Lawfare Daily: ‘War in the Smartphone Age,’ with Matthew Ford

[Intro]

Matthew Ford: And then, so we could not only watch literally in some cases real time, but certainly subsequently edited footage of these Russian columns being like this Russian column being destroyed, but we could also hear the impact in terms of the complete devastation that this was causing to come on and control amongst the Russian armed forces. So this is only possible in this context of civilian drone technology, smartphone technology.

Justin Sherman: It’s the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Justin Sherman, contributing editor at Lawfare and CEO of Global Cyber Strategies with Matthew Ford, associate professor at Swedish Defense University and author of “War and the Smartphone Age: Conflict, Connectivity, and the Crises at Our Fingertips.”

Matthew Ford: The real battle space with the 21st century is over this digital stack, this set of infrastructures that are shaping what we come to know and understand, but also they are shaping what could be militarily of interest and what can be targeted.

Justin Sherman: Today we're talking about the role of smartphones and related technologies in war, how phones are reshaping open-source intelligence and the military kill chain, and how participatory warfare will evolve into the future.

[Main Podcast]

Start by telling us a little bit more about yourself for those less familiar and what, among other things your research these days is focusing on.

Matthew Ford: Currently I'm focusing on, in, on war in digital context, but the reason I got into this is sort of stems from a couple of different career backgrounds and choices I made over the, my course of my academic career and professional career. So I started off working in management consulting during the first.com bubble way back, you can already, I can, people are already gauging how old I am, way back in 2000, the early 2000s.

And then I became a strategic analyst at the U.K. Ministry of Defense. In between, I did a PhD in war studies and so I'm kind of a bit unusual for an academic in that I've got experience of working in the private sector in government and I've got academic experience and that really sort of led me to think about technology and how organizations manage technology change, and that's really been the focus of my interest, it started off with a sort of a concern for analog technology and the culture of military innovation, how organizations really manage change, not just what they say, but how they actually practice change. And that was a bit of an anthropological study, I think, but more recently I've sort of taken that as a sort of my analysis of how military organizations manage change in the 20th and early 21st century.

And thought about that in the context of all things digital and that led me to write a book with Andrew Hoskins called “Radical War,” which was about the relationship between media, digital media, media in a digital context and war into closer relationships, so media studies and war studies into closer relationship and more recently, the book I've just written, “War in a Smartphone Age” is concerned with how these digital contexts are shaping not just the representation of war, but also the conduct of war, how wars are actually fought, not just how they, how they are presented online and what that's doing for how we come to know and understand what's going on in, in contemporary 21st century warfare, warfare and war.

So, how armies fight, but also what that says about how wars are actually are on the battlefield.

Justin Sherman: You have an exciting new book out in the United States on September 15th. Lucky European audiences, of course can already buy it and have already been reading it called, as we heard in the introductory portion, “War in the Smartphone Age: Conflict, Connectivity, and the Crises at our Fingertips.”

So we're gonna delve into some of the books themes and core arguments and then in direct follow on to what you just said, sort of get your thoughts on where digital connectivity and mobile devices and warfare are all headed. To start us off though, big picture, I mean, you gave a little bit of, of this just now, but, but what prompted you to write this book? You know, in a few sentences, what would you say is your overarching focus or argument?

Matthew Ford: So, what prompted me to write the book was that I was trying to make sense of what I was seeing on my social media feed really in terms of the wars in Ukraine and elsewhere, and I wanted to understand what the limits of what I could claim were really, why are these images appearing on my phone typically, although on other devices as well, obviously why were they appearing in the way that they were appearing?

And that was born out of having written this book with Andrew Hoskins in called “Radical War” in, which got published just at the point where the full scale invasion of Ukraine started and I remember very clearly being on a, being asked onto a podcast with the U.S. Marine Corps, the KLA Center, and thinking to myself in a month of the war in Ukraine, how much of my book “Radical War” with Andrew is, is wrong.

And so I sort of spent that frantic month trying to see whether what I was seeing on my social media feed, feed reflected what we were trying to argue in radical war. And that was a really useful experience because I started to think about how social media distorts our sense of reality, how technologies, the, the infrastructures of smartphone technology are mediating how we come to know, understand, and even participate directly in these conflicts. And this is kind of important because these, these technologies are shaping and legitimizing and framing the politics of some of these things.

But they're also being used for the purposes of intelligence collection, surveillance analysis, and actually then being used for military targeting. So, you know, it was, it was a combination of. Looking at these different feeds and going, well, what is it that I'm seeing? And a little bit of me was getting frustrated with a lot of commentary that where there were sort of authoritative takes on what was happening. And I was like, well, how do you know this?

You are only seeing the same images that I'm seeing. Or are you getting, you know, briefings directly from people in the intelligence community or, you know, through your political connections or whatever, but it it, you know, if we're all, if all things be equal, why are we trusting a particular voice on this? And shouldn't we be, be a little bit more skeptical? Try and think about the, the, the sources and the methods by which we, we, we might analyze this and try and make sense of what it is that we're seeing on our phone.

So, a little bit of frustration, a recognition that a, that I had just published a book and a conventional land war in Europe was gonna potentially make that book wrong, and I wanted to understand how wrong it was gonna be. And happily, what I, I think I confirmed in my mind and what led to the writing of War in a Smartphone Age was that we weren't that wrong, there was lots going on here in terms of the relationship between media and war, but it was also going one step further. It wasn't just the representation of war. Now we had evidence, real evidence of how these devices, how connected devices was shaping the conduct of war, how wars were actually fought.

