large geofence over a city and trying to identify devices that don't come from that country. And then once you have that mobile device id, you can really zero down onto one specific device.
[00:16:37] And look at, I don't know, life movement over the last 90 days. Over the last six months, where has this one specific device been? And where are we collecting information on it? And I would say outside of the, you know, public sector utilization, oftentimes this is just being harnessed for things like marketing, real estate development, you know, where are boots on the ground most often, where are these people tending to spend their time?
[00:17:02] But I think if we are taking an approach from, you know, government utilization, national security, utilization defense that could look like monitoring troop movement. Russia monitoring, you know, adversary locations and bed down locations for somebody that is involved in cross border narcotics.
[00:17:19] You know, I think there's a lot of utility here that has value. But the inherent risk of this data is that. We say open source intelligence oftentimes interchangeably with publicly available information. And the reality is this is not publicly available information. This is very much commercially available information, which has its value.
[00:17:40] But I think there is a really. Much needed conversation about how we're bundling all of this under the Osint umbrella. And what is, what is the ethics, what are the risks here of, you know, just boiling this all down to one simple term. There's value, but what are the risks when we consider something like your mobile device, data that's being sold and then utilized as publicly available?
[00:18:06] Well, yeah, and that's, I mean, that's a really good point, right? So, I mean, you know, positive use cases. I know we talked a little bit, it comes to mind, you know, something like search and rescue for instance. Or, you know, a missing persons whether it's a, you know, somebody who might be young or it could be somebody who's, you know, got a medical condition, the elderly, right?
[00:18:21] I mean, these are, these are situations I think where we're being able to access this data can be really, really helpful. To, to track down people, you know, for their own benefit, right? As opposed to, to stalking somebody or, or trying to arrest somebody or troop movements or something like that. So.
[00:18:33] There seems to be some positive to this, but you had also talked about, you know, this ad data, right? And so, you know, a lot of people wonder like, well, I show up in a new city or a new town, and all of a sudden all these ads really seem to, to hit what I want. Gosh, they know that I'm looking for a new you know, a new patisserie in a city that I've landed in.
[00:18:48] How, how does it know that? Right. And it, I, I'm gonna ask the question I think I may know the answer to, but for the audience anyway. Is that what all this is? I've got all these apps on my, on my phone. I've got this activity, all the things we're doing, and so, and all that all comes together and right.
[00:19:01] There's a, a quick customization and suddenly, you know, all the ads match up and, and all the things match up to where I am. This is all coming together very rapidly and through technology right. I mean, I think you're spot on. It's a part of a larger algorithm conversation and kind of, it's not all just based on the, you know, the exact lat long, you know, device data on your phone.
[00:19:21] But you know, there is a substantial amount of location data on your phone via the apps you have installed that are being sold, and that does end up getting used in business and marketing intelligence worldwide. So yeah, if you're, if you're seeing location specific ads, sometimes that's, that's it.
[00:19:38] They've happened to build you know, a specific mall at a very certain area of town that has, has high foot traffic is largely because they figured out that it has high foot traffic for the demographic that they were looking for based on, you know, the demographic data on the apps that they were buying from those apps.
[00:19:56] Oh, that's a really good point. So they're actually using it in advance. Hey, we're gonna put a store someplace. We should look and see where the people, instead of trying to attract people to your store, let's just put the store where the people are. Which is actually a brilliant idea from a business standpoint.
[00:20:07] And unfortunately, you know, we talk to people about, Hey, you know, I talk to people all the time, you know, safety and security with your phones, or, you know, whatever. Hey, shut your wifi off. Shut your Bluetooth off. Right? If you're not gonna shut your location date off, every time you do that, you're get a big warning on your phone.
[00:20:19] But all the things that don't work now that your location date is off, hey, I can't, I can't tell you where you are. I can't help you with directions or give you a map or all, all the things that you want your phone to be able to do. 'cause it's not just a phone, obviously. It goes, oh, well you, you can shut off your location data, but not none of this stuff works anymore.
[00:20:32] Like you just have a phone in your hand essentially. Oh my God, I can't do that. So then people turn that stuff back on. So there's not as. It's not as easy to protect yourself from the sort of customization of your experience as you could by say, shutting off wifi or, or Bluetooth. But it is interesting to know that, you know, companies are deciding to put their businesses where the people are instead of trying to attract, or at least in some cases, instead of trying to attract the people.
