# GEWEL: GEoint Weaknesses Enumeration List ## 📍 Your Step-by-Step Guide to Geospatial OSINT Investigations 👉 This project will help you quickly understand how to use geospatial data to solve your problem. > [!example]+ Some GEWEL guides: > - [[How to find a place indoors]] > - [[How to find a place in a city]] > - [[How to find a place in nature]] ❓What is "weakness" in GEOINT (GEOspatial INTelligence) context? We call something a weakness in GEOINT when we talk about circumstances dictated by natural or anthropogenic causes and allowing more information to be harvested during the investigation or research process. There are three main terms: - **Objects (GEOL)** — a list of the types of objects that can be observed from a particular perspective - **Weaknesses (GEWEL)** — abstract principles, processes and conditions that allow more information to be harvested - **Techniques (GETL)** — specific actions, recommendations on what to do to obtain information You can find the corresponding folders in the left part of this website. ## How to use GEWEL 1. Use GEWEL to expand your understanding of GEOINT search techniques and vectors. Start with the list of weaknesses (GEWEL) and use the internal links to read more about the objects and recommended techniques; 2. In any GEOINT case you have a number of objects which are your input data. Use a list of objects (GEOL) to list and categorize them. If you want to make an Overpass Turbo query, you can use the OSM tags section of each GEOL-n, see [[About#OSM Tags|OSM Tags]] for more information; 3. For more trivial cases, use the Instructions section. The instructions allow you to see different techniques that can be applied to solve your case. You can go through the steps noting the techniques you used; To learn more about how GEWEL can be used in practice see Use of GEWEL ## The value In our time of rapid growth of amount of different OSINT tools with corresponding difficulty in understanding what and how to use, it seems right to bring techniques and approaches to the foreground. GEWEL, as an attempt to make a such framework, techniques-oriented, allows you to create tools-agnostic standard operating procedures for your work in a universal language. - **Investigators**, the framework can serve as a support in the workflow as well as provide new techniques. - **Instructors** it allows to build custom educational program based on scenarios and requests from participants taking into account their use cases. - **Tool developers** techniques list could be used as a source of ideas: almost every entry reveals some principle which could be automated. - **Researchers**, each weakness is an occasion for more detailed examination and subsequent characterization - **Task creators**, techniques are elements of the task skeleton on which the plot hangs. ## Methodology ### The idea of weaknesses After Soxoj published [SOWEL](https://publish.obsidian.md/soxoj-sowel/about), the idea arose that the entire OSINT methodology could be described through the idea of weaknesses. What does this mean? Every investigated system has weaknesses - conditions and principles that allow us to obtain additional information. In any investigation, we exploit the weaknesses of such systems, whether it is a photograph of a landscape or the functionality of a social media. In this sense, not only the SOCMINT category can be described in this way, but the other OSINT categories too: GEOINT, IMINT, FININT, etc. Of course, this division into categories is very conditional and in practice they are all parts of the OSINT, each having its own specificity. In practice, we see the connection between GEOINT and SOCMINT, for example, when we need to know where a photo posted on a social media profile was taken. Thus, the main idea is to create lists of weaknesses for each OSINT category by creating similar frameworks. ### What is GEOINT GEOINT or geospatial intelligence is one of the OSINT categories, a methodology and process aimed at finding and analyzing information about the activities of an object on Earth or another planet, performed as a result of analyzing images with geospatial information. Each element in a photo has a meaning and a reason for being in the frame, so each element, by its attributes, reveals an area or areas on Earth where the photo may have been taken. The more such elements there are, the more we narrow down the search area, the easier it becomes for us to search. GEOINT should not be confused with IMINT. IMINT is the analysis of an image in order to extract some data from it that can already be used, for example, for GEOINT purposes. Thus, when we analyze a photo, we apply IMINT to get information about the objects in the photo or about the photo itself, and then we use the extracted data within the framework of GEOINT and search for the place where the photo was taken. ### OSM Tags Objects on the [Open Street Map (OSM)](https://www.openstreetmap.org/) are described by [tags](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tags), each of which has a key=value structure and is based on the characteristics of the object. Thus, we can retrieve specific objects from the OSM database by filtering and refining the requested data with the necessary tags. [Overpass Turbo](https://overpass-turbo.eu/) ([Overpass Ultra](https://overpass-ultra.trailsta.sh/)) is a tool that allows us to search and retrieve objects from the OSM database using [Overpass QL (Query Language)](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API/Overpass_QL). > [!info] > For more on Overpass Turbo, read [[How to Use Overpass Turbo]] Each GEOL-n has a list of OSM keys that you may need if your case contains that type of object. Each key in the table: - has a description in English, taken from the [OSM Wiki](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page) - has a link to the Taginfo map, which shows the distribution of this key by country - has a link to a list of Taginfo values that are used with this key - has up to 3 of the most common values that are used with this key It is also worth noting that these are not all keys. The keys were selected and categorized according to the following features: - the number of uses exceeds 10000 - have a description in English - have a page on OSM Wiki - are distributed in more than one country The key you need may not be on the list. For more specific cases, use [Taginfo](https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/) search. ### Use of GEWEL ### Types of weaknesses and techniques (reasons) - Natural - natural processes in nature - Cultural - cultural peculiarities of human life activity - Technical - technical and material side of human life activity ## Contributor guide Want to make a contribution? We have developed rules and structure, so please read them before creating a contribution request. Please note that GEWEL is never finished, feel free to suggest edits if you doubt something or see an inconsistency somewhere. If you have a desire to contribute, add something or just talk - DM me: [Telegram](https://t.me/dukera), [X](https://twitter.com/duk3r4), [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikhail-malashkevich-372a2a177/) ### Weaknesses - **Example:** [[GEWEL-1. The Position of Celestial Bodies]]. The position of celestial bodies in the sky at a given time will differ from region to region - **Name:** The title should not overlap in meaning with existing titles and should briefly describe the conditions under which the information can be obtained - **Description:** Give an explanation of why this is a weakness and why we can harvest more information You can also add examples of use or make changes to existing weaknesses ### Techniques - **Example:** [[GETL-4.1. Search for the Places Where this Language is Used]]. Find places where the identified language is used - **Name:** The title should summarize the essence of the technique you are describing - **Description:** Describe the actions that apply when using the proposed technique. Complete the description with existing examples and tools that fully or partially automate the technique You can also add examples of use, tools, or make changes to existing techniques ### Objects - **Example:** [[GEOL-1. Space Objects]]. Objects that are in outer space. These can be stars, planets, satellites, comets, asteroids, etc. - **Name:** The names of objects should combine all types of objects you want to cover. Each object must have at least one weakness. - **Description:** The most detailed description of the proposed group of objects You can also add examples of use and OSM tags or make changes to existing objects ### Contributors - [Soxoj](https://soxoj.com/) - [Ran Locar](https://x.com/ranlocar)