How Web archivists and other digital sleuths are unraveling the mystery of MH17
An armed pro-Russian separatist stands on part of the wreckage of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, after the plane crashed near the settlement of Grabovo, in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. (Maxim Zmeyev/Reuters)
In the agonizing quest to pin down exactly what happened when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 went down over Ukraine last week, Web archivists and other digital sleuths are playing an unusual — potentially pivotal — role.
Wayback Machine, the nonprofit Web crawler that archives old versions of Web pages, captured evidence last Friday that a pro-Russian group was behind the attacks. Meanwhile, @RuGovEdits — a Twitter bot that monitors Wikipedia edits made from Russian government computers — logged evidence that reflects Russia’s interest in deflecting the MH17 narrative elsewhere.
Both bits of evidence could prove important to understanding the crash and its political aftermath, particularly as investigators question the integrity of the crash site. But they’re also compelling examples of the Web’s ability to promote transparency and hold powerful people accountable for their words — even, or especially, when they delete them.
Perhaps no one knows that better than Igor Girkin, a pro-Russian separatist leader whose hyperactive profile on Vkontakte, Russia’s Facebook clone, is regularly saved by the Wayback Machine. The administrators of Girkin’s page regularly post updates on the Ukrainian conflict from news sources, news conferences and Girkin himself. In fact, if you check the page now, you’ll see no fewer than a dozen updates on the crash, all blaming it squarely on the Ukrainian air force.
But there was an earlier update, now deleted, made shortly before the crash went public:
In the vicinity of Torez, we just downed a plane, an AN-26. It is lying somewhere in the Progress Mine. We have issued warnings not to fly in our airspace. We have video confirming. The bird fell on a waste heap. Residential areas were not hit. Civilians were not injured.
Page administrators later tried to scrub that message, deleting it, posting a disclaimer distancing the page from Girkin and quoting a number of news stories that implicated the Ukrainians. They could not, however, remove the screen grab from the Internet Archive, where it now lives with 45 other versions of Girkin’s page.
“Here’s why we exist,” the Wayback Machine wrote on Facebook, with links to earlier versions of Girkin’s page. “A Ukranian Separatist boasted his pro-Russian Group shot down a Ukranian plane on his website. When it turned out to be #MH17 #MalaysiaAirlines he erased it, but our WayBack Machine captured the page for history.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the Twitter bot @RuGovEdits was making its own MH17 discoveries. The bot, which is only one week old, records Wikipedia edits made from Russian IP addresses — unique numbers that identify each computer on a network. (You may already be familiar with the bot’s American equivalent, @congressedits.)
On July 18, the day after the plane crash, an IP address associated with Russia’s state-run broadcasting company, VGTRK, edited the page “List of aircraft accidents in civil aviation” to attribute the crash to the “Ukrainian military.” An address associated with Vladimir Putin’s office has also mademultiple edits to the page for the crash itself, though none were so overtly political.
None of these edits necessarily prove anything, of course — and there have been plenty of cries for moderation and deliberation on Internet Archive’sFacebook page, where commenters point out that even the Web’s smoking guns can prove misleading.
But overall, the efforts of Internet Archive and others like it are powerful testaments for a new wave of pro-transparency bots and tools, all of them dedicated to leveraging technology to expose how governments, politicians and other powerful political figures manipulate the digital landscape. As I wrote last week about Hidden from Google — a Web site that collects links hidden under Europe’s “Right to be Forgotten” ruling — the tools aren’t an inadequate means of addressing the profound disparity between ordinary Internet users and the technological and political forces that impact them. But they are certainly a start.
“Important work,” one commenter wrote on the Internet Archive page. “Without it, we’re in Orwell’s 1984.”
Caitlin Dewey runs The Intersect blog, writing about digital and Internet culture. Before joining the Post, she was an associate online editor at Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.
Photographs emerge of shrapnel damage on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17
From the debris of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine, the first potential forensic proof of what shot down the doomed airliner is starting to appear on social media as more observers access the crash site.
The images show pieces of the aircraft riddled with holes roughly the size of a child’s fist. Evidence, some experts say, of a surface-to-air missile’s distinct detonation pattern.
“Although many of the holes may vary in size, the punctures seen in the photograph attached are relatively uniform in size, consistent with patterns exhibited by fragmentary warheads detonated at a proximity from the target,” Jane’s Military Capabilities Manager Reed Foster said in an e-mail. “This would potentially be consistent with a fragmentation type warhead employed upon a number of modern and legacy surface-to-air missile systems.”
Most surface-to-air missiles, such as those fired by the SA-11 or Buk M1 systems that the U.S. believes shot down MH17, detonate more than 50 feet away from their intended target. This premature detonation allows for a maximum spread of fragmentation into the airframe, damaging or destroying critical components to the aircraft including the engines, flaps and wings.
The pictures on Twitter also show a large amount of shrapnel impacts on what appears to be the cockpit portion of the aircraft. This overabundance of damage to the front of the plane potentially rules out an air-to-air missile attack, as a jet firing a missile at another aircraft usually engages from the rear. Additionally, surface-to-air missiles are traditionally more lethal as they contain larger explosive payloads than their air-to-air counterparts.
“There are historic examples of civilian aircraft surviving air-to-air missile engagement, but not of surface-to-air engagements, presumably due to the higher explosive yield/blast-wave as well as significantly more fragmentary materiel,” Foster wrote.
Yet according to James Hackett, a senior fellow for Defense and Military Analysis at The International Institute for Strategic Studies, even though most evidence points to a surface-to-air attack it is still impossible to be completely sure without pieces of the warhead that destroyed MH17.
“Without additional evidence…either in the form of additional fuselage sections or fragments from the weapon itself (such as from the warhead or casing) it is impossible to be more specific in identifying the precise mode of engagement or, definitively, the system employed,” Hackett wrote in an e-mail.
Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a summer intern and a former U.S. infantry Marine.