[00:20:54] I hadn't thought of that. I, I think when we have these conversations, the reality is it's not all nefarious. Right? You know, there's, there's utilization here that is just, you know, capitalist utilization of, of data. I think the conversation, you know, starts to become, when it comes to, you know, the ethics and, you know, moral utilization of this data.
[00:21:13] Where's the onus? Like is it on the person holding their phone? Is it on the open source intelligence? You know, vendor, is it on, you know, the government policy and regulation? Like who's, who's accountable for using this data appropriately? I think it's, it's a little unfair to just say at, at the, you know, person based level.
[00:21:33] We are responsible for, you know, turning off all location data on our phones. The reality is. You know, there are vendors out there that do have a responsibility to leverage this data in a moral and ethical manner. And I think the ethics and osint conversation is really interesting because really it shouldn't be about limiting access to data overall.
[00:21:56] It's just about protecting trust. You know, we're a. Pretty new industry. We're seeing a huge amount of maturation in open source intelligence. Even just the utilization of the term osint in, you know, policy and regulation. But if we lose that public trust, the entire discipline loses legitimacy. So I, I think there are a lot of vendors out there that want to.
[00:22:17] You know, race to the bottom, they want to get the revenue as fast as possible. So they want to get the data that is gonna get them that revenue as fast as possible. But in doing so, they are turning a blind eye to their responsibility to the public for what is. What is ethical use of data and what is violating privacy of our, of our citizens?
[00:22:38] I've talked about a post-privacy world and some of those things. I'm not sure, I'm not sure how far we are from that, but I think that that has more to do with people and culture and society as a whole. Agreeing to that, I suppose I was gonna take a, a step back, literally 30,000 foot step back. I know in your past you've worked with satellites.
[00:22:57] And the same question to you. It's it's not always nefarious. It's not always military satellites looking at and so forth. There are commercial satellites that do this as well. Can you speak a little bit about some of the use cases there? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, change detection in optical imagery, these are satellites that are, you know, ultimately able to get that daily or near d daily refresh rate, a revisit rate over one specific coordinate on Earth.
[00:23:24] And what we're seeing in, in doing so, is. We are able to really effectively monitor a specific area for changes in terrain for greenhouse gas emissions monitoring. There's some fantastic companies out there now that are working in government policy regulation. They're working in oil and gas and mining to be able to effectively capture and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions as a result of.
[00:23:52] The, you know, the optical and infrared imaging on those sensors. That's a fantastic utilization of the data sets. I think we are seeing and have seen optical imagery and use around movement when it comes to civil unrest, when it comes to immigration from conflict areas and conflict zones.
[00:24:09] The UN has, has leveraged this in some of the work that they've been doing that time, kind of time series data to assess movement and trends. Becomes incredibly powerful. It's definitely got utilization in the public sector. But if we take a look at where geospatial intelligence, geospatial data and information is being leveraged, it's all the way through insurance to oil and gas, to environmental sustainability and monitoring, and there's, there's a tremendous amount of application and value for this data beyond just you know, wartime utilization.
[00:24:43] So you were talking about the environment and I guess when I think of satellite imagery, I'm thinking of looking at something on the ground. But in this case, we're looking at the atmosphere much like detecting moisture in the atmosphere. The weather satellites routinely do.
[00:25:02] Yeah, every satellite has kind of a unique combination of bands in play. Others are gonna be, you know, they're, they're more focused on the specific pixels on ground. But if we are able to assist the amount of nitrogen in soil using a satellite and affect the health, then you know, we are able to drastically improve our ability to monitor crop health.
[00:25:23] For instance, as opposed to having to manually monitor that yourself on some of these large farms. You know, I, I, there's value here that is not just. A pretty photo. You know, it's a lot of the times when you look at satellite imagery online or you see it pop up in an article, what you end up seeing is a sub 25 centimeter resolution, you know, high res image of an airport or of a city, and you go, oh, that's, that's nice.
[00:25:50] You know, that looks nice. I'm not really sure what that's being used for, but great. It looks, it looks good. The reality is when we see this being utilized in a, you know, industry setting, a lot of the times it's less to do with that optical imagery and more to do with you know, your infra band for instance.
