Front Burner - How Bellingcat cracks some of the world’s biggest stories

Episode Date: February 22, 2021

Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative collective Bellingcat, tells us how the group used online information to break some of its biggest stories — from the poisoning of Alexei Navalny to the downing of Flight MH17 in Ukraine — and why he wants others to follow in Bellingcat's footsteps.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. The poisoning of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, the forces behind the downing of Flight MH17 in Ukraine, and Flight PS752 in Iran. Some of the biggest scoops of the past few years have all been broken by this small collective of internet sleuths known as Bellingcat. These investigations mainly rely on open source

information, stuff freely available online. Think calling through thousands of social media posts, YouTube videos, satellite images, and online databases to painstakingly put pieces together. images and online databases to painstakingly put pieces together. And they often ask the public to join them in cracking cases. These days, their work gets a lot of respect. Bellingcat collaborates with everyone from the New York Times and the BBC to the International Criminal Court. But it really wasn't always this way. Less than a decade ago, a lot of people dismissed Bellingcat's founder, Elliot Higgins, as just some guy blogging on his couch, and they really didn't see much point in what he was doing. Today, I'm speaking with Elliot about his new book, We Are Bellingcat, how they cracked some

of their biggest cases, and why he just doesn't buy into the idea that the internet is some dark, The Internet is some dark, unfixable mess. Hi, Elliot. Thanks so much for being here today. Thanks for having me on. So I want to start at what feels like the beginning of this story. In 2011, I know that you were working an admin job in Leicester in central England. And in your downtime at the office, you started commenting in online forums about the war in Libya. And tell us how you got from there to just two years later,

being recognized by organizations like Human Rights Watch and the New York Times as, as one of the top experts on arms used in the Syrian civil war. So I was just one of many people kind of discussing, you know, events in the world online. One of them at the time was obviously the Arab Spring, you know, this huge movement that was happening. What the people of Egypt accomplished over the past 18 days was a transformation. Mr. Mubarak's resignation drew a huge wave of honking and cheering in central Cairo. They've come from the four corners of Libya and they fought their way right to the heart of Tripoli. Rebel fighters rampaged through Colonel Gaddafi's heavily fortified compound. And I was

on the, in particular, the Guardian Middle East Live blog comments, just kind of posting every day, finding interesting links that were being shared um you know finding kind of videos from youtube posts on twitter that gave a kind of more of a feeling of what was actually happening on the ground than news reports were and i was very frustrated that i wanted to kind of know the real fine details of this conflict but um there just wasn't that level of reporting being done you also had people who were constantly kind of attacking these sources saying well you can't prove that that's not true you know there were always people saying well this proves nothing so I was watching one of these videos one day and I shared it on these comments and someone said well

how do you know where that was filmed and I thought well how do I know where it was filmed and I realized that I could go to satellite imagery of the town in question and look for the landmarks visible in the video which in this case was a large wide road with a mosque with a dome and a minaret next to it and I searched the satellite imagery for that managed to find a location that looked similar and then I watched the video again and looked at the smaller details the kind of buildings the trees the utility poles and matched them exactly to what was visible on the satellite imagery and I had stumbled across something we now call geolocation which is using kind of the original sources you're trying to verify and comparing them to other information like satellite imagery or google street view imagery

and that kind of was a core skill to investigation then I kind of did that you know on these comments and arguing with people and thinking I was very clever for quite a few months. And then in early 2012, I decided to start a blog, really just as a hobby, but where I could kind of write down these kind of things I was discovering and explain how I was figuring it out and also write about the UK phone hacking scandal, which was a big deal at the time. It's been revealed that the News of the World newspaper may have been hacking into the mobile phones of bereaved relatives,

as well as murder victims and even police officers. Public outrage exploded with leaks that the family of a murdered 13-year-old, Millie Dowler, had been victimized. The activity on her phone account gave them false hope she was still alive. And that kind of started me off with looking at videos from the conflict in Syria, which was then escalating. The people of Dara have watched their blood spill for daring to challenge Syria's 50-year state of emergency. These pictures emerged overnight, appearing to show troops opening fire yesterday. And just over time, I kind of looked at the weapons that were being used and i didn't know what they were so i used online resources to examine these weapons and because there's so much about soviet weapons which were being used in the conflict um i was able to kind of start

even figuring out what bombs were based off fragments of them and i found the first videos of cluster bomb use and barrel bomb use which were improvised bombs used by the Syrian air force until eventually by 2013 I had managed to identify weapons that were being smuggled to the Syrian opposition by the Saudis through Jordan because they had posted videos of them online and they'd kind of stood out like a sore thumb because they weren't from that region and that ended up being on the front page of the New York Times and I suddenly got lots of kind of attention I got interviewed by the Guardian who I'd been kind of commenting on just a year earlier and then suddenly kind of my profile kind of just grew You know, it's interesting for me to hear you say that you were frustrated by some of the reporting on the ground in the Arab Spring, in part because I actually covered the Egyptian revolution and Tahrir Square from the ground.

