Kind: captions
Language: en
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hi everyone and welcome back to this
series on how to do open source
investigations from home
i'm ben this is part three and let's get
started
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in this part we're going to cover google
advanced search
and google translate and how to use the
two of them together
to get a lot more results and find what
i'd like to call hidden
information online or the results that
you wouldn't necessarily see
in a normal search so to start with this
i'm going to type in for instance
as rock it's in the center of australia
in the northern territory now we can see
a lot of interesting things about airs
rock
and over time as rock has changed for
instance
in 2020 things about asrock were very
different
as to what they were in articles in 2016
and in 2005 but sometimes
we can't necessarily see those exact
results just
by typing in 2016 2005. so i always like
to
restrict my time we can do that and
restrict our certain window of time
to for instance 2016 by having a look at
tools anytime and custom range
now what this does is it opens up a
window that allows me to choose for a
search window of time
so i'm going to search for asrock in all
of 2016
mentions and this means that i've now
searched for esroc
and only restricted my search results to
show
posts or videos or images or other
content online that were uploaded during
the year
of 2000 now that's very useful because
if you think about it
some of these things we can't do on a
lot of other websites
so for instance if we have a look at
asrock on youtube
there's a lot of videos we want to
filter them down and i want to see
videos from 2016.
how can i do that well i could click
filter but filter only allows me to view
these options here in the upload date
last hour
today this week this month this year
what if i want to have a look at results
from 2016
well it's not available is it so what i
can do is i can go back to ezrock and
restrict those youtube results to 2016.
and this is what's called google
advanced search now google
actually has an advanced search box and
you can get there by just typing into
google
google advanced search and this is a
really easy
user what user friendly way of
restricting your searches so if you're
into research
or if you're at university at the moment
or at school and you want to learn how
to get
less results but more information that
you're actually looking for
to really turn down the sound and find
out where the music is coming from
i highly recommend using google advanced
search now let's use that
manually so how do we restrict our
search results to a specific website
like youtube
we put in site youtube.com
this is now going to restrict all of our
search results
to youtube and you can see if we scroll
down here everything is now from youtube
whereas before
it was only it was from everything on
the internet so different websites and
travel sites and
tripadvisor as well as youtube and now
we've only restricted our results to
being from youtube.com with the mentions
of airs rock and we've also popped that
down to 2016
through that time tab as well which we
couldn't necessarily do here
and that's a way to bring the youtube
search engine
into google and use those filters and
restrictions of information so that we
can get those results
now if we wanted to have a look at
something else
so for instance another website let's
have a look at
for example northern territory.com
so what we can do is we can also
restrict our search results from
northern territory.com
so we take the url from there we run
site pop in our url asrock and there we
have it
so we could restrict all of those search
results to
for example let's have a look at what
happened in
january 2018 to march
2018 there we are and this has now
popped in all of the results
from the northern territory.com website
about airs rock and the results are
showing
that were only uploaded between the
first of january 2018
and the 31st of march 2018. so something
else that we could do
to add to that search string and i'll
take it off time so we can get different
results
is to have a look at any mentions in the
url
which is the part up here for northern
territory.com so we want to have a look
at nurl and we want to have a look at
airs
okay so what we've done here is we've
basically
listed websites from all of the pages
from
the site northern territory.com and in
the url we've had everything that
mentions
airs and we can see that up here so for
instance there's airs there
and we could see it in some of the other
results as well
that we're looking at and this is what
the google hacking database essentially
is
so we can see some of the recent entries
uh from
last month essentially so for instance
the solarwinds hack
we can see uh the search that was there
and we can see some of the details there
we can also
have a look at some of the other ones i
find the google advanced search
techniques very useful in investigations
or
open source intelligence or just general
research by being able to really
identify
the important bits of information that
are available online but the case
studies
that we have been looking at so far many
of them have been in different languages
so how can we fuse these with different
languages well let's have a look at that
now
so going back to our idea of doing a
site search
site youtube.com and we'll have a look
at syria because one of our case studies
focuses on syria
this gives us all of the english results
about syria
but what if i didn't want to display my
results in english what if i actually
wanted to search for this
in arabic that's quite simple so we can
do that
by going to google translate and simply
looking for the translation for syria
now what we can do is we can put that
into our site youtube.com
and we'll pop that here you'll notice
when i did that search
the results translated immediately from
arabic into english
the reason why i'm able to do that is i
have a plugin called the google
translate chrome extension this is a
really useful plugin as it really opens
your
search results up to a wide field
that don't just include the english
language so now that i have that plug-in
we can have a look at all of those
arabic results
and we can display them in english and
we can read them quite easily
this is also useful when we start to
combine those search strings on websites
so for instance here is the cia
government website i'm going to use this
one in a google
advanced search result so i'm going to
copy that url and use that
as part of my research in a google
advanced search string
so what we can do is we can put in site
cia.gov let's see what that lists let's
have a look at file type
pdf and let's go ahead and put in
our syria translation okay so i put that
in
and this has restricted all of my google
