The Washington Post added Chris Dehghanpoor to its Rapid Response Investigations Team as a reporter specializing in open-source research.
According to The Post: “Chris has worked as an information security engineer for Twitch, Amazon and, most recently, Google. But it is his sideline hobby that drew our attention: For nearly three years, he has been ferreting out disinformation campaigns under the Twitter handle Trapezoid of Discovery. Many of those investigations have involved threats to democracy and false claims about the 2020 election, and they have shown Chris to be a creative researcher with a keen eye for detail.
“He determined where one noteworthy video was filmed by highlighting similarities between Google Street view data and buildings that were partially visible in the video. By downloading an audio recording and modifying its pitch, he unmasked a speaker whose voice had been deliberately obfuscated. A carpet pattern visible in two separate images helped him identify the owner of an anonymous social media account. And he found that a court exhibit — a screenshot of Google search results purportedly taken on a particular day before the 2020 election — had to have been taken after the election, based on the Google Doodle in the upper left-hand corner.
“Chris’s work has been cited by numerous news organizations, including The Washington Post, the Daily Beast and Vice.
“In his previous career, Chris learned to quickly understand complex systems to identify vulnerabilities or attack vectors. He reverse-engineered applications to determine their true purpose and reviewed network traffic for anomalies that could indicate potential attacks. This work required toggling between viewing a problem at 100,000 feet and at the ground level — and it intersected neatly with the skill set required to be an effective open-source researcher.”
More here.