"Real-Time Monitoring For Research" with Aram Shabanian

You're listening to a state talk titled Real -time Monitoring for Research. This week, a long -time contributor at Bellingcat's Aram Shumanian joined us. He spoke about the free -to -access resources you can use to keep track of live events, from protests to airstrikes to water levels rising, and gave some sound advice on how to approach live monitoring. You can find links to all the resources mentioned in the talk. in the podcast

description. This talk was hosted by me, Charlotte Ma, on Thursday, the 26th of February, 2026, in the Bellingcat Discord server. Welcome back to another stage talk. We are joined today by seasoned open source researcher and very talented Bellingcat Discord moderator, Arum Shebanian. When most people think about breaking news today, they picture a live stream. Someone pulls out a phone, hits go live on YouTube or TikTok, and suddenly the world is watching an event unfold

in real time. But often, the very first signal of a crisis doesn't always come from a camera. It comes from a voice, a dispatcher's tone dropping, a fire unit requesting backup, an aviation controller rerouting aircraft. Long before headlines form, and sometimes before the public even knows something is happening, fragments of reality are moving across publicly accessible emergency radio systems and live -streaming platforms at the same time.

Tonight we're going to explore that edge, the space between first signal and confirmed event, and talk about what aspects you could foresee live monitoring full -time, for example, water height in your local river. How do professionals monitor live events without being overwhelmed? When do you hit record and when shouldn't you? And in an era of AI deepfakes and encrypted channels,

how does this feel changing? If livestream shows what the public sees and radio reveals what responders are reacting to, then monitoring both responsibly and ethically becomes not just a technical challenge, but a societal one. So let's dive into how real -time monitoring actually works. Whilst we talk, you can place your questions in the chat accessible in the right -hand corner of your screen. But please remember that this is being audio recorded

for the podcast. So if you don't want me to mention your username, please add that as a note in your question. We're also sharing some slides today. They're just contextual. They don't actually show any important information and any links mentioned will be in the description of this podcast. Okay, Aram, over to you. Thanks so much. That was a tremendous intro and I will do my

best to live up to it. So for those who don't know me, I've been doing open source intelligence stuff on like a Legitimate basis probably since 2014 but a less legitimate basis before that and by that I don't mean I was like a criminal or something. I'm not cool enough to do that What I mean is that my first Really venture into

what we would call OSINT today. It was when I was probably six or seven years old and I really I always asked my dad what was going on when I would see a fire truck going somewhere a police car responding because that's the kind of kid I was I wanted to know what was happening around me and So my dad got me a radio shack police scanner and I would listen to that thing so if hours and hours and hours right now and listen to the dispatch tones and I figure out what the

different things meant and What that did later in life was it kind of gave me a head start on listening to police and fire scanners to monitor breaking news events and so There are Just to dive into scanners as a way of monitoring Anything around you depending on where you live and this is predominantly US focused there are different laws and different regulations and different technologies in place with these different scanners, so I've got a slide here basically discussing

the different types of scanners. And so I'll go over this for those who can't see it. There are three rough areas that I like to lump living into within the US. So there's like a metro area, you know, and that doesn't have to be a major city like Los Angeles. That can be basically any bigger city in a state. So if it's one of the top five cities in your state, probably counts

as this. Those are they have good funding in those cities and so they have encrypted radio typically and the reason they've encrypted the radio in places like Salem, Oregon where I live where let's be honest You'd have to stretch the imagination to imagine like al Qaeda attacking

the city. There's no Real security reason to encrypt most of the police traffic radio on the radio unlike DC or LA or New York But what it does is it allows the police to hide that activity because in the US we have laws that say it's again that they can't That they have to allow Citizens to scan police and fire radio frequencies and listen in on that In order to circumvent that law the a lot of police departments have started encrypting their radio because it is

illegal to decrypt encrypted messages So that's a way to make listening to the scanner illegal. So there are a number of ways around that You can build your own decryption device basically out of a couple of RTL SDR dongles. Those are available online for like 40 or 50 bucks. There's a bunch of walkthroughs for those. I am not tech savvy enough to figure it out despite having all the equipment and having tried many times.

So I'm not going to try to pretend to describe to you how easy it is to do, because I couldn't do it. That's not to say it's hard. I am kind of a Luddite, despite the fact that I am giving a talk on tech. Anywho, you can get a scanner online for about $400 or so that comes preloaded with your local frequencies that does the decryption. But I would not advise broadcasting that radio traffic back out because that's illegal. And

then they would catch you for it. If you live in a smaller town, my hometown, as an example, you have about 20 ,000 people. The police probably have a trunked digital radio system, which means that it hops between a bunch of frequencies. They're not just staying on one frequency to talk. You can get a scanner that here's those for, you know, 60 to a hundred dollars. Those are pretty simple. And a lot of those frequencies are on broadcastify .com, which you can see on

the right side of the screen here. If you have, if you can see the screen. And finally, there's rural areas and like national forests. And those are going to be using the traditional non -encrypted analog style radios that you can tune to with a very basic police or fire scanner. And those are going to be for areas that are big, big counties. So like Eastern Oregon has some really large counties, lots of flat land. The signal propagates