Justin Sherman: We all know smartphones are everywhere. But, but, but just to, I really want to underscore this 'cause it's sometimes easy to forget, I think.

I mean, we use these every day, but they haven't really been around in the scheme of things all that long. So to frame our discussion, are there any quick hit statistics you want to sort of rattle off about? Just how much smartphones have proliferated in the last two decades and the role they've come to occupy globally?

Matthew Ford: I mean, the, the thing about them is, is that they're so mundane. We take them for granted, certainly in the global north, we don't really think much about it. It's just part of everyday experience. We've already gone from a analog to a digital, to a sort of post-digital space. Everything we do is mediated by our smartphone.

So, and that, I mean, I dunno about you, but my, where I'm going, who I'm seeing, how I'm paying for things, what kinds of things get delivered to my front door. It, you know, all of that stuff is made possible through an app and the ecology of apps that are associated with the, with my smartphone, but of course, different parts of the world have different engagements with different smartphone technology.

So I was speaking to a, I'm name dropping now, but I was speaking to a Google exec working on AI a few weeks ago, and he was explaining why that, that people in the U.S. were more, were more in favor of iPhones over and above Android phones, is I, I'm assuming that that's a fair statement in terms of one was sexier than the other.

I dunno how to put that better. You know, and, and that sort of, there's a sort of culture of purchasing these things that reflects what's cool and what's not in different parts of the world. So first thing, there's an uneven distribution of around the world of these technologies, but where you'd expect things to be most heavily connected because the internet grew out of those spaces, you, you see high levels of connectivity.

So in 2020 there were 5.8 billion active broadband subscriptions. I mean, and the distribution across the developed world and developing world is interesting. 125% broadband, active broadband subscriptions in the developed world, 65% in the developing world. But in 2023 you have 7.6 billion people covered by 3G network. So, you know, in a short period of time, you've, you've got a huge number of people covered by a 3G network, that's 93% of the world, right? So in 2016, you have 3.7 billion smartphones around the world. By 2025, you have 7.4 billion.

Now, that's not to say that, you know, people have two or three smartphones, but that indicates just how saturated everyday life is with these mun, with these, with these devices, that's led to an ex-, massive explosion of data, data production, using the cloud for accessing serv key services, storing our stuff, storing our photos and images, just streaming films and all, you know, all the things that you, you take for granted that, that has a forensic digital footprint and it started off very, in a very small, sort of, not very obvious, it didn't have a very obvious trajectory when I first think about my first smartphone in 2000, what, 7, 8? And it sort of has grown up and I think it's a, it's grown up and quietly and in the background and you know, because it's in the background and no one thinks about it.

And because it's so mundane, we kind of ignore it. And I've, this book is really just trying to draw attention back to the fact that we are living in highly connected space where the promises of AI haven't come through yet, but we do have, we are living in a highly digitally connected environment.

Justin Sherman: Taking it for granted is a great way of putting it. That's sort of what, what I was, what I was getting at.

Matthew Ford: You mean say, I took so long? Too long getting to the point is–

Justin Sherman: Not at all. Not at all.

Matthew Ford: No.

Justin Sherman: I just, you know, we, we've got these things stapled to our hands and sometimes we don't really step back, as you said at the not just the proliferation, but the degree of, of data flow. So in that vein I'm gonna read an excerpt, so, listeners, bear with me for a second here from early on in the book, 'cause I, I really loved this section.

You write that the abundance of data from all of our smartphones quote, “hints at the possibility that the battlefield is transparent and available for ordinary people to witness. If this is true, then we can see everything just on the basis that something or someone is recording it. At the same time, our social media feeds deliver posts to us in an order that is framed by a platform's algorithms. These posts do not necessarily arrive in temporal order. But drop out of context, helping us to link content together in ways that may or may not reflect the way events unfolded,” unquote.

Talk to us about this idea, as you put it in the book of collapsing context. I thought this was very interesting. What do you mean by that? And then how have we seen this happen in scenarios in recent years of, of war and conflict?

Matthew Ford: So, I, I dunno about you guys, but whenever I've been on my phone, I kind of get, have this experience where not always, but sometimes, and it's quite jarring when it happens, but you know, I'm, I'm looking at my feed and it'll tell, direct me towards somewhere I might want a holiday or some review of a book or something, or a bit of news, or typically in my case, it's something about food or wine because that's what I like doing. And then, you know, someone will drop, there'll be another, a random post of someone being shot or assassinated or beheaded or something.

And it, it's kind of very jarring. And I, I, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's had that experience. It's very jarring, or maybe it's just because my feeds are so bound up with war as well as all of the usual normal things that people do, but it's so jarring that you kind of a, a, are left trying to make sense of what it is that you're seeing on your feed.

And typically what we're doing is, is we're just sort of connecting these images together or these post together in a, in a feed, in, in a way that makes sense to us. You know, we are applying our own understanding and drawing out interpretations and, but we're not necessarily thinking about the chronology or the provenance or the sources of, of data or the images or the video. We're not really thinking about where they've come from and how they've arrived on our phone, and yet that has a story that needs to be investigated a bit further.

So one of the early things I found in the full scale invasion of Ukraine was the number of people who thought that they, what they were looking at on their feeds was sort of real time, or that, you know, no one had interfered with it, that it was giving you direct images of what was going on, on in the battlefield.

