On 4 April 2019, Fox News correspondent Lawrence B. Jones III gave a series of interviews from locations along the US-Mexico border, part of a series on Fox about how dangerous the border was (in part to justify President Trump’s border wall fetish). While Jones is mostly an irrelevant member of an ever-revolving cast of disposable clowns and ordinarily would warrant not a moment of further attention, he does present a fun, quick, and simple lesson in open source intelligence in the modern day.
The image Jones tweeted out shows him standing in front of a United States Border Patrol vehicle, itself in front of a bridge. Jones is wearing what appears to be a plate carrier for a child, one which may not even be holding a plate. Jones was obviously the subject of a prank at the hands of his Border Patrol minders and must not have realized such before going in front of a camera. In any case, the image itself is rather striking: a journalist, a member of the free press, the guardians of our very democracy, forced to wear a bullet-resistant vest just in the course of doing his job. He must be somewhere remote, somewhere without backup nearby. He must be in one of the most violent portions of the border imaginable. Let’s find out where he is.
There isn’t a lot to go on in terms of topography in the background of the image, nor are there any street signs or buildings with names visible that would make it easy to locate the shot. There is, however, a railroad bridge crossing a river. And since we know the shoot was at or near the US/Mexico border, we can easily narrow the number of crossings down. A quick Google search brings up a Wikipedia list of Mexico-United States border crossings, which shows all the border crossings sorted by type. There are about eight rail-only crossings listed, and by going through them we can find a match to the type of rail bridge in the image Jones tweeted. As there are only a handful, it is quick work to find the only matching bridge type/color is the Texas Mexican Railway International Bridge in Laredo, Texas.
With this location in hand, it is quite simple to geolocate the position the photo was taken from in Google Earth:
And while Laredo may not be the safest city in the US, it is by no means the most dangerous, and the location the image was taken at in no way demanded body armor. But then the story got better. Not two weeks later, famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma played a waterfront concert in Laredo. I couldn’t help myself, I had to find out how far away from the Jones photo shoot this concert was held.
In the image provided by tpr.org, you can see a large concrete building in the background. Finding the building in Google Streetview is a snap, allowing one to quickly geolocate the concert, mere blocks away from the Fox News photoshoot. Quite embarrassing, one would think, but one would need to feel shame in order to experience embarrassment, and working at Fox News proves one is beyond such petty human emotions. Just remember that in today’s world, it’s really hard to bullshit professional bullshitters.
