One of the things I regret the most about having deleted my Twitter account as soon as Musk took over was the OSINT challenges. Luckily, it looks like folks are posting these on Bluesky as well, and that’s how I bumped into Sofia’s challenges.
She already posted the solution but let’s avoid that and go for the latest one, number thirty.
Goal: to find the location of the white tent at 1m16s in the video posted.
This video was posted in 2007 so I’m already guessing this will not be straightforward. After all, Sofia states this is a hard level exercise.
After watching the whole video – and using the automated subtitles – I got the words “bulengo camp west of gelma”. After trial and error, I found Bulenga on Google Maps, but no Gelma…
Addtitionally, there were no articles mentioning Bulenga as a UN site, only a few sources describing it’s a conflict-stricken region.
So I then searched for UN camp sites in the DRC and finally bumped into a CGIAR article about Bulengo Camp! This article mentions it’s “located at the far western edge of Goma, in the ‘Lac-Vert’ neighborhood”. And voilà, there it was, Google even marks the camp accordingly.
Now that we found the camp (-1.622413, 29.128100), we need to take a closer look at the video.
There seem to be two hillsides behind the tent, so this is already helpful. Google Maps or similar won’t help with this, though, especially because the video is from 2007, so we need historical data… open Google Earth. I now suspect two locations:
I found a potential candidate at location A but I’m not convinced, especially because the camp didn’t extend so far in 2024 (the date of Google Earth’s imagery).
It’s easy to find that the camp area is blurred before 2014, so that’s the most recent imagery we can use.
Now looking at location B, I think I can pinpoint other locations from the camp by observing the video:
I’d even risk saying the tent we want is also shown at 2m19s:
I’m more inclined to location B, as it is where the camp was started, and these other images from the video shows they were filming around that area.
However, I still can’t say for sure I got the exact location… So my best guess is somewhere at 1°37’28.50″S 29° 7’43.14″E.
