Graffiti and Anarchy: OSINT #25 Sofia Santos Write-up

Hello there, welcome to another OSINT write-up.

Today I am taking on Sofia Santos’ OSINT exercise #025 the brief is as follows:

The world is full of anonymous quotes. Several were written in the unidentified building seen below.

Your task is to:

a) Locate the building.
b) Find the quote containing the word “anarchy”.

Click here to open the photo on a new tab.

Let’s begin with the characteristics of the image. It contains a graffiti that says:

“In a society that has abolished all adventure, the only adventure left is to abolish that society”

The graffiti is laid against a bare brick wall that has some tints of blue and red. The building is open with little to no walls, big pillars and exposed vents. Due to these aspects the abandoned building is most likely not residential and could be a warehouse, a factory or a commercial center.

Locate the building

Google reverse image search yielded the results I needed. Through using their cropping function I framed only the words on the wall and found a photographer who had taken a picture of the same graffiti in the same location.

Stephanie Avery has a picture for sale on her website titled “Adventure”. It is likely that it was taken in the same location, the graffiti in Avery’s photo displays the same handwriting, the same exposed brick with the blue tint in the middle.

In the photo description it says that it was taken at an “Abandoned computer factory” in “Rochester, USA”.

What computer factory?

Through googling “Abandoned computer factory, Rochester, USA” I found the Rochester Subway website. In the website they talk about an “Abandoned Sykes Datatronics Building” located in “392 Orchard St. Rochester, New York”.

Through googling “Abandoned Sykes Datatronics Building” I found a photography blog called “The Color Blind Photographer”, where another photographer explored the building and took a picture of the same graffiti quote.

a) The location this picture was taken in is the Abandoned Sykes Datatronics Building located in 392 Orchard St. Rochester, New York.

Alternative Method

A picture that The Colorblind Photographer took in the Sykes Datatronics building also shows up on Google’s reverse image search when you do not crop the original picture.

Find the quote containing the word “anarchy”

Searching on Google: “Sykes Datatronics” “anarchy” yielded a Reddit comment result on a post with the same quote as the source image.

Clicking on the “anarchy” link takes you to a the person’s flickr page with a quote containing our keyword word.

“This office was a prison for our brothers and sisters in wage slavery. Let’s make it a carnival for our brothers and sisters in anarchy.”

To confirm that this was indeed taken in the Syke Datatronics building we can go back to the Rochester Subway website and find the same quote but cropped out.

b) The quote containing the word anarchy: “This office was a prison for our brothers and sisters in wage slavery. Let’s make it a carnival for our brothers and sisters in anarchy.”

Answer Summary:

a) Locate the building.

Abandoned Sykes Datatronics Building located in 392 Orchard St. Rochester, New York.

b) Find the quote containing the word “anarchy”.

“This office was a prison for our brothers and sisters in wage slavery. Let’s make it a carnival for our brothers and sisters in anarchy”

I hope you enjoyed this write-up, until next time.

Peace and love!