And of course, you know, some of that stuff, a lot of that stuff is amazing because you'd never expect to have such a ringside seat on what was going on in terms of a particular conflict or artillery strike or whatever, but you kind of had to really think carefully, and that's what I spent that first month working on, thinking carefully about the sources of the images or the video that I was looking at.

Was this a street cam? Was it a webcam? Was it a doorbell cam? Was it something that had come from a, a, a helmet or someone wearing it on the body? Was it a smartphone or was it someone you know as part of a mainstream media team that had been sent out to collect a load of news stories, stories, and they were embedded or they weren't embedded, they were wandering around a battlefield, looking for stories and, but you know, once you start thinking about the images themselves and what, what they're saying, where they've come from, the type of recording it is, you start to think and reflect on and contextualize how these things have been in the first case collected, and then you start to go, well, how do these things get put up onto the cloud? How do they get streamed? How are they being broadcast? Are they being broadcast over a, a mainstream news network? And then you can start to think, is there some other level of mediation going on there? What's the storytelling going on behind that?

Is there if, if it's a 24-hour period between initial capture of the image and then it's posting onto social media, what's happening in that 24 hours, and it seems obvious, you know, that somewhere down the line someone might be trying to mediate, tell a story contextualize that story for you. They've put added music, or they've edited in some way, shape, or form.

But then, you know, the question is, is where does the, where does the thing get posted in the first place? Does it get posted to Telegram and then goes to, to X or, or what? I mean, one of the early, early experiences I had when I was thinking about these things was I got tagged to a video of a Ukrainian filming another Ukrainian calling a Russian mother to tell her that her son had been shot in the war in Ukraine.

And, and the interesting thing was is that, you know, why was the question I asked myself was, why was I being tagged to that on X on Twitter as it was? And so I went, I actually wanted to go and find out, I mean, was I being targeted as part of an influence campaign or was it something else going on? And the interesting thing was, is that I spoke to a friend of mine who's a Russianist, and they confirmed that it was Ukrainian Russian.

It was as awful. The story that was going down was as awful as it was being subtitled. And then I asked someone doing forensic stuff. And they said that the, the film had been taken possibly or uploaded at least in Russia, then sent via China, via Reddit in India, and then finally got posted to me on, on Twitter.

And so, you know, once you start thinking about that, well, what's the story behind that? Now you don't ordinarily think about that when you are just looking at your feed, you just repost and all the rest of it. And of course that contrasts very clearly with what the military is saying they're doing when they've got the opportunity to collect all these different sources of intelligence sig int and stuff from satellites and all the rest of it, where they think they can tr, where they, there's a, the ba the battlefield looks somewhat transparent to them.

So you've got this kind of mixed ecosystem where the military see one thing, the public see another the public aren't always queued in on what they're seeing and they don't, typically, people don't typically spend time to go and fact check the feeds that they've got. And so you've got this, this narrative that's out of kilter where on the one hand things look transparent to the armed forces, and on the other, the, the public have got a particular narrative that's playing out, and the mismatch creates all sorts of challenges and unintended effects that have sometimes really real political and conduct of war effects, and you need to pay attention to that. And that's where I started to, that was my breaking in point, if you like, for trying to understand the distorting prisms that are social media.

Justin Sherman: As an example of, of what you're talking about, you describe in the book the use of unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs, AKA drones on the battlefield in Russia's full scale war on Ukraine as a way that information, as you're saying seen online, plays a critical role in how we, broadly right from journalists to generals to members of the public, interpret war.

Even if the underlying, you know, timeline or context of the information is, is fuzzy. So, tell us more about this story. How has information about UAVs in the war, including first person videos of, of drones been shared and consumed, and what has this meant for how we, as you were saying, think about and then understand the conflict and the role of these UAV technologies within it?

Matthew Ford: I mean, it's fair to say that the drone has played an outsized and disproportionate effect on how we come to understand the war in Ukraine and wars more enerally, I think. And so I, I what, in what I'm just gonna say now, I don't want to sort of discount the importance of the drone as a technology for framing representations of walkers, I think it's been really, really very important. Having said that civilian operated drones have been very, very important for defeating Russians at the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Things have changed. The, the, the, the way the battlefield has unfolded, the types of technologies that are relevant or not has changed.

