Crowdsourcing Airstrikes
How Random Citizens are Picking Targets, Exposing War Crimes, and Shaping Battles from Behind their Screens
Tools once reserved for the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies have made their way into the hands of normal citizens everywhere. High definition satellite imagery, facial recognition software, advanced data analysis programs, and other open-source intelligence tools have made it possible for anyone to determine another’s identity, their location, their movements, connections, or even their complicity in a crime.
In recent years, these tools have been used to much more ambitious ends, as individual cyber-warriors have intimately mapped live battles, catfished foreign soldiers, exposed war crimes, and even called in airstrikes on their enemies.
Anyone, anywhere, can now serve as an online partisan in wars raging across the globe.
Internet Sleuths Call in an Airstrike
The first major instance of coordinated open-source intelligence (OSINT) use by individuals to influence combat operations was documented in the Syrian Civil War.
On the anonymous chat website 4Chan, a small group of international netizens created a forum titled /sg/, or Syria General, in which they could share memes, videos, gifs, and updates on the brutal conflict.
Despite mostly hailing from Western countries and memeing in English, these individuals overwhelmingly supported Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad. Forming a strange coalition, the forum’s far left backed Assad’s Regime for resisting American imperialism, while its alt-right contingent viewed him as a White crusader in a global battle against Islam.
A combatant in Syria took notice of this peculiar forum and realized he could channel their eccentric support for his purposes. In the months of April and May of 2016, a poster under the pseudonym Ivan Sidorenko requested help from 4Chan and Twitter users in geolocating several places which had appeared in rebel propaganda videos.
The /sg/ Community descended upon Google Maps in the hunt for clues. Showcasing a collective wit and cleverness, the untrained posters rapidly identified a rebel training site from the video based on its distinctive power lines and building structures.
Sidorenko promptly forwarded the details of the crowd-sourced investigation to the Russian Ministry of Defense on Twitter. Within a few hours, a Youtube video was posted which appeared to show the location being hit by Russian airstrikes.

“Holy Shit We’ve Done It”
“The regulars here have blood on their hands… Which is a bit morbid if you think about it”
For the Russia MoD, the intelligence gathered by 4Chan cyber-warriors was solid enough to warrant several airstrikes, with locations being bombed in Khan Tuman on April 4th and in Al-Lataminah on May 31st.
While the airstrikes could be coincidence, it is highly unlikely given their specificity. It is far more likely that Sidorenko himself, a member of the Syrian Arab Army, used both his web savviness and Russian ties to bring the strikes to life.
With a simple internet connection and some English language skills, foreign military and intelligence members such as Sidorenko are now only a click away from sympathetic internet mobs, who can help them rapidly conduct intelligence and paint targets in real time.
However, these online warriors are far from professional intelligence gatherers, and despite their victories in targeting Syrian rebels, their actions often achieve the opposite of the intended goal. In one instance, a member of /sg/ managed to get a Dutch concert canceled and himself arrested while trying to bait and catch potential terrorists in Europe. In a separate tragic incident, online mobs aiming to identify the Boston Bombers ended up driving an innocent man to suicide after thousands of threats and slurs were unjustly directed his way.
The Clash of Open-Sourcers - Ukraine vs. Russia
The Russo-Ukraine War in 2022 radically expanded the scope of noncombatant intelligence operations. For the first time, millions of international internet partisans have been able to make a mark on a conflict thousands of miles away from their homes.
In the first weeks of the Ukraine War, an unfathomable amount of information flooded the internet. Ukrainian villagers live Snapchatted Russian tanks on their roads, farmers Whatsapped helicopters overhead, and families Instagrammed shells exploding from their balconies.
Overwhelmed, but recognizing the major tactical advantage of this info, Ukrainian Armed Forces devoted significant resources to sifting through the endless content to discover every Russian movement they could. The Ukrainian side even rolled out specialized apps for citizens to report enemy movements, such as Diia, where direct messages, photos and videos can be sent directly to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
According to Mikhailo Federov, Head of the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation, the tens of thousands of daily reports have been “Very very useful”.
However, intelligence support from online hobbyists may be even more consequential than the instant ground reports. Members of the OSINT community ProjectOwl have produced millions of reports for the Ukrainian side, using everything from flight tracking, to social media analysis, to NASA’s public database of fires to document artillery shelling.
OSINT use has thus created the most accurate, up-to-date war mapping tool to ever exist. Deep State Map is an open-source mapping tool run by several young Ukrainian men out of a small Kyiv office. Every few minutes, around the clock, they update the map, field by field, trench by trench. The Russian side, in red, is demarcated by each individual brigade, while the Ukrainian side is shown, but its specific units obscured.
Hundreds of volunteers send thousands of videos to the site administrators each day, helping verify videos, photos, and radio transmissions from the conflict region. Upon validation, updates are made to the map and various units, vehicles, and weaponry are identified.