Can you tell me a little bit more about why you were frustrated with sort of the reporting on the ground? So a good example is when in Libya, the Misratin rebels who controlled a small pocket around a city in Libya, they managed to push out through the front lines and they were heading towards this town called Sirte, which is where Gaddafi was believed to be hiding. And there's this kind of coastal road that goes towards there. And after they pushed out, the journalists who were traveling back and forth would go up and down this road but they would occasionally kind of tweet there's a town called Twerga off the main road and they would say oh the rebels are firing artillery into it and then another one will tweet another day saying the buildings are on fire there and these kind of separate bits of information pointed to something

happening in that town but because that wasn't the main story and they only had like, they had a much bigger story to pursue, they were kind of ignoring this. But a few weeks later when Gaddafi was captured and killed, they kind of went back to that town and discovered it had effectively been ethnically cleansed by the Misrartan rebels. Where have all the people gone? The answer reveals some ugly truths about the end of the Qaddafi regime. Ten thousand people were driven from the town of Tawarga in a single day.

And this story had been missed because even though there were these kind of digital traces of it happening, it wasn't the main story for the journalists on the ground. So having this kind of, and another example is just how every day you would have more videos and claims and counterclaims and you could verify them and figure out exactly where frontline positions are just these really fine details that journalists on the ground weren't able to report on because they could only be in kind of one place at a time whilst because you had online all these different sources that could be reviewed and verified you should actually get a much kind of wider and actually more detailed view of the conflict but that's not to say that journalists on the ground don't, you know, there's no point in them going to these conflict zones anymore.

It's just a different perspective that allows you to get a different kind of information and analyze it in a different way. Right, right. I mean, it is so interesting to me to hear you talk about this, because in my own experiences, too, I have examples of when my editor would say to me, this is happening over here, this is happening. I'm like, I don't know, I can only see what's four feet in front of me right now. So it is really interesting to hear that perspective that you were having at the time. I think it's worth noting that, you know, around this time, by 2013, you'd been laid off from your job, right? And you're at home, you're taking care of your young daughter, and you're still continuing to compile all of this incredibly detailed evidence of, you know,

possible war crimes going back to Syria from your couch, right? And so what motivated you to keep documenting and investigating all of this so relentlessly? Well, I've been blogging for about a year since 2012. And it was early 2013, when I kind of revealed this smuggling route and was suddenly getting all this media attention and kind of I was getting cited more and more. And I just started off some, you know, annoying commentator on someone else's blog. And I was now kind of getting cited by, you know, the New York Times. So I really wanted to figure out how I could turn this into a career. And I was still working. But my job, my basically, like the company I was working for was kind of shutting

down and I had some temporary work but then it was like I need to pay my mortgage and I was off I was approached by a kind of business intelligence firm that kind of does intelligence for oil companies and they said we'll power you but you have to stop doing the blog and by that point I'd kind of built up a kind of following online and I basically just said on Twitter that I'm sorry but I'm gonna have to stop doing this blog because I need to pay my bills and lots of people said well we'll crowdfund you and I took a big risk in kind of crowdfunding the blog and I didn't raise a giant sum of money it was basically enough money just to kind of scrape by for a year. But it allowed me then to work 100% of my time on kind of analyzing this stuff. And it just kind of really built from there.

There's this moment in the book where you read an intelligence summary from the Obama administration about the Syrian war, and you're just like dismayed by how flimsy you think it is. And what were you starting to see at this point about what you were able to accomplish using these open source collaborative methods that traditional intelligence methods and even traditional journalism wasn't accomplishing. So in August 2013, there was a major sarin attack in Damascus, and there was a huge number of people killed. And as with any incident in Syria, there's a huge amount of videos and photographs coming from the attacks. The rebels fighting the Assad regime say Syrian government troops fired rockets on these innocents.

Describing this video as disturbing doesn't do it justice. Bodies sprawled across clinic floors, many of the victims' children, even infants. Victims frantically gasped for air. And, you know, on the first day I probably collected about 100 videos and that showed victims and also impact sites with the munitions that were used. And I had actually seen these rockets being used before because they'd been documented in previous videos going back nearly a year being used against opposition-held areas,

both explosive versions and chemical versions of these same rockets there were even videos and photographs from the syrian government side showing them firing these munitions so it's very clear where they came from but i was kind of sharing this and i had quite a lot of journalists following me by then and i think i and everyone else kind of expected when the white house gave their intelligence reports to the public, it would include some of this content because it was so clear what had happened. But they didn't. It was like a few pages. It had a map that was completely inaccurate on it.