[00:26:07] So staying with that image of a, a city, for example, you could take a random shot of that and look at it and say, okay, the angle of the sun is this. The photo was taken roughly at this time of day, and you could get the lat long. Data that way, is that correct? So when we're taking images, yeah. I mean, we, we are tasking a satellite to take an image of a specific lot long, right?
[00:26:34] So mission planning is critical when it comes to these types of satellites. So inherently when you do get you know, a geo TIF file of that image. There is referenced lat long of that image attached to it. It's not just a a p and g file at the end of the day. There is, you know, in a similar sense to what we were just chatting about with social media metadata you know, the metadata of a satellite image is where the value is.
[00:26:58] That's, that's what we're looking for here is the metadata on the backend of the image. There's also some really interesting applications around 3D modeling when it comes to satellite imagery. We're talking about urban settings. You know, if we are, you know, effectively taking images frequently of one specific place, being able to go off, off Nader.
[00:27:17] So rather than up and down off Nader on either side, we are able to create really effective 3D models that can be used again. Mineral exploration, mining, or it can be used in more of an urban planning setting. There's just such a tremendous you know, world of utilization here. Where I'm really interested to see this end up getting merged in Osint is.
[00:27:40] You know, we're talking about satellite imagery and historically, when talking about geoint or geospatial data and the Osint world, you know, and AJ you had mentioned this, it's, it's a map. It's, it's Google maps. So we see somebody that says, Hey, I've got a. Geospatial situational awareness tool. And what they actually have is, you know, a Google Maps backdrop that they're plotting dots on a map on they're, they're treating maps like a user interface problem and not an intelligence problem.
[00:28:10] And, and they're really not necessarily adding geospatial information that. That does have intelligence to it. They're just making the, the, the picture a little prettier by dropping a map interface on there. So I'm, I'm really interested to see the vendors in the space that over the years and continue to innovate here by not just putting pin drops on a map, but context layering analysis.
[00:28:34] You know, how can we look at how locations shift? How can we look at how context evolves over a specific place in time using this really impactful data as opposed to just making geospatial kind of the backdrop so that we can check off the cable. Well, yeah, you're talking about the difference between.
[00:28:50] Google Maps and Arc, GISI mean, for instance, right? I mean, and for those who don't know Arc, GISI don't, I I don't have time to explain it here frankly, and I'm not an expert. James probably could, it could be somebody in talk to later, but I've worked with some people who do amazing things with this platform.
[00:29:04] And then you get into all sorts of just unbelievable technology that can be layered on top of that and give you all sorts of, you know, insights, right? You can, you can figure out how water's gonna flow through an area or how air flows through, or you can talk about how, how the air quality will change depending on, depending on heat or depending on whatever's been put in there.
[00:29:20] You can obviously talk about crops, as you mentioned. You can talk about minerals. It's all these different pieces and, and, and just if you change a slight angle, oh, hey, what if we dug, you know, the, the trench this way instead of that way. What if, you know, what if we changed this? What if we built the construction?
[00:29:31] The canal goes this direction instead of that direction. There's so much that can come in there. It's not just a map, right? I, I'll the map will be able to tell you where the canal is. It won't tell you where you should have put it and why, and what the flow is gonna be and, and all the, the obstacles that'll come if you don't build it properly.
[00:29:43] Right? But so I am thinking though, in what Rob had said, so. There's a piece that popped into my head. I talk a lot about mystic and malformation. It's kind of my big pet peeve in life at this point. And I wanna talk about in, in this terminology. 'cause I think Rob was hitting on that. I think he was heading there in terms of, hey, the angle of the sun and you know, the time of day, whatever.
[00:30:01] So we see a lot of videos that go out and people claim it's something, right? It's you know, somebody's doing something they don't like, whatever. I'm not gonna get into too many details and offend, offend somebody because I'm sure I will, but. You could sometimes go back through and obviously sometimes within the context you can look and say, well, this is clearly the wrong country.
[00:30:16] It's the wrong language on signs, or whatever it was. But sometimes it's, it's harder to do that. And then, you know, how do we have a chance to maybe look at geo as that and say, well, hold on, this can't be what you're saying, can't be the right time of day or the right location because of, you know, landmarks, backgrounds, you know, where the sun is located, time of day, et cetera.