easier over flat land over long distances. And it's, there's no real reason to encrypt fire traffic, you know, for like forest firefighting and stuff. So all of these. things are to say, listening to the police and fire scanner can help you with a number of things. We saw in Lahaina in Hawaii a couple years ago, a tragic fire that

killed, you know, dozens of people. And one of the issues that I heard about from folks I talked to over there was that they weren't able to get any situational awareness on where the fires were. There weren't like traffic cameras they could pull up. The fire maps weren't available in Hawaii yet. and the satellites don't update

that fast. So in California or in Oregon or Washington, what we would do is open Broadcastify or pull out our scanner, tune to the fire frequency and listen and listen to the street names they're giving out and listen to the areas they're giving out. So we know and we can warn our friends and our families and our communities about what's going on in real time. And in fact, listening to the scanners like this has allowed groups like WatchDuty to arise. And I'm a member of

the WatchDuty community. During the summer, we Listen to scanners and watch fire cameras and things like that to provide up to As close to real time as we can information on fire whereabouts The idea being that we can't allow another line that happened that that that that was reprehensible and the fact that encrypted radios are the reason people weren't able to listen in and Get out in time To put it lightly infuriates me So What do you do when you get a scanner for the first

time? Because a lot of people make a mistake of getting a scanner and hearing something and starting to panic or thinking this is really boring. There's no use to doing this. You kind of have to get used to it. You have to put it on a lot, especially if you're trying to learn your local area. Learn the rhythm for your local dispatch. Learn how many calls typically come in at night. How many typically come in during

the day? What types of calls are they? You know, how do the officers respond or the firefighters respond to stress, things like that. All of those are clues that will allow you to pick up in real time before they even say something that a disaster is taking place. And so I've got a couple examples and I really hope that these are not too loud. They were very loud earlier when we tried to use them. So please. This first audio clip is from the 2018 campfire in Paradise, California.

This is about an hour and a half into the fire. Up until this point, a lot of the calls that you could hear were stressed and urgent and talking about fire advancing on the town, but it couldn't really paint a picture in your head of how hellish things were until we heard this. If somebody could let us know if you can hear it in like two seconds, that'd be great So we heard there is a Relayed call that an engine crew was with civilians sheltering in a creek from the fire

The picture that paints there right? How many times have you heard of the fire department saying hey kids family? Let's go get in this creek and lie down That's like not how the fire department handles these kind of things ever So if you hear that kind of call you have to realize despite the fact that he sounded quite calm in that call

That's a that's a panic inducing moment. This next call is Same fire around the same time and what you're listening for here is first of all The word choice and the message that's put out but also listen for the background noises here And so this is you're gonna hear dispatch in Oroville, which was the closest to Paradise, California So not only are they putting out a call to evacuate an entire town, which is not

typically how it's done. If you have ever seen an evacuation take place, if Paradise is an example, but think the Houston area during Hurricane Harvey, even with a lot of advance notice, it's very difficult to evacuate most major cities. This is made Even more difficult in paradise. I actually visited the city last year and saw for myself how difficult it is to get in and out of the city, especially if any of the main roads are blocked. There's one highway that leads up to

the city and then it stops. It stopped at the end of like it went to a little town past paradise and then that's it. So you had to go down the mountain to get out of the fire and everybody was getting out of the fire at the same time. This was, you know, a town of 20 ,000 people. Everybody hit in the road at once. That's not how you do an evacuation. And the fact that they put that call out, despite the fact that it only sounded a little bit stressed, really raised

my hair. The other thing you can hear there is the phones ringing off the hook in the background at the dispatch center. That's not typical. You don't normally just hear phones ringing and ringing and ringing in the background. That's a sign that something has gone wrong with the situation. And so you can find a lot of archives of previous events on Broadcastify's archive. There's a lot

on YouTube. You can search for specific incidents and try to hear what fire and police personnel sound like in your area when there's kind of an unusual situation going on. You'll often hear when they're holding the channel, the primary channel for an emergency situation, you'll hear a beep every five or 10 seconds on the channel. That's something that I've learned to listen for, right? So if you hear that beep, you know that it's a priority alert. They're holding the

channel. Nobody else should talk unless they're talking about the event in question, uh, the main event in question. So scanners are only useful if you contextualize them. It's like a lot of other OSINT. You can't just learn the tech and the techniques in a vacuum. That's going to get you a job that will suck your soul. Like. You don't want to do that. You really want to combine it with other passions. You have another interest to have. And so another way, uh, to

gather information other than audio. So let's say you live somewhere on the West coast. It's summertime. It's been hot for a couple of weeks. The wind is coming from the mountains and there's a bunch of smoke descending on your town. You want to know what's going on, but. the scanners aren't really being helpful or there's no scanners in your area. What you can do is look up, there are live cameras all over the West Coast and

all over the US now. It's the Alert West network and those provide fire watch capabilities from towers all around forested areas and in metro

areas. That's an obvious one, right? But other, you have to start thinking, I guess, When I got really into the game portal like 30 or 40 years ago when that came out when I was like 42 I think at the time They're really into portal and the first couple of times I played it I started you know You start thinking in portals you start kind of imagining the world if you had a portal gun, right? You have to kind of do that with