This map has been of enormous service to the Ukrainian side, whose soldiers use the map daily, crediting it as helpful in targeting and awareness. A separate, more sophisticated map is provided to Ukrainian intelligence, who work in tandem with the open-source analysts.
The Russian side also uses this map frequently, alongside Russian-sympathetic OSINT maps such as Rybar and Suriyak, which aim to provide similar benefits to their side as DeepState does for Ukraine.
These mapping tools have revolutionized information in war, and may be able to account for events more rapidly than ground commanders and those in the trenches can.
Movements have also been ascertained from a rather unconventional, modern means: Dating apps. According to reports, Ukrainian women are using sexy AI honey-traps to lure Russian soldiers into giving up crucial information and potentially their locations. This online-dating method has also been used by the Russian side who have managed to coax Western military members into forfeiting sensitive info.
Keyboard-warriors also identified numerous Ukrainian and Russian positions by spotting and geo-locating front-line soldiers’ selfies and Tiktok dances. Even carefully considered posts can get soldiers killed. In several instances, although soldiers' backgrounds were intentionally unidentifiable, their locations were discovered and targeted using photo metadata.
Many deaths have resulted from such lapses in intel on the Ukrainian side as well, leading Zelensky to sign a law banning videos and photos from combat regions and heavily restricting social media use.
It’s not only pictures and videos from the trenches that can get combatants into trouble however. Using social media, Russian-sympathizing vigilantes have identified and doxxed hundreds of volunteer foreign fighters through a telegram channel known as ‘Trackamerc’. After collecting publicly available intel, its 38,000-strong member base harasses the exposed foreign fighters, and if the foreigner was killed in combat, they contact and taunt the fallen’s families.
Crowd-funded Warfare
Not only have online activists been able to map, target, and identify enemies in war, they also have been able to fund war in a manner never seen before. Numerous Ukrainians on the front lines monetize their war by selling personalized messages on munitions. Internet users can pay $40 for a Ukrainian soldier to draw memes, their names, or ‘from Texas with love’ on shells and mortars fired towards Russian positions. Other macabre online fundraisers court donations for drones, ‘dronations’, in return investors get HD videos of the tech blowing apart Russian soldiers.
Documenting War Crimes from Cafes
Not all open-source conflict intelligence is done for offensive purposes. For many hobbyists and investigative journalists, OSINT provides the opportunity to uncover and document war crimes, paving the way for future justice and accountability.
Successful investigations in recent years in Sudan, Ethiopia, Yemen, and Ukraine were able to connect war-crime perpetrators to the location of massacres, identify individuals involved, and counter official Government narratives with substantive evidence.
These successes have led organizations such as Amnesty International and Europol to open their own OSINT investigative units, and evidence gathered could assist in formal prosecutions in the international bodies at The Hague.
In an in-depth investigation recently, independent researchers for Bellingcat were able to collect and map the intentional and systematic mass-destruction of Palestinian infrastructure in Gaza by Israeli Defense Forces. Each clip of a civilian apartment bloc’s leveling is accompanied by a verified video of the culprits, proudly showcasing their work for social media attention.

Other independent investigations have intimately mapped out the killings of journalists and children in the West Bank, providing second-by-second analyses of the events as they transpired.
For victims of war crimes, legal channels may fail to enact justice even with these damning reports. However, the reports alone cut through propaganda and validate the experiences of survivors. At the very least, this evidence can set the historical record straight and inform the public on contemporary crimes against humanity.
OSINT Activists Beware
Online partisans should pause and reflect, as their vigilantism presents many potential consequences. For most, mapping wars and identifying actors involved is nothing more than a fun and engaging hobby which can give them the veneer of power.
However, as Nietzsche famously penned:
“If you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss will stare back at you”
Russian, Israeli, Chinese, American and even Rwandan intelligence services have a global reach with the capacity to retaliate against those meddling in their affairs. It is not out of the question that prominent online partisans could find themselves targeted by harassment, doxxed, detained, or even assassinated. For those uncovering war crimes this may be an acceptable risk, but for others, reconsiderations should be made.
Conducting digital intelligence may not only have potential repercussions for personal safety, as mob-intel movements also present major moral conundrums. OSINT forums are quite open to misdirection and infiltration by malicious actors, and in some cases, researchers may be harming their cause more than helping it.
In other instances, users may find themselves way over involved in a violent conflict they have no personal stake in. In the case of the 4Chan Syria airstrikes, several users, after playing accomplice to the aerial slaughter of humans a world away, expressed remorse for their role. A grim awakening indeed.
The wars of today are no longer confined by geography and national affiliation. Now, anyone can serve as a partisan, providing intel, maps, targets, espionage, and resources to the foreign military of their choosing.
In the era of connectivity, everything has become accessible, even the perils, triumphs, and moral complexities of war.