[00:30:32] You know, some of the things Rob was talking about there. Is that something you've gotten into at all or seen people do Well. That's a really good question. I think it probably. Is going to, you know, all things geospatial imagery in itself. As well as you know, our earlier conversation kind of about enriching location of specific, you know, photos.
[00:30:51] There is going to be an inherent risk here of is this a real photo? How long until we see AI generated earth observation images that are being claimed as a specific place that aren't, I think maybe what we're gonna be able to decipher here is, because it doesn't have that metadata, it is ultimately anything that would be, you know, AI generated or an attempt of a specific place.
[00:31:13] I would hope that a geo professional will really quickly be able to decipher that by determining what the, the metadata is on the back end of that image. If it doesn't have, you know, the band information from that satellite, if it doesn't have the metadata that we can, you know, verify time taken off Nader, you know, degree.
[00:31:31] Then I'm not gonna trust it in the first place. I think it's up to us as analysts, it's up to us as intelligence professionals, geo and professionals to, you know, rely on verification. Especially now more than ever, where we see, you know, every vendor under the sudden claim AI collection or, you know, leverage ai classification, AI translation to you know.
[00:31:54] Leverage this when possible, but also there has to be a human in the seat doing verification of this. And I think in a similar sense for imagery, there needs to be somebody there verifying you know, what they have eyes on. Well, now that the AI is listening and now it knows how you're gonna identify when it's ai, I'm sure we're gonna start seeing, you know, the metadata's gonna be spoofed as well.
[00:32:14] I mean, you've just taught the AI while we were having this conversation, James, nice work and the world's off to, against No, I, I think it's a good point. I mean, they're not there yet. Again, somebody for nefarious purposes probably will go down that path. You could spoof anything eventually, but you know, I think you make some good points on what we can do today.
[00:32:28] At least, you know, as professionals, at least with people better than myself can do to get an idea of is this real? Is this not real? Because, you know, the attacks on truth on just, you know, basic facts just seem to grow every day. There's people who want to change reality for whatever their purposes are, whatever, you know, some are doing it for the walls and some are doing it for other reasons, I'm sure.
[00:32:45] But, it, it, I'm always spending a lot more time with, with professionals and experts like yourself on whatever the technology is saying, okay, how are we gonna combat that? 'cause, you know, it's gonna take ethical, honorable o centers in a lot of cases. I think you know, to be able to do that. So anyway, thanks for, for, for jumping down that.
[00:33:01] I was just curious. Go ahead, Rob. The absence of metadata. Is something that I'm interested in because oftentimes from where I sit as like a journalist or whatever, I, I get an image, but I don't have that background that I can refer to the, the details as, as you were of the bandwidth so forth. So it's always like, what can I glean from the image itself?
[00:33:24] And you were talking about how AI is gonna generate an image but not have. The metadata there they're gonna, AI's gonna get something wrong. Like if it's showing me a building in Auckland, New Zealand and it's got the sun in the south. Clearly this is a generated image that doesn't know that the other side of the world behaves differently than the northern hemisphere.
[00:33:48] It's, it's, it's gonna take a human to determine some of these things because there's like 10 billion things that humans know that machines still do. Not sure. Yeah. Absolutely correct. I think where we could probably see some misinformation, disinformation coming here is. You know, maybe we see a nation state posting an image over a certain area and saying, Hey, look, you know, we have, we're not here, or we haven't, you know, shot missile here because this is what it looks like right now.
[00:34:16] And, and, you know, they're not gonna be releasing the geo tif file of that. They might just do a public news release of an image. You know, this, you know, ultimately draws back to when Russia initially invaded Crimea. And they were saying, Nope, we are not in Crimea. We're not here. At the time, you know, it was at Echo Sec and we were doing exactly what we're talking about here, which is, you know, validation of geospatial data.
[00:34:41] And the Russians were posting public workouts on Strava. Crimea and we could see troop movement exactly where they said they were not based on poor data hygiene and, and public information online of, of Strava routes. Strava is still one of the best geospatial publicly available data sets out there as a result of it.
[00:35:02] I think, you know, maybe that's where we see kind of the, the, the earth observation angle here is having to go out. Task, trusted satellites to validate what we might be seeing in other public releases of data. That, that, that's maybe the, the closest comparable I could draw. One of my favorite stories from all these stories of, of security failures is of course, you know, military facilities are blacked out on Google Earth, et cetera, et cetera, and then Strava comes along.
