Today a consortium of 14 news outlets has released an in-depth report on brutal conditions in detainment camps for (mostly) Uyghur citizens. I was part of the team, focusing on #OSINT-related research. Here are some of our findings #XinjiangPoliceFiles 1/

https://t.co/sxiM4bGMpY https://t.co/WNioLnVv52

First, there are thousands of pictures within the dataset. So I wrote a script that automatically looks for metadata. (for python-folks: I've used the pillow library, can share in case you're interested) We could find make and model, serial number etc. 2/

https://interaktiv.br.de/xinjiang-police-files/ https://t.co/7IqQaSkbhg

Some pictures even had GPS-information stored. The one on the bottom left is located at 43.10755155555556, 81.78891752777777. Colleagues from @DerSpiegel were able to geo-locate it. (Check out their excellent story here: https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/xinjiang-police-files-so-haben-wir-das-datenleck-ueberprueft-a-0dc1d2e6-2771-48ab-af72-ded4aae6970b) https://t.co/5xlg7VQUhv

The BBC has been able to verify cell phones for camp police officers. The screenshot shows a transcript when one of the offices picked up the phone.

Reporting here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-8df450b3-5d6d-4ed8-bdcc-bd99137eadc3 https://t.co/V9VclbAiL5

The data contained thousands of pictures of that essentially look like mugshots. In some pictures, small items were visible. In this case, what looks like a poster, in the background

https://interaktiv.br.de/xinjiang-police-files/ https://t.co/nXwXyIf6hL

If you translate uyghur and painting into chinese and search for these words via chinese search engines, as @Philipp_Gruell did, you end up on sites depicting those very pictures in full, stating those were to be turned into posters.

https://interaktiv.br.de/xinjiang-police-files/ https://t.co/cZzkJCNd0H

This is Tunisagül Nurmemet. We met her husband, Abdurahman Hasan, who corroborated the information contained in the spreadsheets. He told us, that Tunisagül looks "destroyed", like her spirit is "broken". https://t.co/Dlb0hQlHQu

Some pictures were taken outside. Colleagues at Der Spiegel were able to geo-locate them

https://eu.usatoday.com/in-depth/graphics/2022/05/24/the-uyghur-files-hacked-data-photos-unprecedented-evidence-of-chinas-secret-uyghur-detention-system/9615109002/ https://t.co/gjNnJnYk4G

Lastly, forensic experts at Fraunhofer SIT checked parts of the material for manipulation. They didn't find any signs indicating manipulation /FIN

https://twitter.com/FraunhoferSIT/status/1529053326704353280

I want to give a quick shoutout to @radadmiral who reviewed (and vastly improved) my code.