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.