OSIN, right? So you're trying to figure out When this fire will be in the town or or the flip side It's been raining a lot and you want to know how high the rivers are in your area how high? the creeks are in your area, you have to think about is there going to be data on that? Is there a reasonable suspicion to believe that the government would put up cameras to watch

fires? I would say so. Do you think that there is somebody monitoring how much water is going through the river or what quality of the water is? I mean, yeah, that's somebody's job, right? And there's no legitimate reason to keep that info secret. There's some info that should that

will be secret. You know, they they don't tell you when a freight train is coming by because They're still afraid of train robbers on horseback or something, but with river gauges There's no legitimate reason to keep that information secret with fire cameras There's no legitimate reason

to keep that information secret. So you really have to start thinking of what to search for on Google or wherever your preferred search engine is to find tools and techniques that I'm not even going to outline today my main point here today is to give you examples of stuff that I've done in the past that Just kind of thought of on the spot. I bet there's this and I could Google it and find it, right? And so with live cameras Most cities states counties have traffic cameras,

right? I mean that's that's pretty common So what you want to look for if you're trying to find? Video of vehicles responding to a fire or maybe there's a protest or a riot in your town or something like that search typically with the city name traffic camera on Google or state name traffic camera on Google, you'll usually find results. Now, how good those cameras are is up in the air because there's no mandated

quality. However, if you know where the cameras are and you know where the incident is and you know the area well, and I know Seattle well, you can rapidly watch things happening. And so a few years ago, a good friend of mine was visiting Seattle. And he texted me that there was some, like somebody was shooting a gun near them. They were at a coffee shop. They can hear gunshots. And then they had stopped. And so I looked and I saw, yeah, there are shots fired downtown Seattle.

My friend evacuated the block and I tried to pull up traffic cameras to see the area. And my friend walks in a pretty particular way. It's not like a weird way. It's not goofy. It's just, I'm on the spectrum and I notice how people walk. And so I could see one guy walking that way on the camera. And so I told my friend, hey, go stand by the street and, uh, tax the traffic camera or look at the traffic camera. And so

he did. And I pulled up this Seattle traffic camera that those who are watching can see and saw a fellow standing on the curb, looking at the camera and knew that was my friend. Um, and so you can, you can not only be creepy to your friends, but you can see in real time, oh, there's a traffic jam there because the police have closed

off the road. That's some information that would have been useful to me if I was really following this it wasn't that they give an incident So like I said, I started with the police scanner fast forward to The run -up to the war in Ukraine and I've started to hone this as a professional skill now I wanted to have a network of webcams to monitor for the outbreak of war in Ukraine as 2021 turned to 2022 But Googling Ukraine webcam

is not really all that useful. You're going to find a fair bit of porn, but a lot of just clickbait websites and just bad websites that pull from websites that are pulling from websites that are stealing from somebody and they have watermarks and all that crap. You don't really want those kinds of streams. You want to be specific. Think about who has webcams on their buildings near you. Government buildings typically have webcams.

And sometimes they're accessible, right? You can see, you know, here's our webcam from the top of the local capital building and it shows the sunrise, whatever. Um, so I looked into schools in different cities in Ukraine to see which ones had webcams available for the public. And I found in Mariupol, uh, the local ISP actually had a link to every school in the entire metro area,

a camera on every school. And so I had about 30 cameras of different schools around Mariupol that I was able to monitor up until the day the war started, at which point they all went down. So it never actually was useful for me, but it was a good exercise, I think, in finding cameras. The point being here, you wouldn't normally think to look at schools for monitoring a war. But if you think about buildings that might have a webcam on them, you have to think in OSINT,

right? You have to think in where would this information be that's accessible? Obviously, military bases are not going to have cameras you can access, but schools probably will. To take that point to an extreme, the military academy in Harkeev actually had a webcam on it because they were building a memorial in front of the academy. And I found that camera at one point

prior to the war. pulled it up during the war and it stayed up for about three months after the war started and you could see convoys of Ukrainian vehicles going down the road every single day and then coming back with wounded all over them and again you have to that one I think I had found because I had looked up the YouTube account for the Memorial Society affiliated with the building being built at the University because they had talked about on their website,

the society is building something at our university and they have a live camera. And so I hopped through website to website to website to YouTube, found the live stream. It takes a bit of hunting though, but you have to again, think in OSINT. Um, the, uh, the other thing you have to, uh, adapt a lot of the techniques that you're using, a lot of the technology you're using. So if you can see the screen, you can see an arrow pointing

at the top left and a little bit of light. This is a camera on a harbor near Crimea, near the Kersh Straight Bridge that I had found. If you can see it, if you're viewing, this was supposed to be a webcam to monitor the arrival of shipments at a little port near the Kersh Straight Bridge so that local companies could see when their

goods had arrived. But I noticed that at night you could see a small light in the background that ended up being the arches of the Kursh straight bridge and so I saved this this link and then when there were reports that Ukraine had struck the bridge I pulled the link up and sure enough could see fire in the distance. So other types of cameras I've had luck with in this way are Surfline is a website that has surfing cameras, right? So you can check what the beach is like

so you can go I don't know. I haven't watched Rocket Power in a long time, so I don't really know what they do at the beach anymore, but you need to know the conditions. The other thing that Surfline is useful for, other than being a surf bro, is monitoring the comings and goings of hurricanes and storms and Navy ships and ships of interest. If these surf cameras are anywhere near a Navy base, you can pull them up and see when an aircraft carrier leaves, see when a destroyer

leaves. That's pretty useful open source information. I would say But you wouldn't think that it would be Something that you you wouldn't think surfer is when you think getting OSINT on aircraft carriers, right? But that's the way it works out So I guess that's that's kind of Those were the two big

ones. I really wanted to hit on were the the scanners and the webcams there I wanted to give us plenty of time today for questions about methodology and techniques and whatnot and hopefully that will spark more talking on my part, but I am desperately parched and looking for a desperate and looking for a reason to take a drink while y 'all ask questions. So go for it. Awesome. Thank you so much for taking us through that.

