Welcome to Line of Actual Control, a blog about satellite imagery, social media, and other open-source information from all corners of the internet. Sound interesting? Let’s explore.
Why subscribe?
If you subscribe, you’ll get full access to the newsletter (honestly more like a blog that I email to you) and website. Here are a few types of posts you’ll see:
Open source stories, like the time an Iron Dome rocket misfired and almost blew up a university in Israel
Technical investigations, like how a bit of Python code can detect volcanoes in Indonesia
How-to guides, like how to use OpenSky Network’sAPI to hone your flight tracking skills
If these sound interesting to you, hit that subscribe button! And if they sound really interesting to you, your friends, or your coworkers, I’d love it if you could share Line of Actual Control with them:
What is Line of Actual Control?
Most open source reporting falls into one of two camps. First, large, institutional outlets like BBC Africa Eye or the New York Times Visual Investigations team will produce monumental, detailed works of journalism that require the resources only a professional newsroom can leverage. In the other camp, individuals passionate about a certain angle or component of open source information will focus on interesting, needle-in-the-haystack observations about what they see in their domain (ships, submarines, satellites, bots, etc). To be sure, both of these groups form the bedrock of the open source community. I try to bridge the gap between the two.
I write detailed, biweekly open source investigations on topics that run the gamut from the Taliban’s social media use, to the Somali charcoal industry, to naval tête-à-têtes off the coast of Crimea. I use social media, satellite imagery, corporate registries, public government documents, a bit of web scraping, and pretty much any other open data set I can find to write these stories.
About Me
By day, I’m an analyst at a tech company focusing on social media, South Asia, and a bunch of other things. By night, I bake bread, boulder, and explore open-source stories from around the internet.
Want to Help?
I’m always eager to collaborate, share ideas, and lend a hand on any open-source investigation.
Got a tip? Want to chat? Shoot me a direct message @LOActualControl on good old twitter.com. You can also email me securely at lineofactualcontrol [at] protonmail [dot] com.