search results to
being from the cia government website
about or mentioning
syria but in the arabic text of syria
and all pdfs i'm using my google chrome
extension
translate that to english and i can also
restrict that to a specific time
for example we can have a look at all
results from
2018 and then translate it in english as
well
so basically what we've done here is
we've looked at the cia government
website which is here
and it does have a search box there as
well so we could even search for
syria in there it hasn't given us any
results here
but if we do the search through google
on the ci government website for syria
and restrict that to pdfs because pdfs
have a lot of interesting information
then we can really easily go through
and have a look at all of the
information that is publicly indexed and
publicly available
from the cia government website about
syria in arabic
so that's a really useful tool to use in
your research and it really opens you up
to being able to
look at not just the english language
but also many other languages
in your research so now that we know how
to do that we can apply the same
methodology
to the image that we're investigating in
the previous sessions
which was from myanmar originally we
thought it was nigeria
there are indications that it may be a
myanmar village burning
so here's an article that we found
previously
from voa news this was in one of the
previous sessions and we were able to
as we did before just have a look at an
image of her search of that to see where
else this may have been mentioned or
other other places but in having a look
at the search results of this we can see
that they're all
in english with google translate as we
can remember from the previous sessions
we can actually change this text
so what i'm going to do is because this
article mentions
an area called racking state i'm going
to have a look at rakhine state on
wikipedia
and take a translation of that and i'm
going to put that in my text next to the
image of earth search
so now what we've done here is we've
done an image reverse search with the
image from this news website of the
burning village it's the same one that
we were sent from our friend that
mentioned that it was in nigeria which
is absolutely wrong
and we pop that in there for an image of
her search and we've also used the
burmese text which translates to rakhine
state now if we have a look at some of
our results
we can see that our news results are in
burmese so we can translate them
and we can see that for instance we have
even some facebook posts
and there's one article here destruction
of lakka village fire
so let's click on that one and have a
look at it okay great that's a really
interesting picture
the text is in burmese so if we just
translate that to english we can get a
little bit more information about it
and that's really interesting because
now we have an alternative image
that we can even try and compare against
our previous image that we were looking
at
to see if this is the same place
it does look similar the fire especially
and also where some of the trees are
the type of trees the type of land some
of the buildings as well
may be similar to some of the ones that
we see over here
but let's go a step further and see if
we can perhaps find more information
and add more context to this photo which
originally
if you remember we just started with
this photo and
no trustworthy context at all except
after doing an image of earth search we
found that it might have been myanma and
now we're really
narrowing down and adding more to our
intelligence picture or our research
picture
of what actually happened here and what
was happening in that photo
the benefit of having this english
translation is that we can see what this
originally burmese text we can start to
have a look at
location-based searches in burmese so
in this article it says according to
satellite imagery about 200 houses were
found on fire in lakka village
in the mrak u township now that may be
wrong pronunciation
but let's have a look for that so i'm
reading this page something that i
really like to do
is identify where there may be names or
place names that i can start to search
for
so that i can really start to get an
idea of exactly where this village is
located
and so we can start to get onto the
process of geolocation
or locating this on a satellite image
and then verify the time
so in the caption of this photo we have
this text down here which gives a place
name
a village name a region or a province
and don't forget we've translated all
that into english so i'm going to
translate that back to burmese
and then start selecting the text that i
think may be suitable
if we click on the google translate
plugin again this pops up and it gives
us an idea as to the name of the village
and the name of the township so what i'm
going to do is copy that text
into a new google search
and see what results we get out of that
now all of those search results
are in burmese so i'm going to translate
that to english
and it looks like we have a lot of
interesting search results
it looks like that fire has been or that
village fire has been well documented as
well which is great
one feature that we can do is have a
look at the google images
and see the google images and try and
match them up
as well so we can see that there's a lot
of imagery
that is available from that town or or
supposedly available from that town
and we can possibly start to match that
up for example this photo
and we even have other ones from the
scene or allegedly from the scene
as well so that's really added to the
context of what we originally had with
that picture which was nothing
and and we originally thought that or
were told that this was in nigeria
and however we now know that it is most
certainly in burma
we still have to verify that so
geolocate it to satellite imagery
we still have to identify the exact time
we can do that with satellite imagery as
well
but it seems that with all of this
content that there is enough
content to make a full document or a
full brief or research piece on this
and what we've done here is basically
fused together
the google advanced search techniques
with the
translation techniques as well and using
that
translate plug-in for the the chrome
extension
which is which has allowed us to
essentially hack the translation
of this burmese village and then conduct
searches
in another language for this area where
there would probably be
a lot less results if you were to search
for this
in english now we've opened our field of
information up a lot more
and we have a lot more at our fingertips
in terms of knowing what happened
and when it happened and start to verify
this event as well
so that's been really useful for that
and i hope you've enjoyed that
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