I'm gutted. I couldn't see those last images, but I'm glad everybody else had the opportunity to. Please keep your questions coming through the chat. I have noted them down. BJ Mackey said, are you seeing friends on camera? Is there an easy way to tell what the lag time is between real time and what you're seeing on the broadcast? That's a pretty easy question. So a lot of times the cameras will have the timestamp physically on the video. That tells you what time the camera

thinks it is. That's not really telling you how much lag time there is. But most of the streaming cameras, it's almost instantaneous. Um, but not all DOT cameras are going to be streaming. I think in Oregon, most of our cameras were put up in the eighties or something. I'm like, not even exaggerating for comedy. Um, and they update every 30 seconds or 30 minutes or something. It's 30 minutes, every 30 minutes, which is, uh, not useful. You'll see like, traffic's flowing.

Something's on fire. Traffic's flowing. Oh, cool. There was something on fire for a minute. Not really good info. Um. But in somewhere like Arlington, Virginia, I know, for instance, they have high definition cameras on almost every street corners that citizens can access. So it really just depends on your local area and local laws and whatnot.

If we've had a question about finding cameras, I know you mentioned briefly on just searching street cameras, but do you have any, someone else has asked, does someone or some service keep a directory of open cameras? Is there any like keywords that you usually use when looking for cameras in a specific area that you might not be as familiar with, like Seattle, like you mentioned. Yeah. So include, include the word

DOT in it. DOT camera. Right. Is typically, so like Seattle DOT camera or Washington DOT camera. At the end of this talk, I will be submitting, I have a spreadsheet with a link to traffic cameras in almost all 50 states. Some states I couldn't find anything. And then in some cities and metro areas and stuff like that. So I'll be sharing that publicly. Um, if anybody is interested in gathering more links with me, uh, message me and I could add you as an editor and would gladly

take the help. Amazing. Thank you. Um, someone's also asked any advice for cameras in other countries. I know obviously this is a bit US specific, but I'm guessing it's the same search terms. Is that correct? Yeah. And that's what I've found. Um, the problem is I don't speak any foreign languages, so I can't, I have to use Google translate to do this and it's not not great all the time. But if you speak a foreign language, then yeah, you just search, you know, local area DOT cameras.

I know, for instance, the night or two before the war in Ukraine officially started, folks pulled up cameras on the Polish side of the Ukrainian border at the border checkpoints that updated like every two or three seconds. And all of a sudden in the middle of the night, we saw a Black Hawk helicopter land at the border. and some people got off it and like got on another helicopter. That's not normally how borders work. But again, so that was a public, you know, border camera

for Poland. I don't think there are border cameras for the U .S. because our border patrol are real special here. But in a lot of countries in Europe, you're going to have cameras there just because it helps with wait times. So truckers know when the border crossing is crowded and not. And that's kind of what I mean by thinking in OSINT, right? Think about Okay, would they put border cameras on the border at the road, on the road border?

Maybe. But would they do it to save truck drivers money and boost the local economy in that way? Oh, there's the financial incentive. Of course they're going to want to do that, right? If there's a financial incentive and there's nothing that hurts the public from it being known, then yeah, it's probably going to exist. Sarah, put in the chats. a link to some of the resources that we mentioned in your previous talk where we focused

mainly on live streams. And so there's some really useful traffic camera links in there, including those animal webcams, which I got obsessed with after the talk last time and watching little cute animals in zoos and lots of other resources in there. So feel free to click through to that link. I'm sure it's embedded within the podcast description as well. Also, feel free to add links there as well if you're aware of things that we haven't added to that particular resource.

Please do continue to add there. Lots of other questions, particularly about the scanners. Someone did ask about any recommendations on translating radio messages. Do you have any advice on that if you've heard something in the different, you just using... uh, audio to text models to kind of help translate those kinds of, uh, scanner, recorder. Yeah. For, for, for foreign audio, I am too poor to afford any of the translation

stuff. So what I have done over the years is just, I've become friends with people who speak different languages and we'll ask them like, Hey, if I buy you lunch tomorrow, can you translate me this 10 minute, translate this 10 minute audio for me? Typically works, but on a professional basis, you probably wouldn't want to do that. I don't know of any good services. Unfortunately,

