Jet Lag: The Game OSINT

I never thought I’d write about a YouTube channel, but I want to talk about Jet Lag: The Game and OSINT. Before I go any further, there may be spoilers ahead.

Jet Lag: The Game was created by a team of YouTubers consisting of Sam Denby, Ben Doyle, and Adam Chase. The premise of the show is based on travel challenges. They’ve played Hide and Seek in Switzerland, Tag across Europe (twice), Capture the Flag in Japan and raced to see which team could make it around the world in 100 hours, to name a few of the games. Basically they turn the world into a board game and in order to win they have to complete challenges to advance to their next destination.

When it comes to OSINT and what Bsquared Intel does, it can get a little on the technical side of things, so what I thought I’d do is talk a little about the different subsets of OSINT used in Jet Lag: The Game to have a better understanding of the discipline.

OSINT

OSINT stands for Open Source Intelligence. It’s the collection of publicly available data, the analysis of it, and then putting into use what is learned. Some sources are news, court records, voting records, property records (really any public datasets from the government), and search engines.

In a few seasons like Tag Eur It, Capture the Flag Across Japan, and Tag Eur It 2, each team, based on the position of the trackers they use to see where the others are, will utilize the opponents’ location and pull up train/flight schedules (the OSINT part of this) to figure out what the best strategy is to tag the runner, if playing tag, or figuring out the best train station to take when bringing the opponents flag back to home base in capture the flag.

GEOINT

GEOINT is Geospatial Intelligence. This is the use of maps, photos, and video to identify objects and/or their movement in a physical space. In Jet Lag: The Game, geolocation is heavily used in the Hide + Seek season where the seekers are running all over Switzerland to find the hider. The seekers can buy information about the hider’s location. This includes things like asking for the hider’s latitude and longitude, or to take pictures of buildings, or the closest train station to where they are. At one point the seekers used the price of hotels in the region of Switzerland they were in as their search for the hider narrowed. By knowing the prices of the hotels, they could further narrow the geographic area they need to search.

SOCMINT

SOCMINT is Social Media Intelligence. This is the use of social media platforms to gather information and act on what is learned. Typically this is in the form of text, photos, video, or audio. This may be a spoiler coming up.

In the season Tag Eur It 2, Ben Doyle is the runner in his second attempt to reach his goal destination in his designated country. In episode 5 Ben says

“Okay, so it is 9:48 and Adam just tweeted something. And that suggests to me that they just got on a train. Because like usually what I do it’s like I’ll sit down on a train, like a long train, and I’ll like pull up my phone and pull up Twitter. And that would make sense because there was a train one minute ago … um from Namur to Arlon. Um… and if they got on that train they could get to Luxembourg by like 11:50. Um … so I’m going to assume that that’s what they are doing and so I just have to get out Luxembourg before then. I think that should be no problem.”

Ben arrived at this deduction based on the timestamp of Adam Chase’s tweet. This is a pretty amazing use of SOCMINT, coupled with understanding Adam’s behavior, in order figure out what Adam and Sam’s next move is to tag him.

Definitely check out the Jet Lag: The Game’s channel and if you’ve watched any of the seasons, let me know what OSINT techniques you found Ben, Adam, Sam, and the occasional guest, use that you found interesting.

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-B2