Good at Google
I was at a friend’s birthday party when the third bottle of wine just opened.
Everyone was warm and loud and funny, the way people get when the evening stops being polite and starts being itself. Topics came and went: someone's holiday, someone's renovation, a story about a colleague that got funnier with each telling and at some point the conversation turned to weekends. What had everyone been up to.
I thought of the weekend before and the case I'd been working on. I didn’t speak about the case, just mentioned something about finding missing people. The table went quiet for a moment, the kind of pause that happens when something not quite fits the mood, and then one of my friends grinned and said: so you’re just good at Google!
Everyone laughed, I smiled and the evening resumed. I didn't say: the last thing I found was a dead child and I sat with that for three hours before writing the intelligence report.
I left it at good at Google.
I’ve been working as an intelligence analyst for several years now. It started as volunteer work and as I grew more experienced, I was fortunate enough to turn it into something more permanent.
The cases that come to me sit across a wide range, from cold cases to active geopolitical conflicts. Missing persons, conflict zone footage requiring verification, proving war crimes, identification of perpetrators and locating victims of trafficking landed on my desk frequently. And more times than I’d liked, cases involving children. The kind of material that stops your breath before your brain has registered what your eyes have seen.
It’s forensic work. You receive a case file and you use everything the internet (and all its darkness) holds. Metadata, dark web marketplaces and chat rooms, geolocation from daylight angles and shadow analysis, facial recognition cross-referenced against social media and public records, satellite imagery matched to terrain, uniform details and weapons cross-referenced against known military divisions. You verify footage that governments dismiss as fake. You locate people who do not want to be found. You build records of what was done and by who, and sometimes those records lead to arrests and convictions. Frame by frame, pixel by pixel.
You learn to look at footage the way a pathologist examines a body. The first time you watch you see the totality: the severity, the horror, the fact that this is a human being. That what is happening or has happened to them is real and being done to them by another human being. You see the worst parts of 'humanity'. That first viewing costs something every time.
The next two thousand times you see pixels. You are looking for the street sign in the background, the license plate reflected in a window, the model of a weapon, the timestamp encoded in the compression artefact. The person has to disappear so the evidence can emerge.
One investigation involved a baby. She wasn’t even a year old. I will not say more about the nature of the material than that. The severity of what had been done to her was beyond anything I had encountered before or have encountered since. The baby’s own mother had been part of what was done. My team worked the case for hours, watching unimaginable material, cross-referencing, verifying, tracing and reading horrific conversations between the most depraved people. At some point the information converged and we all became sure, at roughly the same time, the way a group goes quiet when everyone knows and no one wants to be the first to say it.
The baby was dead.
I proposed to step away from our screens and get some air. So we went for a walk at two in the morning.
Hardly anyone spoke. A sigh here and there. A cough. Someone said this was horrible and then it was quiet again. I was fifteen minutes into the walk before I realized I couldn't feel the night air on my face. The temperature was there because I could see my breath, but the sensation wasn't reaching me. I kept thinking about the baby. Just a baby. A baby who had no one. No one who was coming. No one who cared. And the people who should have been her safety were the ones who handed her over. I wanted to scream.
Instead, I went back inside and wrote the report.
Not all cases end like that. A few years after this case, during the beginning months of a conflict, a video circulated online groups. The video was sent to me with the ask to see what, and possibly who, I could identify. The video showed an elderly woman, between 80 and 90 if I had to guess, on a street in the middle of that conflict zone. The woman was attacked and violated on the street by what looked like a soldier. I watched the video countless times. From a methodological standpoint, it was a straightforward case. Finding the perpetrator proved difficult, but the location and the timeframe weren't. I gathered my results, wrote the report and filed it. The analyst in me processed the case the way she processes almost everything: efficiently, precisely, and without stopping to feel it. Case closed. Move on to the next one.
Months later I was standing in my kitchen stirring a pot of Taiwanese beef soup. It was the first time I made this soup, a new recipe that I‘d started early in the morning. It was nearly done and I was excited after being hunched over it so many times that day. It took some time but it turned out better than I hoped. The television was on in the background, nothing I was watching as I just like the noise, while the kitchen smelled of star anise, cinnamon and Szechuan pepper.
I heard a loud scream come through the tv speakers and it was something about the pitch, the terror in it, the way it broke at the top, that threw me off.
The soup and kitchen disappeared and all I could see was the elderly woman, on the street in a conflict zone.
The footage had been processed by the analyst but the person inside me who had actually watched an elderly woman suffer was still holding it. And she chose a Saturday evening and a beef soup to let me know.
I watched from behind my eyes. I could still hear the television and the stove and I could feel the weight of the spoon in my hand. But I was somewhere behind all of that, breathing through the image, waiting for it to release me.
I don't know how long it lasted, maybe a minute, maybe less but when the kitchen reassembled itself I was still holding the spoon, still standing at the stove, and the soup was fine. Everything was fine. Except that I now knew the work cost me something.
I‘m always coming back to the work, but I learned to negotiate with myself.
No more children. No elderly people this time. More time between cases. Criminals instead. Financial structures, networks, the kind of targets that don't leave images behind your eyes. I chose what I could carry next the way you manage a dosage. Knowing your threshold but also knowing you'd cross it again anyway, because the next case would come in and it would be urgent and someone needed finding and you were good at this and it mattered.
I told my therapist at the time that I thought I knew why I was good at this. I said: the ability to detach from what I'm seeing is the same mechanism that used to take me out of my body when my parents hurt me or screamed at me. I don't think it is resilience but more like a calibration. My nervous system adapted its threshold long before I chose this work. What overwhelms others on first contact isn't new to my system. The content is different but the register is the same.
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said: I think that's right. But the mechanism explains how you can do this work. It doesn't explain why you went looking for it. What made you choose it?
I didn’t say anything. I just stared through him and sat in silence for a long moment before I thanked him and said: Uno reverse, I think that’s enough for today.
He smiled and let me go.
People are alive because of this work. Families received answers, perpetrators were identified, footage was verified and submitted as evidence, war crimes were documented and are ready to be used when it’s time for people to be held accountable, children were found. That is real, I am part of it, I’m extremely proud of it and I would do it all again if I could go back in time.
But I never explained any of this to my friends at that dinner party. The joke was funny to everyone and I left it at that because the truth has no casual register. There is no light way to say: I spent hours and hours last weekend to find out that a baby is dead, then I went for a walk at two in the morning and realized I couldn't feel my own face.
I’m just good at Google.