I can't recommend anything on that level. Um, but bonus, since I just saw it on my other screen, as in I meant to talk about this during the talk and didn't, uh, here's a tip. Um, so when I talk about thinking in OSINT, the Raspberry Pi, you know, as a single board computer, a lot of people are familiar with it. Raspberry Pis can do a lot of things. They do flight tracking. You can use them as police scanners. But there's the raspberry shake is a new thing that people are

working on, right? Where it's a raspberry pie that acts as a seismograph. So obviously you can detect earthquakes with that. But the other

thing you can do, thinking in OSINT, right? If somebody bombs a district of Kiev heavily and there's a number of seismographs in Kiev and you know where they are in the city, depending on how large the shockwaves are at those seismographs, you can kind of... figure out where in the city the bombs were dropped, how many bombs are being dropped, how heavily they're bombing the city and whatnot. So unfortunately, there were none in Venezuela near Caracas, so we couldn't monitor

when Trump did his thing last month. But they are in most countries. And so there's a number of them in Iran, for instance. So you could pull those up and watch for if the U .S. starts bombing Iran, you might see seismic activity in the area. And so tangent there, completely out of place, very ADHD, but that's how we're going to go. If you have questions on that, please do pop

them in the chat. But I wanted to just quickly go back to the radio codes that you mentioned that you've kind of picked up on over the years. How steep is the learning curve in terms of interposing? radio signals, what's one phrase, a fire channel that makes you sit on a fire channel, for example, that might make you sit up immediately. How long did it take you to learn what was danger and what wasn't? So I actually have, uh, an audio file here to explain, um, how you can pick up

on danger from code words. So this man is going to say, and I've read interviews with him since He said that in the moment when he keyed the mic to make this broadcast, he knew that dozens, if not hundreds of people were listening to the scanner in real time. And that if he panicked and kind of word vomited onto the scanner, what he was about to say, people would freak out and

it wouldn't be good. So he had to steel himself, take a deep breath, and then say something that I will translate when the audio is done playing here. So here it is. So that first part, this is from the 2018 campfire, 30 strike teams of engines, any type, immediate need. So what he's saying is, I don't care if these fire engines are meant for wild and firefighting. I don't care if they're city engines for structural firefighting. get them together and get them out here right

away. And so if you live in California, you can look up what these terms mean because California has like a glossary of these firefighting terms. A strike team in California and in most of the U .S. is five engines of the same type, each one staffed by four or five firefighters and then one like battalion chief with them to command them and they'll have common radio. So 30 strike teams, you're calling for 30 battalion chiefs and 150 engines right now. That's panic inducing.

Like that is a oh no kind of statement, right? That's the kind of thing that would set the alarm bells off real quickly when you hear things like that. Another example I will play is from, you know, I apologize in advance if this is very loud. I can't really gauge how loud these things are. This is from the 2020 fires in Oregon here. I was unfortunately listening to this from far away. I was in Monterey at the time. couldn't really help folks out. But this is what's called

an iPAWS message. And so it's an integrated public alert and warning system. It's something that FEMA implemented a number of years ago. And basically it streamlines the system for sending out like text alerts, digital alerts, radio alerts, and phone alerts to folks in an area that there's some kind of a major disaster taking place. So part of the iPAWS alert going off was this very calm, methodical message that went out on the fire scanner, which I will play now. Whoops,

I messed up audacity. Hold on a second. I had it looping because I am incompetent. Okay, here we go. No? Is it playing for everybody else? Okay. Well, I will include that in the discord later. Basically it's a very robotic voice coming out and saying, uh, attention all units, this fire is a historic event. This is a plume dominated. Fire. It's a high risk life threat, life threatening event. Disengage all firefighting activities. Find lookout, find escape zones and safety zones.

Encourage citizen evacuations on the way out. So again, kind of like sheltering in a creek. You don't normally have a lot of fires that are often over the radio where the fight, where the dispatch says, Hey, run, just run. You're going to die if you stay. Like that's pretty alarming to hear, especially for the area that I grew up in. And so something like that would definitely be something to alert you. But overall, I would say, you know, just remember, you can Google

a lot of these terms. So if they're using 10 codes, a lot of police departments use 10 codes. You can Google 10 codes for city of blah, blah, blah. And there's usually either a Reddit page

or a very specific... Geocities looking website that went up in 1998 and was crafted by a guy that died like sometime in the Bush administration But it still has the ten codes and they're all relevant and they're written in comic sans and they're all there for you That kind of website exists because there are a lot of radio nerds out there So if you don't know what the code means Google it and you'll probably figure it out that way That being said, with the codes,

are different, if you hear different agencies mentioned as well, can that be a sign that things are escalating as well? Are there particular agencies that you also listen out for in terms of being called into action? Yeah. And that, that really depends on how far into this you want to get. I had put on the slide regarding the broadcastify .com access. I highly recommend if you're into this kind of thing, that you get a paid account with them. I think it's like five

bucks a month. And it allows you to build. You can make basically a page with up to six scanners that go at the same time So then you can listen to your different agencies in your area and see when they're being activated And then there's also the calls platform which allows you to access some of the more the trunk systems Beyond police and fire and so I can't remember what the incident was But there was some kind of a shooting or something a number of months ago, and I was monitoring

it with the scanners And one of the channels I just randomly had pulled up, and I'm not going to credit this like, I was thinking ahead. No, no, I think I forgot that I had this one up, was the local inter -hospital communication network, like a radio network that the hospitals have just for an emergency. And somebody came over and said, alert, alert, standby for mass casualties at all hospitals. And so that was like, oh, OK. That's not just trying to keep track of how many