We've moved from maybe initially the javelin being anti-tank missile being the the weapon that was most iconic and you were seeing lots and lots of images and memes being put across online relating to the javelin. But then the real killer has been artillery and more recently we've been talking a lot about drones and clearly the U.S. has kicked off a drone policy, which underlines how important the technology has been, but go back to that first month of the invasion, full-scale invasion, and what you have is civilians operating drones that are helping Ukrainian artillery spotters. So they're, they're literally calling up on WhatsApp the positions of the advancing Russian tanks from the tank columns on the MO1 highway heading towards Kiv and they're calling out the positions of the sixth, the 239th Tank Regiment and ninth Guards tank division. And there's this lovely video put together by the Austrian General Staff, which you can find on YouTube, which sort of pulls apart how that campaign, how that operation went occurred. And they, all of the relayed information by civilian participants was incredibly useful for artillery sponsor 'cause they, you know, they could box in the Russian column and they could take out crucial communications vehicles which then forced the Russians to communicate, abandon their own encrypted communications and start to communicate in the open over Ukrainian cell phone grids. And then, so we could not only watch literally in some cases real time, but certainly subsequently edited footage of these Russian columns being like this Russian column being destroyed, but we could also hear the impact in terms of the complete devastation that this was causing to command and control amongst the Russian armed forces. So this possible in this context of civilian drone technology, smartphone technology, and that was brought really home very early on in the war. I mean that's all led to all sorts of odd claims, you know, some of which are that the drone is gonna make the tank irrelevant and also, and various other bits and pieces, but I think we need to be careful because just because the Ukrainians are now producing, what, a couple of million drones a year, that was, I think last year. The implication is there's a sort of changing balance of weapons available and that tells you that. Older technologies, armor, fighting vehicles, and the rest of it aren't necessarily relevant. They're getting destroyed easily, but what you don't hear in all of that is how in 2023, at least about 10,000 drones a month were being destroyed. So you have the footage from drones that have successfully attacked Russian targets, but you don't have the footage from those drones that haven't successfully targeted Russians. The result is, is you've got a sort of inherent selection bias in the feed that you are seeing. It's sort of telling you that the drone is successful, even though 10,000 or so have been lost in as part of that month's activities. Now, I'm not trying to say the drone's not important, but you can see straight away our hope, you can see that what you're seeing on your smartphone, what you're seeing online, what you're seeing over social media doesn't actually give you all of the context. And that, that speaks back to my point the earlier point I made, which is you really do need to reflect on the provenance, the sources, and how this information, these images have been presented to you under what circumstances, because only then can you start to think about how to crosscheck and corroborate different sources.

Different feeds, different sources of intelligence to start to make sense of what might actually be going on in the battlefield. And of course, what actually might be going on in the battlefield is different now compared to my analysis from 2023 and 2024 and all the rest of it. So you, you know, it's very deeply contextual and takes quite a bit of effort to pull apart, but once you do, you kind of get past the very trite claims that you know, the tank is over, or, you know, x, y, and Z is the future of war. It might be. But it might be a specific set of circumstances that are applying right now that make that the case. And you need to think about that very carefully before you make bigger claims.

Justin Sherman: Right and if you lose the context, perhaps that exacerbates it, you know?

Matthew Ford: Yeah.

Justin Sherman: Another challenge you highlight is that in more time, as in, you know, just in, in life in general, vis-a-vis social media, there is this strong demand for individuals to, to often be the first one to comment or, or on share something, right?

There's this sort of tremendous valuation, perhaps both algorithmically, but also, you know, in the social context of novelty. And so, you know, you point out that journalists are held to higher standards, I’ll say at least, you know, ideally but, but neither they nor the media organizations they work for are free from pressures to sort of scoop other outlets by a minute, two minutes either, right. So what, what are these incentives in your mind doing to what newsrooms are, are covering in the war? How they're covering the war in the smartphone age, and I'll say not just the Russian war in Ukraine, but also Civil War in in Ethiopia, and any other number of recent conflicts where there is that popular and also journalistic rush to sort of be the first to get something out online.

Matthew Ford: I mean, if the images that are appearing on our feeds are mediated, then it, we have to pay attention to the ecosystem, the news ecosystems that bring us this stuff. And social media and mainstream media, the, that relationship is sort of well documented, I'd say well understood in for most journalists and people thinking about social media, in terms of capitalism and in terms of how this is shaping surveillance, capitalism shaping, shaping the business models of mainstream media.

Famously, of course described by the Trump administration as legacy media, so we have to pay attention to what's going on in terms of these ecosystems for me. But I, what I, what I noticed was early on that that people aren't reflecting on upon that necessarily in relation to war, which I, you know, we can do it in terms of surveillance, capitalism, we can do it in terms of surveillance and surveillance state in terms of domestic managing domestic political arguments and all of that kind of stuff, but when it comes to war, I haven't seen so much being presented about that a, and the, the kicking off point really was me being challenged by Louise Mensch within three or four days of the start of the war in Ukraine, and she sort of shouted at me, of course Ukraine's gonna win. And I was like, well, how do you know that? And the Russians are going to lose. And I, it just, you know, there was someone with a, a follow account on X of, on Twitter at the time of, I dunno, quarter of a million or whatever, and she was telling me that I was wrong and I, I didn't know what, I didn't know at the time, it was three days into the war, you know, Russia's a, a superpower, Ukraine's not a superpower, anything could have happened. I dunno how we could have come to any kind of evaluation after three days that one side was gonna lose and the other side wasn't. But there she was shouting at me. I was like, what? So we really got to think, that's my conclusion here was is we've really gotta think about how influencers work, not just in terms of Saturday night light entertainment and how this is shaping people's choices around what sorts of things they buy and what sorts of things they watch and how they engage with each other on, in, in a media context, but also in relation to war.

So that's, that's my impulse. We know already and have, and we've seen this over a long period of time that. Social media is disrupting the mainstream media business model. You need eyeballs on newspaper adverts, on newspaper front pages where all the adverts are. So the challenge is to get people to click onto mainstream media webpage and off the social media page.

Well, of course, Elon got made that impossible by getting or tried to make that impossible by getting rid of the headlines from. He posts on X that quoted a newspaper, newspaper article and he keeps talking about x being the media. So this is, you are finding out the news on social media and this clearly the goal is to get everyone.

