Episode 93: I Spy, You Spy

Jessica and Michael discuss visual surveillance and how Bellingcat cracked the Skripal case by corroborating information using ordinary photographs from uninvolved bystanders from sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google Street View.

The era where anyone can be a visual investigator full of possibilities both empowering and troubling, Michael says:

There’s something so seductive about it. And as designers, you learn early on the power of permitting the audience to connect the dots as opposed to connecting it for them, right? And how persuaded people are their conclusion if they are able to line up a bunch of things and feel, Oh, these all really do go together. Their conviction about what’s true and what’s not true is much stronger when they feel they came to that conclusion independently. And I think it’s really easy to come to potentially multiple conclusions based on the same, or just slightly conflicting, information.

Also mentioned this week:

• Bellingcat Investigation Team, Skripal Suspect Boshirov Identified as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga
• Dali, Warhol, Boshirov: Determining the Time of an Alleged Photograph from Skripal Suspect Chepiga
• Malachy Browne et al., NYT, How Surveillance Cameras Tracked Two Russian Hit Men
• BBC, Skripal poisoning: CCTV shows suspects ‘on way to victims’ home’
• Joshua Rothman, New Yorker,  In the Age of A.I. Is Seeing Still Believing?
• Malachy Browne et al., NYT, The Jamal Khashoggi Case: Suspects Had Ties to Saudi Crown Prince
• Malachy Browne et al., NYT, The Trail of Clues in the Disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi

• Las Vegas shooting, Turkish security in D.C

• Reddit and Boston Marathon bombing witch hunt
• Book trailer for Culture Is Not Always Popular: 15 Years of Design Observer

• Art of the Title, Pablo Ferro

• New York Times, William Goldman obituary
• Michael Bierut, Design Observer, I Hear You’ve Got Script Trouble: The Designer as Auteur
• The film Boy Erased, directed by Joel Edgerton
• The Ballad of Buster Scruggs by The Coen Brothers
• Open Culture, Glenn Gould’s Heavily Marked-Up Score for the Goldberg Variations Surfaces, Letting Us Look Inside His Creative Process

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