ambulances are dispatched. That's them telling every hospital to get ready. Right? The problem is with a lot of the escalation is by the time an incident starts to escalate to a situation where they would need SWAT teams or federal agents or something, they typically go to an encrypted channel and you lose the communications, which in and of itself can be a sign that things are escalating, right? Like the lack of radio traffic can tell you that there's something big happening,

so... And radioreference .com is a very good resource for knowing your... radio stuff in your area. They have all the frequencies you could possibly need, like in exquisite detail, locations of the different transmitters, who, which agencies have which frequency. It's good stuff. Sorry, I think I stepped on your toes there. Go ahead. No, amazing. Thanks for giving us that URL. I've written that in the chat as well. Sorry, it's not linked, but feel free to have a little explore

of that. I keep the questions going. Before we move on to, I want to... talk a little bit about the environment data that's available. But before we move on to that, just as we're talking about escalation and emerging events, how do you make sure that you're not contributing to panic when you're trying to report perhaps on your own social

profiles what you're hearing? So for example, if you are witnessing something on a live stream or hearing something on a radio and you feel like this could be reportable, how do you manage that? aspect of not adding to panic and perhaps even by accident reporting something that isn't quite the level that you think it might come

to on public profiles. The answer to that is you have to first of all be aware of the dangers of what you just talked about that you might cause a panic that you know gets people hurt. But I also think back to a number of terrorist incidents we had. about 10 years ago around the world wherein the terrorists learned that they can have somebody monitoring Twitter or social media and people would post what they could see on live streams or on news streams. Oh, the police

are at the south side of the mall, right? Well, now the terrorists know where the police are in relation to the mall. And so after the first incident or two that I saw like that happen, I instituted like a self policy of like Is this a tactical movement of like somebody who's taking on a critical threat to public safety? If so, you don't need to talk about it in real time.

Last year, there was a big protest in Seattle and I found on the traffic cameras that you could pull up one end of the protest to the other on like 12 traffic cameras. It was really impressive. And I waited about eight hours to post any screenshots of it because I didn't want to give away the idea that Hey, look, here's this crowd of soft meat bodies moving down a street. If you hate them, you could drive a truck into them. I didn't want to give that information away in real time,

right? So I held off on posting that data. Some of the screenshots that I've posted here from Ukraine. Again, I held off on posting for several months until they weren't relevant anymore. And that's kind of what you have to learn to do with a lot of this is while you're up and coming and learning the ropes, basically, you need to understand that you're, tell yourself you're more of a historian.

in a moment, right? You don't want to be a journalist yet, you're more of a historian, you're gathering the data, maybe it'll be relevant, maybe not. If you think it's something that's critical to life safety or critical to somebody that you know, if it's someone you know, you know, hit them up, let them know what's going on. If it's you don't know them, you don't want to post it publicly, look into communities that are already watching this kind of thing. That's how I got

involved with Watch Duty. And if anybody listening is interested, we're always looking for new volunteers anywhere in the U .S. Um, and, um, you learn that you have, you have to learn to, uh, kind of take a deep breath when you see things happening. Understand that is what you're feeling when you see a crisis unfolding in front of you on the screen or over the radio is like 50 % excitement that you're witnessing something happen. 50 % you know genuine anxiety or fear or worked up

in this right? But you have to differentiate between those two and kind of keep them in check Otherwise you might post something in a hyped up panic that does get people hurt and I have seen that happen in the past and it's it's upsetting Because I know the kind of people that are posting it are typically not doing it to get anybody hurt but it's It's like any any alerting system, right? The fire alarm, you don't want to pull the fire alarm in the building unless the fire

is actually in the building. Not just because you're going to get in trouble, but because people will freak out and somebody could get hurt evacuating from the building, you know? So that kind of thing. Yeah, as community members have said, archivist instinct is definitely a critical skill.

That being said, as we're thinking about archiving, when you are watching a live stream or when listening to radio, is it legal to record what you're listening to and how do you go about archiving these spaces in real time? So for video, I just use Open Broadcast Studio or OBS and record it that way. And in terms of audio, typically the same thing, but often Broadcastify is an example. They have archives on their website going back about 30 days. So

if you're a paying member, you can... Look up the timestamp that you're looking for and pull the deck download the audio of the incident with them. I believe that the policy is that I'm not

going to try to remember the policy. You're gonna have to look up their privacy policy on their own on the website In terms of recording though, my rule of thumb is basically if you're not going to rebroadcast it back out publicly and try to make money on it If it's just for your own personal record I don't see any police around so do what

you want. Like I it's not really something that you're gonna get nailed for, unless you record proprietary video or audio and then try to make money off of it, then yeah, they're going to come after you. But if you're just keeping it for yourself, you should be fine. Thanks for that. Someone has put in the chat, the watchduty .org as well as the space for volunteer applications that you mentioned, which takes me nicely into

the environment aside. In terms of the environment and things that you can continuously monitor live. What are some of the key environmental things that you can watch online? You mentioned water levels. We've mentioned fires. Is there anything else that is top of mind that people might be interested? Sky's the limit, you know, metaphorically and literally with this, especially

with the technology that's changing. So during fire season, Um, what I'll have up on my screens, if I'm nervous about my local area, I'll have a map that shows current wind speeds, right? And all that data is coming in from wind gauges on the ground and also satellites. I think maybe you can do it. I don't know. I'm not a satelliteologist, but, uh, definitely gauges on the ground are giving that info. So if you see a lot of gusting wind during a dry season and there's a lot of

fires, that's a danger sign. So that's the way to be aware of things. Um, when fire season starts. A lightning map is awesome and there's a number of websites that track lightning strikes in real time. So you can see where the lightning is hitting in the woods and know, oh, hey, we should probably keep an eye on that. When I lived down in Monterey, I was watching a live lightning map one night.