And, and that's just a function of clickthroughs and monetization. So these spaces, if there's no money to be made, if you, if you will, from watching what's going on in odd parts of the world, then social media, mainstream media won't necessarily pay attention to it. And this, there's all sorts of implications of that, right?

So there are about 106 languages being spoken in Ethiopia. Some of those will be modeled for Translation by Google Translate and others, but the vast majority won't. Facebook, before all of the changes in terms of its content moderation when those changes happened in the last year or so, they had about 15,000 moderators. Those moderators will be supported by some kind of AI platform to sort of monitor for content and strip out the really awful stuff. But what about in those languages that are not covered in by Google Translate or whatever, that's still left to a moderating team of, you know, a small moderating team in Kenya or whatever.

And there's never gonna be any money for Facebook or any other mainstream or social media company to, or even Google Translate, necessarily Google to necessarily codify all of these languages. So if there's no money in it, these, these things will always go part down and, and slip past the radar. And then you're in a battle between the moderators who are being asked by non-governmental organizations to pull down content that it shows violence in parts of the world that.

Aren't being properly looked after because the infrastructure, the moderating infrastructure isn't there. They are posting to moderators, please take this stuff down. And then moderators themselves taking two, three weeks to turn around and, and in that time, two, three weeks, there's a lot of political violence can go on.

So there's, there's, there's stuff going on here that we need to make sense of because you can still scoop mainstream media because just because of the distribution of information infrastructure, distribution of moderation, infrastructure, that becomes a real problem for mainstream media that are typically not geared up for, or have not typically been geared up for this space.

So, if journalists are mainly sourcing their, have traditionally mainly sourced their news from human connections, from sources that they've tapped up and they've asked questions of. Now, of course, people online can start looking directly from the feeds that are being posted online, and you can get an pretty quick image of what's going on, and you've got this battle then between mainstream media news desks who are for all sorts of reasons principally, they don't want to tell an untruth, they don't re don't wanna libel anyone online, they on, on in their news, they, they want to fact check. You've got this situation where the fact checkers can't keep up with the, with the what's going on online. So you, they are, they are always being scooped by social media, and if you can crowdsource your open-source investigation or open-source intelligence, then you might even be able to do something more accurately online than you can do in the mainstream media.

I just give you one example. I gave a talk at the cabinet office conference one time in the U.K. and at that conference there was a fact check organization Every day, this fact checking organization, it checks for misinformation, disinformation, finds a hundred thousand bits of misinformation disinformation using AI, an AI scraper.

And they can only fact check 10 of the hundred thousand that they find every day. So, 99,990 other bits of disinformation or misinformation get lost and they don't check and they can't correct. That just struck me as being really, you know, if ever there was an indication of how, you know, truth and falsity and misinformation is from, this is like pushing water uphill, tou just can't keep up given the amount of stuff that's going on online.

Justin Sherman: You mentioned open-source intelligence. Let's talk more about that. This has, has been in the news a lot here in recent years for a variety of reasons. It's played a role as you spell out in the book, in conflicts across among others, Europe and Africa and the Middle East.

How do you define open-source intelligence? And then how do you think governments are thinking about open-source intelligence or OSINT in the context of modern warfare?

Matthew Ford: So I just take a definition that's come from the National Defense Authorization Act, the U.S. National Defense and Authorization Act intelligence that has been produced from publicly available information and is collected, exploited and disseminated in a timely manner to an appropriate audience for the purposes of addressing a specific intelligence requirement.

That's how the act describes it, and it kind of is easy for me to follow along. It's important because the same tools that are available to you and I, I mean, anyone can do it, right? I mean, that said, to do it well, you need analytical tools and techniques and you need to understand what you're doing, but the tools themselves are available to everyone if they wanted to go and check and look. And that kind of democratizes, if you will, the process which, which we can actually try and make sense of what's going on in general, but also in particular in relation to conflict and war. I, I mean, I built an OSINT, built, I worked with a bunch of guys and we did some open-source intelligence work, some experiments effectively we, we became part of a team together and that allowed us to understand whether we could work to the same standards as the U.S. intelligence community. So, and we did this work for the British government, and effectively we showed that we could work to U.S. National Intelligence standards, so ICD 203. Now, that was a useful exercise because it revealed what was involved in actually doing open-source intelligence. And the problem with when we are seeing people talk about open-source intelligence is, is that they typically won't discuss their sources and methods. And if they do, they kind of 'cause they don't wanna reveal them, 'cause if they revealed them, then they wouldn't be able to use them or do them again, necessarily use the same sources. They wanna reveal their source, they wanna just sit there and watch what's going on. But that was a very useful exercise to understanding what was possible. Doing open-source intelligence work as an ordinary person without having access to any digital clever tools that would necessarily automate or maximize my data collection activity. So can you do these things manually? Yes, you can. Is it time intensive and complex? Yes, it is. It helps if you are skilled. Can you learn those skills? Yes, you can. And why is this important? Because actually non-state actors, people who don't have access to the kinds of work made possible by the intelligence community in states like the U.S. or the U.K., non-state actors and smaller states, they can do it themselves if they want. So one of the examples I reference in “War a Smartphone Age” is Hamas and they use exactly the same, effectively they're using similar, I say exactly the same, but similar techniques to the ones that we worked on when I was putting this team together to help them or organize for October 7th. So that's why it's important and we need to pay attention to it.