[00:35:35] And we know pretty much what the streets look like in that military, military facility because the runners are tracking their, their runs and Strava is not under the same rules that Google's under. So yeah, it's remarkable. It's, it's a good example of, of how the best. Best laid plans, right? People have all these great ideas on how they're gonna protect things and then something comes along that they're not prepared for.
[00:35:59] Because you can't control people. You can't control everything. You can't control. There's just too much going on. We're all interconnected. There's everything happening. You know, we've seen, we've seen lots of those things. I, I remember fitness watches became a big deal and know I worked in the agency and, and nobody bothered to ban them at first.
[00:36:12] And then you started realizing, you know, smartwatch is a fitness watch, things like that. You had to ban them. 'cause they have all sorts of things that shouldn't be in the buildings. Right. And that's a good example, right? Yeah. Yeah. Google Earth. Blocking of, of facilities hasn't quite gone as planned, I don't think.
[00:36:23] So listen, I think this is a really fascinating conversation. You know, we could probably go on and on about this stuff. I I'm gonna ask you one more question and I think we'll get outta here 'cause I think we're gonna run up on time, but I'm curious and all the times you've been doing this, okay, I lied.
[00:36:36] I got two questions. I'm gonna try to spin 'em, I'm gonna try and pull 'em together 'cause they just popped into my head and then Rob can figure out how to edit it out. So I got two questions. You can edit however you want. So, the first one is. Your background isn't military, it's not government. You, you came out of a totally different environment, you know, can you talk a little bit about that?
[00:36:52] Like backgrounds, other ways to get into geo and, and to get into this world if you're not coming outta the military, the government. And then the other piece that I'm gonna ask, and you can figure out which one you wanna keep in the show. All the times you've been doing this, do you have like a cool, you know, one or two that you can share like cool stories of, you know, success stories or blunders that you've seen in the world, you know, related to geo end?
[00:37:11] Yeah, absolutely. Are you, I mean all, all the credit and, and honor and respect to those in my community and those in the intelligence profession who, who have served or actively serving I don't come from that background. I'm very much on the commercial side of the house these days. And started more on the research side of the house.
[00:37:32] There are so many ways, both in open source intelligence and geospatial intelligence to get involved in this community. There's fantastic education programs out there. There are some world class certification programs that you can get involved in. Shout out to Osmosis for, for some of their, you know, open source intelligence sort of.
[00:37:51] Ation programs, I think a really good starting point and kind of launching point. But beyond that, you know, geoint, geospatial one of the things I love most is that this is a perennially online community. There is a tremendous amount of opportunity online to get started. AJ you had kind of mentioned to capture the flag.
[00:38:09] Courses you know, this can be something that starts as just a skilled hobby that you can pivot into a career. There is an tremendous amount of work at education institutions and uni universities. I'm up in Canada so I can speak to ours more than the, you know, the United States. I think corporate organizations oftentimes have, you know, GIS roles or geospatial information systems, roles that have kind of a flare of earth observation or imagery attached to it.
[00:38:37] You know, I had mentioned environmental sustainability. That's an angle that I'm always, you know, you know, preaching and, and hope that people want to get involved in, in terms of finding ways to leverage this technology to take care of the earth that we live on here. Yeah, I mean there's, there's so many different directions we can take it that aren't just serving.
[00:38:53] And, you know, I'm online. I'm one of those per online humans. So if anybody's ever interested and, and wants to learn about, you know, different trends in the industry or, or ways they can get involved, I, I highly encourage people to reach out to me. Stories, fun stories. Oh man, I've got a lot of fun stories.
[00:39:11] I'll, I'll give one, one success, one blunder maybe. I think that's a fun one. So my first foray into geospatial intelligence was working for a. Earth observation company that delivered optical imagery, but they also had a, the, the world's first ever full color Earth video platform. So this was really novel at the time.
[00:39:34] I still think, you know, there's some value there. It didn't seem to really totally take off like everybody had hoped. And you know, I was working with the organization and there was kind of a big question mark of we have this novel technology, what do we do with it? Where are we gonna apply it? Who wants to use it?
[00:39:50] And there was a project that kicked off with a large brand that was doing a I I what they had advertised as the first movie motion picture ever made from space. It was gonna be, you know, you know, there's some big actors attached to it. And they, they planned something called activation.