There was a big storm off the coast. I went down to the beach and watched it and then came back home and saw a bunch of strikes up in the woods. Figured that's not going to be good. Went up around 8 AM the next day as the initial attack crew was going up into the woods to fight the fire. And about three hours later, a close friend of mine, his childhood house burned down. Uh, so being able to watch where the lightning strikes with these maps is actually quite helpful for

pinpointing the fires. Um, in the winter, there's a number of radar apps. There's radar, uh, apps for your phone. There's some for your desktop computer that track weather patterns. So you can see if it's going to rain a lot. if it's going to hail, if it's going to snow, right? You can have a weather station, basically. You can pull the same data that the news channel pulls, for the most part, in your living room. It's pretty remarkable. And the reason is, think

in OSINT here, right? Where is the news channel getting their data from? Most news channels don't have their own Doppler radar. They're getting that data from the government, from the, you know, NOAA or the USGS. They have the weather radars. Is there a legitimate reason, or can you imagine a world? I mean, I can now, but typically could you imagine a world where the US government would be like, ah, you can only get the weather data if you pay for it. Like no, weather data

is pretty much a free thing. And so if you can get to the data, and that's usually the hard part, you can get it for free. typical of weather data and a lot of other data that's gathered by the government. So these river gauges, you're going to be able to find a lot of free data from the fire. The fire towers have started implementing these new, I can't remember the URL to get to it, but there's a new system that basically monitors

air quality around the fires. And these are these self -contained pods that have multiple probes on them that pick up different kinds of pollutants in the air. They typically have a camera facing up and a camera facing down, a thermometer, rain gauge, all that. And they're starting to drop these all over the place, all over the wilderness here. So those will become up and coming ways to monitor weather events. I talked earlier about river gauges. They've started putting cameras

on some of the river gauges. So you can actually use river gauge cameras to monitor not just river levels, but uh, people in inner tubes drinking, um, or if a fire is approaching the river, you can see it in real time on a river camera where there might not be a fire camera, right? Um, a couple of days ago, I saw somebody who pulled up, uh, a bridge camera in Denmark and saw a Russian warship traveling under the bridge web camera in the distance, right? Um, yeah, so those

are, uh, kind of rambling there, but yeah. Not rambling at all. That's really useful notes and resources there. We've got a few in the chat as well. Someone mentioned null school. Somebody else mentioned that that is satellite modeled wind, not directly read from sensors, just as a mention. IQ air as well as another one. You have to take the monitors with a grain of salt because you don't know the environments individuals have set up their monitors, but taken as a whole

can be useful. And then someone has also linked the NOAA US River Gauges website as well. Really useful. I will say the NullSchool website is the most aesthetically pleasing. We love aesthetically pleasing. And it's really neat. We love aesthetics, right? And what you can do is you can actually take screenshots of like, so I remember during some of the hurricanes, you take a screenshot

every hour of the NullSchool. display and then stitch them together and you can see the hurricane advancing through an area growing stronger and weaker and whatnot. It's actually kind of a useful model for learning how these storms work. And if you're interested in kind of monitoring weather and geological phenomena, well, we actually have a channel in here and it does just that. It's called Weather and Geological Phenomena and you

can pop in there. A lot of our resident weather experts live in there, particularly in hurricane season, so please do have a little look at that. Chameleon in the chat said, been finding cameras around the world found in France, Denmark, Norway, England, checking Finland now. Surfline required membership to watch some places though. Yeah, surfline has gotten kind of rough. With the cameras, I will recommend, if you want to monitor a number

of cameras at once, very handy tool. And I shill this all the time and I will shill it till the day I die. It's called vidgrid. The website is vidgrid .tk .gg and it allows you to dial in between one and nine live feeds at a time. It's built in for news monitoring, but any stream that's either like a .m3u8 stream or like a YouTube stream or a Facebook stream, a lot of live streams, you just drop them into the box there and you

can pull them up. So you could have nine feeds going at a time on your screen and feel like you're creeping on the world, which is fun. So it's really useful when you're monitoring, for example, airstrikes across different streams and things like that. That was useful when the airstrikes started happening in Gaza, for example, using that software. With that in mind, just going back to emerging events slightly. We only got 10 minutes left, so if you have any questions,

please do pop them in the chat. I have a few from earlier as I wanted to mention, but which platforms tend to matter most during breaking events for you? Where are you keeping your eyes? That's a tough one because they've all gotten terrible lately. YouTube is a good one though. I would say One of the best things you can do on YouTube is follow both the Associated Press and Reuters and, uh, and then like maybe AFP

as well. Uh, because they go live when there's a major event happening and they'll have a camera there. Uh, just a raw camera, you know, nobody's talking. I mean, there's people talking in the background, but like nobody's marrying what you're seeing. So those are pretty useful for monitoring, uh, breaking events. Um, but other than that, I use a mixture of blue sky and Twitter and I'm going to dead name Twitter until the day I die.