Justin Sherman: As you note, it's, it's not just governments folks like, and some of these folks are certainly friends of the podcast, you know, Elliot Higgins who founded Bellingcat and, and plenty of others, you know, we're doing pioneering work around the war in Syria circa 2012, looking at Russian assassination programs and, and various other things. So, but you, you draw this out where it's not just governments that are leveraging open-source information, it's also hobbyists, it's researchers, it's these, I don't wanna quite say traditional newsrooms, but more sort of investigative hubs. So,

Matthew Ford: Yeah

Justin Sherman: You know, talk to us a little bit about that. And then second, and in the same vein, you draw a distinction between open-source intelligence, OSINT, and open-source investigations.

I'm not sure about the acronym, but, but open-source investigations right. And then so what, what is that distinction as well, and how does that fit into war?

Matthew Ford: I think the interesting thing was is that, I mean, I'm, I'm pleased you brought up Bellingcat and Elliot Higgins 'cause they clearly founded an entire field you, I mean, created a field If I think I, I, without trying to exaggerate or just linking it just to one person or group, but certainly, you know, pioneering, I was astonished when I first looked at what they were, what Elliot was producing out of Syria and I was teaching the civil war in Syria and all that was going on there and using the stuff that Elliot was producing as a sort of, you know, this is amazing transparency, amazing stuff that was that, that you could find just by scouring YouTube and you know, applying some.

Basic understanding of equipment, military equipment to sort of establish what was likely to be a, a turn of events in a particular campaign or use of a particular weapon system. I mean, and of course the story of Bellingcat is probably also the story of YouTube, of the White Helmets, of the availability of head cams and the availability of digital media in Syria and elsewhere.

And so there's a sort of, these, these techniques emerged at the same time as some of these devices became more widely available. And of course it's changed again as the smartphone has become more available and, and those changes are important to document and understand because what was possible in 2012 may not be possible in the same sort of way as it is in 2025.

Not least, of course, as I said, right, the head of the show, top of the show, you know, there's an enormous amount of data being produced, so the challenge then becomes sifting through all. Now, it's commonly stated that the war in Ukraine is the most documented war in history, principally because everyone has some kind of digital device in its very highly connected environment, and how people use those devices is sort of clearly contextualized by how the government and the police and the security sector works and the need not to share critically important information online that might be used for military purposes by the Russian armed forces, but there are a lot of people still collecting lots of evidence of war crimes and other illegal activities. And that is sort of forming part of, if you will, a sort of series of accidental archives. Archives that have been set up and sponsored, set up by the, through the Ukrainian government, sponsored by external actors funded by philanthropists or whatever. And they are doing what I've described as open-source investigations. And I think the difference here between OSINT and OSINVT. OSINTis really something that would, might lead to some kind of immediate, actionable actit, someone, someone doing something actionable, right? It would, it would have a military or civil society commercial purpose. It would, it would produce immediate results, it would lead to an immediate intervention in some way, shape or form. It might shape how the news is reported or what target is attacked, but open-source investigation can happen in slow time. Just a process of accumulating different bits of evidence, but the question then becomes how forensically accurate that information is so that it can be used, documented in a, a war crime tribunal where the standards of evidence are much, much higher than just you taking a picture or a video that might in some way be meddled with digitally somewhere down the lines.

Justin Sherman: Right and our, our international law listeners ears just perked up, as you said, an interesting sort of, you know, what's, what's analyzable in an intel context versus the, you know, a court or something. So you mentioned infrastructure a number of times thus far. You know, smartphones, of course, not operating in isolation, but laying on top of a whole variety of other technologies. Plugging into them, depending on them from data centers to. Telecom infrastructure. I'll also plug, we just had Adam Chan on the podcast who's the National Security Council to the chairman of the FCC, and we talked all about summering cables. You can go check that out. Matthew, you have a useful framework, you talk about a tech stack for how to think about smartphones and the underlying technologies, but especially in your book, not just, okay, here's how this works, but here's how this attaches to how we think about war. So why don't you, you flesh some of that out for us.

Matthew Ford: So, the stack is really combined layers of digital infrastructure that make up I dunno what you might call a human computer interface. I mean, it's, it's the terrestrial sensors, it's the local digital, cellular and regional communications networks, internet gateways, which of course include the sub C cables, the LAN points, and all that. Satellite systems, of course, copper wires, copper wires in Germany, a sort of east west relationship strategic challenge of managing the east and front of the Western, and ultimately things around resource and supply chains. This is old, old 19th century technology, but, you know, layered onto that is all the more sophisticated and more recent communications infrastructure, and so there's, there's some influencer there around war, but there's a lot more in terms of the 20th century and the growth of the internet around globalization and offshoring and outsourcing business processes to different parts of the world.

Clearly the arrangement of these technologies shapes the speed and latency of the networks that you are connecting to, and that then shapes information flow. And I suppose one of the core arguments of the book is that actually the, the real battle space for the 21st century is over this digital stack.

Set of infrastructures that are shaping what we come to know and understand, but also they are shaping what could be militarily of interest and what can be targeted. So getting a sense as to what these infrastructures are, and they are mainly civilian. So, and it's the relationship between the civilian technologies and their military technologies, the fact that civilian communications technology is faster, can carry more data and is in many ways more useful than military communications infrastructure. This is the, some of the key drivers I think, that are changing patterns of participation in conflict and they're changing what we fight over. And you can see that in relation to Hamas on October 7^th, you know, that was my, that's my main example, getting through the smart wall was easy in inverted comm, still a complicated set of challenges and took several years to organize and plan, coordinate all the rest of it. You know, the Israelis controlled all of the communications infrastructure in Gaza. So there was nothing that Hamas could do that wasn't being observed by Israeli intelligence.

