Destroyed tanks, shot dead civilians, open battles: Hardly an hour goes by without new footage of the war in Ukraine hitting social networks.
While the war is largely fought with weapons from the last century, it is documented using state-of-the-art methods.
Every day, research groups, scientists and, last but not least, a large number of private individuals organize the data volumes into an overall picture.
Not the whole, but a significant part of the reality of war is thus comprehensible for everyone.
Some propaganda lies can be quickly disproved.
Jochen Stahnke
Political correspondent in Berlin.
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Satellite images play a large part in this.
Between March 9th and 11th, Earth observation satellites from the Maxar company took pictures of Bucha, which was then occupied by Russian troops.
It showed lifeless bodies lying on Jablonska Street.
Maxar left the images to the New York Times for publication.
This rendered the Russian claim that only after the Russian withdrawal did the Ukrainians place corpses on the streets even more implausible.
In fact, the people killed most likely lay in the same position on the street for more than three weeks until the Russians were driven out of Bucha and the bodies could be recovered.
Individual satellite images used to cost many thousands of dollars, but today they are also affordable for private organizations.
"You subscribe to a satellite imagery service, pay per month, and you get photos similar to Google Maps, only with more up-to-date and better image options," said Lukas Andriukaitis, chief of the Digital Forensics Lab at the Washington think tank Atlantic Council.
Thousands of observers and amateur analysts all over the world work with the data obtained and compare it with thousands upon thousands of often high-resolution images, dash cam recordings from private cars or videos from social networks.
Like the military - only more creative
It's called "Open Source Intelligence" (OSINT), and it's about handling unprotected data.
The world has become "flatter, more accessible and more connected," said former head of the US National Bureau of Geographical Reconnaissance, Robert Cardillo.
Anyone can get data.
"We (intelligence agents) no longer have such a large technical advantage in space and in sensor technology."
Andriukaitis' Digital Forensics Lab alone trains five hundred people every six months on how to use OSINT: how to tell the time from the shadows in an image and how to compare it to weather data.
How geolocation methods can be used to determine the exact location based on the arrangement of buildings, vegetation and road markings in an image and to compare it with satellite images.
How images can be searched backwards on the web to determine whether an old photo is issued as new.
Or how to use the daily updated, freely accessible images from the fire satellites of the American space agency NASA, which document fires.
"Open source intelligence is similar to what the military does," says Andriukaitis, who previously served in reconnaissance with the Lithuanian Army's special forces.
While military reconnaissance often follows a pattern, private OSINT users proceeded more creatively and spontaneously.
For example, military movements at the beginning of the war could be tracked in real time using railway databases, and other activists logged onto dating portals that they use to find members in the area around military bases.
A student uncovered secret American bases of operations
The genre became popular ten years ago, when an Australian student tracked down secret American advanced operating bases in Afghanistan using the movement profiles of a fitness app.
A little later, the same student discovered Chinese detention camps in Xinjiang via freely accessible satellite images.
In 2014, OSINT communities such as the research group Bellingcat, founded by a Brit, were able to use publicly accessible satellite and mobile phone images as well as geographical data to prove that the MH17 passenger plane was shot down by a Russian air defense unit over eastern Ukraine.