Summary: A special edition of The Listening Post on a new kind of reporting: open-source journalism. Citizen journalism allows anybody with a mobile phone to document current events and produce content that is now routinely used by news organisations. Open-source journalists often start with that kind of material - and then they apply some of the same investigative techniques that are used by police and intelligence agencies. It is a growth industry, partly because of the decline in press freedom across many parts of the world. Tariq Nafi explores how open-source reporters have proved valuable on the story in Syria. Dubbed the first "YouTube conflict", the Syrian civil war has produced a goldmine of raw material - hours of images and information - for open-source investigators to analyse, interpret and authenticate without having to go there and take the risks that come with the assignment. Daniel Turi goes on to examine how open-source researchers in China have proven the existence and the location of so-called re-education camps for Muslims in the province of Xinjiang - camps whose existence Beijing had previously denied. And even if the authorities are successful in shutting down specific individuals, there are more open-source researchers out there. That is Beijing's challenge on this story, as it is for the Bashar al-Assad government in Damascus. It is not just the reporters doing this kind of work - it is also the technology that makes their work possible. And that is a much more difficult thing to suppress. Contributors: James Palmer - deputy editor, Foreign Policy Shawn Zhang - law student, University of British Columbia Adrian Zenz - open-source researcher Yuan Yang - China tech correspondent, Financial Times Eyal Weizman - founding director, Forensic Architecture Hadi al-Khatib - founding director, The Syrian Archive - Subscribe to our channel: http://aje.io/AJSubscribe - Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish - Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera - Check our website: https://www.aljazeera.com/