So they had to figure out how to do all of this whilst they were being watched all the time. Now, they successfully did that, but the crucial things for them were to plan all of this in the open effectively took two years, managed to the easy bit in inverted comms breaking through this cyber physical, wall, the iron wall, but once having got in through the barrier, the real challenge was really to create enough time for them to spread as much atrocity as they could across Southern Israel. So to do that, really you had to attack the Israeli military stack, but they also, what was important was to leave the Israeli civilian stack in place, mainly because firstly, they needed to communicate over it themselves. So on the night before the attack they switched over to 400 is they switched over, switched on 400 Israeli simcards, and used those as a means of communication across Southern Israel. But also if you leave civilian cell phone networks up, Israelis themselves can broadcast their own murder, so, you know, you get a double bubble. You, this is an enormously significant political event, world changing event, and it was driven in my, as far as I'm concerned, by a very sophisticated bunch of planners who understood that they needed to spend more, create more time in Israel to commit more atrocity, and the only way to do that was to slow down the Israeli Defense Forces' response time whilst leaving Israelis themselves open to broadcast their own terror.

And it's been very, very successful and that, I think that's a good example of what I mean by why in my mind, war is now being fought over through and about, around the stack.

Justin Sherman: Another really interesting part of the book is looking at, you know, taking this stack idea, OSINT, several of the things we've mentioned and looking at how smartphones themselves are not just capturing the battlefield or a means of intelligence analysis of the battlefield, but how they actually sit and play a role in military operations themselves.

And so you talked to us in the book about the, the military kill chain and how smartphones are playing a role, and then how that kill chain has evolved, say from the U.S. military fighting in Iraq in the 2000s, versus how we see smartphones playing a role in the battle space today.

So, so what is this concept of a military kill chain, and then how have we seen that, that evolution in today's highly connected environment?  

Matthew Ford: So these are good questions. I mean, I think they're important to under, it's important to understand the kill chain, what its origins were in the global war on terror, at least in the contemporary terms, and then once you've understood that, then you can see how ordinary civilians can get involved in that. So the kill chain is really a process by which you can find, fix, finish your enemy and that for, that's an intelligence gathering analysis exercise, but once you've killed or captured, it's not just kill, but kill or captured your enemy, you then take the evidence that you find and your enemy has produced the digital evidence in particular, and you, you exploit and analyze that.

And then as a cycle you find, fix, finish, exploit, analyze, and then start the process again, so on. And it started in really with JSO in Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq under Stanley McChrystal, it was about finding terrorist cells as quickly as possible so that they could be killed or captured.

And if you could do that a, a tempo on a really quickly, then you could effectively prevent the terrorists from striking you whilst you were having this and sort of ongoing political negotiations between the other actors in Baghdad and Iraq and out of this process, you know, what you found was that you were collecting an enormous amount of data, there were more sensors than more noise than signal. So the challenge was collecting, making sense of analyzing, and synthesizing all of this stuff and you'd have, you know lots and lots of analysts going through this data and you know, synthesizing it on their computers without any kind of necessary automation product, putting it all into a PowerPoint slide deck, and then presenting it as this is your target list for the night. And of course, that's a very time intensive exercise and the question, and over the last 10, 15 years, the challenge is how can we automate some of that and then having automated it speed up the process by which we can, and optimize the process by which we can make the kill chain work. The important thing from a smartphone point of view is, is that the smartphone is an incredibly sophisticated device and sensor in in particular, and everyone's carrying them around and as individuals, you can actively choose to take images and take data, as I said with the drone example, you can provide that information to intelligence analysis fusion cells they're called, you can provide that and in you effectively become part of the sensor network in the kill chain. And my suggestion is, is that that changes the nature of participation in conflict. The Ukrainians are doing that through a, a standardized app called eVorog and my suggestion is, is that's gonna be more the norm because everyone's carrying these devices and it's useful information. And you could be effectively part of this kill chain or what the Americans, sometimes U.S. armed forces are sometimes calling a kill web. You just become another layer in part, a layer of that sensor network sensor grid that builds resilience into the kill chain as a civilian participant. And you know that that potentially provides actionable open source intelligence directly to the armed forces who can, can strike an enemy.

Justin Sherman: I wanna double click on this just 'cause it's, it's interesting, this participative warfare concept and I saw you sort of preview some of the stuff in the book in a talk and it was quite terrifying.

But just, just for like 30 seconds, if, what are one of one or two of these really illustrative examples of how, as you said, literally through an app or a smartphone device, people are participating in war in a way that I think few, we might think, oh, they posted a tweet. No, no, no, like actually participating in, in the conflict.

Matthew Ford: Everyone's heard of signmyrocket.com, right. So whilst you're listening to this podcast, quickly pick up your phone and write in to your browser of choice, find my signmyrocket.com and you'll find you have the capacity to buy a rocket or a a bomb, they'll film and photograph your name being signed onto the bomb.