[00:40:10] So essentially the satellite would go over. And, you know, they would drive hundreds of Volkswagen buggies around a Dubai desert into a peace sign. And, you know, in, in everybody's heads we thought, wow, this is cool. We're, we're gonna be a part of something tremendous. And I, I've seen the actors' names on here and you know, this is gonna be really exciting.
[00:40:28] And you know, everybody got together and we filmed some really fantastic stuff. And then when the movie dropped. You realize, you know, this is one meter res, this isn't, you know, a camera in front of somebody's face. This is top down, you know, some buggies driving around in a circle. So there was a, a short film released.
[00:40:45] But I think the actual satellite footage that we spent months of our life planning and, you know, dozens of people and analysts, course correcting videos and mission taskers accounted to about 15 seconds of footage across this entire video. They gotta check their box to say it was done. From space, we, you know, we're solely disappointed in the impact that, you know, space video was going to have in the movie industry.
[00:41:10] But that was my first kind of foray into, into Geoint. And I think ever since then I kind of got spooked from working with the entertainment industry more than some other impactful industries success. Oh, I mean, we could go for days here. I won't go into specific cases, but I will say.
[00:41:30] Spending eight years now in open source intelligence with the geospatial intelligence lens attached to it. I continue to be, you know, most drawn to, and, you know, have the most fulfillment behind supporting use cases around counter trafficking. You know, I've, I've worked in some really fantastic cases with some really powerful teams.
[00:41:50] Again, if I'm gonna give kind of a, a, a brief shout out. There's a really powerful nonprofit in our industry right now called Skull Games that is empowering current and former intel professionals to essentially identify victims of trafficking and the traffickers themselves. A really incredible group that has seen a tremendous amount of success.
[00:42:13] And, you know, one of the things that I have really taken home from time spent with them in the past and, and continuing to kind of cheer on my colleagues that are there is the various backgrounds that we need in this industry to see success. And one of the things that I really value about. An organization like still games is they are actively partnering intelligence professionals with survivors of trafficking themselves.
[00:42:36] And as we're talking about kind of super locators and people that can see a location and an image, sometimes that's all you have to go on in a world like that. You might have a a a, an Instagram photo. And you just have a background in that photo and you're trying to identify somebody who is missing.
[00:42:51] You're trying to identify somebody who has been trafficked. And to see kind of the merge of all these people with various life experiences and the successes and rescues of victims of trafficking has been, you know, one of the highlights of my career. That, that is a good note to end on, a very positive use of all this technology and knowledge.
[00:43:11] James, I'd like to thank you for coming on the show today. I. Thanks so much for having me guys. This was a pleasure and you can learn more more about James and where to find him. In our show notes, you can also find transcripts and other episodes. We're approaching a hundred episodes of Needles Stack, so this is pretty cool.
[00:43:29] Where do you find them? It's at authentic8.com/needlestack, that's authentic with an eight .com/needlestack. And there's also a comment button there, and I know AJ reads all of the comments, so please feel free to leave a comment for, for one or both of us. And be sure to let us know your thoughts on social media.
[00:43:51] You can find us just about everywhere under the symbol @needlestackpod, and very important, wherever you're listening to us or watching us today. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss out any episodes in the future. Aj? No, I think that's it. I, I appreciate it. You know, as Rob said, please feel free to leave comments.
[00:44:10] I, you know, I love to read them all. I certainly don't use my Osun skills to track down people who say negative things about me. But no, I honestly, the show's about the people. On the show, and it's about the people who watch and listen to the show. It's not about Rob or myself. So, you know, we do care about feedback.
[00:44:25] We want this to be a, a show that's entertaining and it's educational and it's interesting, you know, a good use of your time. So if you have questions, if you want, you know, ideas to improve it, if you have, if you know somebody who should be on the show, please do reach out. Let us know. You know, we wanna make this the best show we can for people who are taking the time, you know, to be involved.
[00:44:41] You know, as you said James, thanks for being on the show. Really appreciate it. Really interesting stuff. You know, all the way through. I hope people do reach out and get more information from you as well. You know, and everybody tries to figure out a better way to protect themselves while learning, you know, about all the things we can find in the world and the positives that come out of it.
[00:44:54] So, you know, with that in mind, again, thanks to everybody involved. I think we're gonna go ahead and just close it out. For this episode. This has been another episode of NeedleStack.
