As geolocation is something I spend a lot of time on myself, I can tell you that this is not so magical.

The photo of the armor above was taken by someone with an iPhone or Android Phone set to track the person’s geolocation, and when it was uploaded to VKontakte, a popular Russian social network, it showed its exact coordinates — click through all the links and you’ll come to that.

But how was that photo found, you ask? Isn’t that a miracle?

No, because there was a video uploaded from Stary Oskol with Buks that got a lot of attention as people watch for these things. Then after they have a sighting they looked for “photos near” using the functiong on VKontakte. If they have one photo in Stary Oskol, they can click and see an entire deck of all of them and go cruising through.

Stary Oskol, a Russian town, has Google Street View, and so it’s easy to go right in from those coordinates on the map and see what the road looks like and match something like a crack in Google’s view and in the photo.

Stary Oskol has gotten a lot of attention because Buks were spotted there (it’s a Russian city near the Ukrainian border) by teenagers taking amateur videos and then the same Buks were found later in Ukraine by Bellingcat’s team.

This business is not as open as its boosters claim, however. Like many “open source” things, it’s actually dominated by very closed societies. Most of the people doing this locating are anonymous using pseudonyms. So you don’t know who you are dealing with. They say they have to use pseudonyms to be protected from “Kremlin trolling” if they are in the West or even arrest or worst if they are in Russia or Ukraine. Yet the most reputable ones doing this don’t use pseudonyms and work closely with journalists who actually check out these stories on the ground.

I know surpher @5urpher well, he has helped me out when I have been stuck on hard finds a number of times and I see him drop in on others stumped and give them crucial clues. How does he do this? Most likely he’s an ordinary guy who lives in this region and knows the terrain well, and obsesses over maps and pictures on Twitter. But maybe he’s in intelligence? And how can we know? Some of his finds are just too incredible.

Yet even to suggest this, I’ve found, gets some of these anonymous sources so angry that they block you or stop following you and they will never talk to you again.

Like many geeks in these sorts of “magical” causes, they are incredibly thin-skinned and sometimes wildly angry and crazy.

There is no substitute for real life in meat-world. Elliot Higgins rightly deserves credit for his painstaking work (and it takes hundreds of hours so only the most geeky nerds would stick with it) and for putting this method on the map, literally and figuratively. Yet it’s when someone like Simon Ostrovsky of Vice checks his work and actually travels the thousands of miles to these locations and confirms them that they hold up.

And lurking behind this is an Internet ideology that ultimately seems to imagine that all of us can force politicians and generals and oligarchs we don’t like into a Panopticon where we can use all the clues they leave in official media or accidental social media into “gotchas,” that makes “the crowd” doing magic geolocation to be “democratically” in charge, “holding feet to the fire.”

I’ve seen entire castles of air built on scrutinizing videos over and over and matching them to random things — such as the contention that the POWs at Krasny Partizansk were executed — which those released and some other key eye witnesses don’t confirm this. Nobody has really done the due diligence required to check that story because in part it’s labor intensive and in part it’s dangerous, the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” militants are deadly and harsh to journalists who don’t get their approval and take their escorts and essentially embed with them.

Yet old-fashioned journalism by foot on the beat and making cold real phone calls really does beat pixels. All of this social media stuff is routinely dismissed by the Russian government and all they do is close down any accounts associated with it. If the State Department invokes it, they are dismissed.

And whenever the conclusions don’t suit anyone in power, including liberal mainstream media, it will be dismissed as couch warrior stuff. Only if geolocation is accompanied by old-fashioned journalistic methods can it be credible.