Then they'll take the bomb on a drone and drop the bomb on someone and record all of that, and then use all of that for marketing purposes. And you, you never know, you might even get the chance to press the enter button as to when the bomb gets dropped, all the, all while you're sitting on your home in your, your office looking at your, your computer or on your smartphone. So, you know, th this is, this is not just the, the smartphone and these connected technologies are helping you see the war differently. They are also making it possible for you to participate in it differently, not just directly in the kill chain, but also just because you wanna spend money and crowdsourced kit that you can make available to people because you support the cause and you wanna get involved. That's not just representation, that's you getting involved in the conduct of war. So these sorts of things are available and they're a bit shocking, and there are plenty of other examples that some, in some cases, date where this trajectory of ideas has come from.

One last example I'll give you, I mean, there are examples of Islamic State using social media to like or down like whether they murder someone on social media that clearly the platforms themselves are getting, trying to control limit or minimize how this kind of use of their platform works, at least in a public social media platform, but you know, when it comes to instant messaging, WhatsApp or or signal, whatever, how would you control end-to-end encrypted. Instant messaging platforms and what they're doing for building engagement online and encouraging people to, once they see that, not only to be motivated politically, but they may also, it may also be part of a crowdsourcing or crowdfunding campaign to collect money and show that where that money is going is having useful results on the battlefield as part of the crowdfunding campaign.

Justin Sherman: Sort of a horrifying in some ways sort of thought of like, you know, we're, we're tracking charity impact, but here it's worse.

Matthew Ford: So, yeah. Yeah. So, sorry Justin, just quickly, I mean, you know, the, the, there's a, one of my colleagues in anthropologist, just whilst you said that, you know, one of my colleagues in anthropologist, in Somalia working on Somalia has tracked this sort of smartphone soldier where someone will carry a knik off and another person will carry a smartphone and the guy with a knik off will go off and do their thing. The guy filming it will record all of that and then make it available to the diaspora live as it were, the Somali diaspora, to as part of a crowdfund. You know, we need, you need to know where your money's going.

And my anthropologist colleagues have seen that happen. And that's just part and parcel of what it is to do connected, have connected devices and connected technology around available being used in ways that people in Silicon Valley might not have anticipated, but, you know, it may also be equally legitimate, you know, the Somali clan looking to defend itself and needs to raise cash in order to do that. So the, these are the sorts of things that are happening and I, and need to be reflected on.

Justin Sherman: Very thorny. So, so lastly here, I just wanna, I wanna bring us back to, to us the listener. So if you had, and, and I always hate getting asked this, but now I get to ask someone else this question, you know, if, if you had one, you know, recommendation for folks who are listening and who want to or actively do follow drones in, in Russia, Ukraine, right? Or they wanna look at content, you know, from a civil war to understand what's happening, but they don't wanna get misled by what they're seeing, or maybe they wanna think about the broader context of smartphones and war, is there, is there one suggestion you would give us for how we can become better consumers of war content in the smartphone age?

Matthew Ford: Build your op own open-source intelligence team. That's the first bit of advice I'd have. And I say that in jest. I think, you know, only partly right, the, the, the number one thing is to think about in my mind, and this is how I went about it initially, how is the battle? How is the battlefield unfolding?

Where are people, where are different armed actors? How have they got there? What's the, and that some of that stuff is just documented in mainstream media, right? But that should give, that gives you the context for what's going on in terms of the battle. And then you've gotta be thinking about the actual images themselves, where they've come from, what the source is, whether it's webcam, street cam helmet, cam, smartphone, mainstream media, because each one of those different images will have its own story to tell, and making sense of that is, is really important for thinking through the, the way that image has traveled from the person who's initially recorded it all the way into your hand whilst you're looking, whilst you're sitting at home or on the tube? On the tube or the train trying to make sense of what it is that you're seeing. And so that is kind of the starting place.

The other interesting thing you might want to do, and I've been doing this with students a fair bit, is go online and if you really want to sort of see how many different ways of taking a particular story, just go and investigate one particular moment and just see how many different ways of interpreting that.

Are there, and you just get an, and without making any judgment calls about who's right and wrong, list the different stories that are being told about a particular event, and then think about how that relates to the source material itself, and then contextualize that against the, the bigger picture. And you start to get a sense as to the role some of these images play in terms of trying to over, overall trying to shape the narrative about a particular conflict.

And I think that can be a very useful, just sort of stepping back the other thing is don't jump in and repost straight away because it's, you know, within 24 hours or several, a couple of hours, someone's bound to have shown that everything you've just done is, or everything you've claimed is all wrong.

So, definitely hold back and do some thinking before you post. It, it always helps to have a good understanding of the armed forces themselves and the technologies and the, and realistically what those technologies can realistically do because some of the claims made about them. Just, it's just doesn't sound likely to me sometimes that the Russian advance in Ukraine failed because of poor maintenance of tires.

I don't think so. I really don't think so.

Justin Sherman: Yeah, it all needs the, the context. That, that's all the time we have, but Matthew, thanks very much for joining us. It was a real pleasure.

Matthew Ford: Thank you for having me.

Justin Sherman: The Lawfare Podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. You can get ad free versions of this and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a Lawfare material supporter at our website, lawfaremedia.org/support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters. Please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Look out for our other podcasts, including Rational Security, Allies, The Aftermath, and Escalation, our latest Lawfare Presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine. Check out our written work at lawfaremedia.org. The podcast is edited by Jen Patja and our audio engineer. This episode was Goat Rodeo. Our theme music is from Alibi Music. As always, thank you for listening.