Back in 2017, Mexico City was devastated by a 7.1-magnitude earthquake that leveled parts of the city and beyond, killing nearly 400 people and injuring more than 6,000.
For Gisella Peréz de Acha, who was living there at the time, it was both a catastrophe and a calling.
Peréz de Acha, a trained lawyer and journalist, was keenly aware that the online information environment was becoming tainted by waves of misinformation and disinformation. To combat it, she and others coordinated a network of more than 500 volunteers on the ground to compile real-time data and do some serious fact checking.
“We figured out what was needed at each disaster zone at each collapsed building to dig people from underneath the rubble,” she recalls.
Today, Peréz de Acha is the founder and CEO of Fact Finder, a national program that teaches journalists, private investigators and lawyers in open-source intelligence, also known as OSINT.
On May 26-29, she and Guillen Torres, an open-source specialist at the Investigations Lab at the University of California, Berkeley Human Rights Center, came to Madison as part of a digital investigations bootcamp hosted by the Public Tech Media Lab, a new entity in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication led by Tomás Dodds, an assistant professor of journalism. For four days in Morgridge Hall, the three of them taught an audience of journalists, students and UW–Madison academic staff how to use a sizable array of online tools — from AI to satellite imagery to social media data and much more — to conduct investigations, verify data and tell stories.
“It’s really exciting to see that something that was really fringe and that took a lot to convince people was something worth teaching, has now become such a firsthand necessity. There’s a lot of demand for it,” says Peréz de Acha, who taught open investigation techniques at Berkeley for several years. “It’s very inspiring and very validating.”
Torres, who came to the field after seeing how misinformation was being used in Mexican politics, sees OSINT as a sort of essential digital literacy for everyone, a set of tools that can be used to combat misinformation, polarization and the erosion of democracy.
“My main interest is that people understand the rationale behind doing digital investigations,” says Torres. “The data that you need for your investigation is very likely out there, because we’re living in a world in which everything is basically datafied. If you have enough access to this stuff, you can just gather that data and exploit it for learning about the world for justice and accountability.”
During the training, Peréz de Acha programmed an AI bot to simulate a breaking news disinformation situation and asked boot camp participants to use the OSINT tools they’d been shown to verify the data and fact check the story.
The boot camp was sponsored by the College of Letters & Science’s Collective for Research Impact and Social Partnerships (CRISP) and the Knight Foundation, as well as the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association and the Wisconsin Newspaper Association. To Dodds, that range of support is indicative of a growing need for both the technology and knowledge to use it ethically and responsibly.
“This is precisely what the Public Tech Media Lab is trying to do,” he says. “We want to be that bridge between good trainers, people with experience in the field and practitioners to our students and faculty. We want to bring that expertise in a responsible way into the university setting.”