Sofia's OSINT Exercise 003

💡 Check out Sofia's amazing blog and this exercise here

Challenge

“In April 2017 Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo, the then president of Somalia, visited Turkey. A news agency published a photo where he was seen shaking hands with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the country’s president. The article did not disclose where the photo was taken. Your task is to find out the name and coordinates of the location seen below.”

First Look

This looks like a typical press photograph and has a lot of distinct features that shouldn’t be hard to find:

• big, pompous building and doors
• we already know this was shot in Turkey
• highly political context will narrow down the location

Google Lens

Time to introduce Google Lens. Right-clicking and selecting “Search image with Google” is probably the fastest way to get contextual information about any given image.

Our hard right-clicking work is immediately rewarded with tons of similar looking images. As suspected, this location is a popular press photography scene for political receptions.

There’s no named location in the first few results as far as I can tell. Let’s see if we can find some exact matches by clicking “Find image source” at the top of the page.

One of the results looks promising because it references Somalia. From the task description we know that we’re looking for a meeting between Erdoğan and Farmaajo, the ex president of Somalia. Sure enough it’s a news article about the meeting between Farmaajo and Erdoğan in April 2017. It includes an image of the same scene depicting the two men shaking hands, but from a different angle. According to the image caption, the photo was taken at the Ankara Presidential Complex.

We quickly confirm that it’s in fact the correct building by simply Googling the building name. Wikipedia has a high resolution image of the complex we can use to compare. The door frames and the round red emblem are very distinct and leave little room for doubt that this is the same building. Wikipedia conveniently tells us the building’s coordinates, which concludes this challenge (or so I thought…).

Name of the location: Ankara Presidential Complex in Turkey
Coordinates: 39.9308°N 32.7989°E

❗Sofia pointed out that these are in fact the coordinates of the building, but that wasn’t the question, was it? We’re looking for the exact location this photograph was taken, which could be in several places around this building. Eager to finish this writeup I skipped to the end without putting in the work to validate my findings against the original task.❗

Thank you for writing a walkthough.
The only thing I would point out is that your coordinates do not point to the exact location of where the two men were standing. In geolocation, the more precise the better.
It's still the correct building though.

— Sofia Santos (@Gralhix) March 10, 2024

Thanks for the bias check Sofia, I got lazy! Let’s roll up our sleeves and do this the right way.

Exact Location

Looking at Google Maps, this building has a front and a back side which look very similar. We need some more details to pinpoint this location, so off to Google we go. Many of the press images show a large empty square in front of the palace. This already eliminates the two smaller side entrances as they have some park-like greenery in front of them. This leaves us with the water fountain side (South-West) or the road side (North-East).

On YouTube we find a video of the palace from nine years ago that conveniently flies over the palace, revealing more details about the two entrances. In particular,

• the fountain entrance has large glass windows left and right next to the doors (Figure 1)
• the road entrance doesn’t have the glass windows, but we can spot the two “golden phone booths” from our source image (Figure 2)

In a second video from eight years ago, we find footage of

• cars entering the palace square through the gate from the road side (Figure 3)
• a man entering the palace, passing the “golden phone booths” (Figure 4)

If we think about it, it makes sense. High-ranking political guests are brought to the palace in protected vehicles, so easy, direct access by car needs to be available, making the side facing the road and gate the most likely solution.

Now for the actual solution, the coordinates of the photograph are 39.931158°N 32.799684°E

Final Remarks

This one caught me a little off guard. I pulled the building’s coordinates off of Wikipedia without revisiting the original task that required finding not the building’s location, but the specific location of the image. Maybe I got tricked by the Medium-Easy difficulty rating, who knows. To be honest if I learned from it, then I’m glad I made the mistake!

Tools used

• Google Lens
• Google Earth Pro