Um, mixture blue sky and Twitter. Unfortunately, Twitter has gotten pretty difficult to use for open source monitoring. Uh, it's not really the best, but it's the only option for certain topics. Um, but it has made things difficult. Um, Facebook is sometimes useful, um, especially for small town governments. A lot of them post on Facebook

before they post elsewhere. I know during the 2018 campfire, some of the updates that we were getting were from Like the local community hospital posted on their Facebook page that they were evacuating the hospital. That was a pretty big

sign, right? That's not something of course that I had followed ahead of time Because I you can't really guess which things to follow I tried to do that once on my old Twitter account and I followed I guess the Royal Navy did a thing where they've made a Twitter account for every boat I Followed every boat in the Royal Navy and then my Twitter feed was just boats talking to each other. So don't do that It's not really helpful

I love that that exists. That's amazing. There's a few people in the chat exchanging wastewater sites. There's wastewaterscan .org for disease. I shared one in the UK that I'm particularly fond of, which is www .sewagemap .co .uk and they signify sewage with a little poo emoji. Brings me joy when I see my local area being polluted. We've had a few questions earlier when we were talking about radio channels and scanners about encryption. Have you seen an increase in

agencies moving to encrypted systems? And has there been approaches of monitoring encrypted tetra signals in Europe, for example, as well? Are you aware of anything outside of the US?

Don't know about the tetra signals. I know there's a lot of laws in the EU that make it more difficult I know like in Germany, you're not allowed to use scanners at all But in terms of encryption increasing absolutely I mean since 9 -eleven yeah, because when the tech started to come out, but but really the last ten years the the Militarization

of all the police departments. That's one of the things they've done is encrypted all their radios In a pretty alarming way To jump back to the environmental monitoring real quick, again, think in OSIN. Is there a legitimate reason for people to be aware of when sewage might be spilling into the river? Yes, that's a health concern.

In Portland, a number of years ago, we dug a hole and put a big pipe in the ground to take all of our poop because it was going into the river previously and you can't do that anymore. So when it rains too much, the pipe fills up and it flows into the river again. So there is, of course, a website that tracks how full the pipe is, right? That's an example of trying to think of what might be a public information use source that you can think of that you could use

for others. I mean, there's no real way to use a poop pipe for other OSIN other than flooding, but that's just an example. We've only got five minutes left and we've had a question which I think is useful for the overview of kind of what we're... talking about here in terms of putting all these little bits together to kind of get an overall picture. Somebody asked how useful is supplementing stationary cameras traffic act with live streams on social media during ongoing

events? Any advice for that? So is it easy, for example, to pinpoint corresponding cameras and is it useful to kind of do that while you're live monitoring? Yeah, and so if you have a high enough resolution screen or a big enough screen and a Windows computer there's a tool built into the new Windows operating systems called fancy zones that allows you to basically divide your screen up into a number of squares that you can then click and drag a window into and it will

automatically size it there. So during fires I've had a lot of luck having fire cameras in one section of the screen and then Local news is another source of live streaming video. Bookmark your local news affiliates. So there's ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox in almost every major city in the country. So you bookmark the video pages for those affiliates near you. And when a major event happens, they'll have a live stream of the event

typically that you can put on your screen. So you have news camera footage or like you had said, social media footage, and then maybe a flight tracker. to see which aircraft are over the scene or, you know, any of the other resources we've mentioned, right? But it's definitely useful. And during a number of fires I've had, it's almost overwhelming at times. You see the helicopter circling on the flight tracker and then see it

come into the news camera. And then the other window is the video from the news helicopter, right? Like it's almost like you're there. It's like the worst version of SimCity ever. It's really not fun. But, you know, it's information, so. I think that's a really nice quote to end on. The worst version of SimCity ever is what

we've taught you to create today. Please make use of the many resources that have been mentioned here, some really useful ones, all in the chat but they will also be put in the podcast description. Anything else you wanted to shout out or any way that people can reach out to you if they

have any further questions on this topic? Yeah, I'm pretty easy to get a hold of on discord Blue sky is a little bit harder because I don't notice my inbox because it just says 10 all the time and I can't reset it Don't I know what to do about that? But I'm always willing to help people out always willing to teach people what I know and I guess my final note is Think about what

you know, like what's your expertise? What's your passion and what kind of information it within that field might be publicly available? That I haven't mentioned here that you can look up And if it doesn't exist and there's no legitimate reason to keep it secret, maybe you should create it. Maybe that's your thing. Because if you're thinking that it's information that's useful, you're probably not the first person to want

that info. What is really nice about this talk is Aaron's actually volunteered to spend some time next week in a session. For this, it'll be a work with me session. So if you want to come along and test out some of these tools and do some live monitoring live, you can in that session. We'll advertise that on the events page soon. And I'll talk about it in announcements on Monday as well. But for now, thank you everybody for coming and happy monitoring. Thanks for listening,

everybody. Thank you for listening to the Stage Talk. If you'd like to catch a stage tour live where you can ask the guest questions, join the Bellingcat Discord server by visiting www .discord .gg slash Bellingcat. The music you've heard is titled Dawn by Newer Self and is courtesy of Artlist.