And I knew that because I was analyzing the videos of the Syrian government's front lines where it was very clear where they were. So then it kind of really made me think that wow there is a huge value to this but there aren't you know the policy makers the governments don't seem to even realize this and the more i kind of did this work and the more people i kind of connected to i realized this was kind of such a new field of investigation that even kind of news organizations human rights organizations barely knew about it let alone kind of had tried to do it themselves plus being connected to a network a community of people who are very open and shared information and collaborated together gave us an advantage over organizations kind of that were more kind of

traditionally uh kind of insular you know news organizations wouldn't talk to other news organizations about the stories they were investigating so that always gave me kind of that advantage as well and that's even now with Bellingcat, you know, nearly 10 years later, that is really core to how we operate. Right. You know, I often wonder what might happen on a story if all the news organizations across our country

got together and tried to piece it together, how much quicker we might be able to get to the end. So I know that in 2014, you retire the blog that you had been working on, and you form this open source intelligence organization called Bellingcat. And at first, it's just you and a handful of volunteers. And what were you hoping that the organization would do? I launched Bellingcat because at that point, there was a growing interest in open source investigation. I had people who were kind of submitting articles to my blog for publishing.

I wanted to give them a space where they could publish stuff, plus resources, guides and case studies for people to teach themselves how to do this. And I launched that on July 14th, 2014. And then three days later, Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing 298 people on board. Whether the disappearance is due to mechanical problems, pilot error or even terrorism is yet to be determined. As the day wore on, families in tears, lacking information.

The investigation has only grown foggier. And the community, so kind of before that had focused very much on the conflict in Syria, and now there's this kind of new community of people looking at what happened from all kinds of different countries, a kind of Internet that was very different from what you had in Syria. In Syria, there's very limited Internet access, but in Ukraine, it was free and open. So there's masses of material and masses of people looking into it. And Balinkat kind of became a a main node in analyzing that and we started publishing more and more articles tracking the missile launcher that shot it down through eastern ukraine to the launch site where there was satellite imagery and people talking about seeing

this missile launch online all the way back to russia to the 53rd air defense brigade where we had discovered there had been a convoy a few weeks earlier that had been filmed and photographed by russians and one of the missile launchers in that convoy had damage marks and other details that were identical to the one that was seen in ukraine which showed that the missile launcher had come from this 53rd air defense space in russia and gone to ukraine and shot down MH17. And you know, I just want to note for our listeners here, I know that you and your team use similar crowdsourcing methods after the crash of flight PS752 in Iran, which killed 85 Canadian citizens and permanent residents. And a day after the crash, you published evidence you'd

found through crowdsourcing that strongly suggested that an Iranian missile had struck the plane, which turned out to be true as well. But I want to go back to Russia with you. Your MH17 investigation implicated the Russian government, as you mentioned, all the way up to Putin. The investigation concludes that even if the buck launcher was given to Ukrainian separatists, Russian soldiers were likely still present to advise on its operation. And since you've done a lot of other investigations about Russia, including exposing the alleged Russian agents who poisoned and attempted to kill opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and unlike most of your work,

this investigation didn't actually rely mainly on open source data. And I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about how you exposed that case. So it actually started a couple of years earlier with our investigation into the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, where Novichok was used to poison him. British police now believe that former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a nerve agent. Something which in local media on Sunday

was perhaps thought to be an accident or an overdose involving fentanyl. Now we are talking about a substantial geopolitical crisis. And two suspects claiming to be sports nutrition salesmen were interviewed on Russia Today, claiming they were actually just visiting Salisbury to visit the 123-metre spire. Our friends have asked us for a while to visit this beautiful city, said Petrov of Salisbury.

Its cathedral is famous for its 123-metre spire and its clock, added Borshirov, as if quoting from wikipedia so we were looking into these people and weirdly they had no online footprint whatsoever which was extremely bizarre for any average person but especially if you were supposed to be in you know involved in selling stuff one of our colleagues christo grozev he's been collecting a lot of leaked databases from russia it used to be you could go to like a market in Russia and buy like a CD or DVD with a government database on it it was that easy to get it which suggested they were fake identities in Russia you also have a black market for data basically because Russia is a police state that's also incredibly corrupt

loads of people are selling data online from various government agencies so Christo went out and purchased their passport registration forms and discovered that they have some very weird markings on them such as the phone number of the Russian Ministry of Defense and markings that indicated they were parts of the security services and using a combination of those kind of sources and open sources we were able to eventually identify them as two gru officers that then led us to a third gru officer involved in the poisoning we tracked him to another poisoning in bulgaria and it also connected him to scientists in russia who had formerly been part of the russian novichok program which was the same nerve agent used in the

scribble poisoning and then when nirvani was poisoned we got the phone records of those people and they just happened to have been calling officers who we got the phone records and travel records of and they'd been following nirvani not just on the day he was poisoned but for 40 other trips beforehand and since then we've discovered it was not only nirvani who has been poisoned, but multiple Russian opposition figures who have mysteriously died or fallen ill over the past several years. So this seems to be a very large scale assassination program using an illegal nerve agent program being run from Russia. Right. I mean, it's extraordinary this web that you and your team have unraveled here. You know, the Russian government has not been happy about this reporting.

The propaganda outlet Russia Today regularly smears you and Bellingcat. And, you know, I do wonder, many critics of the Russian government, they do, they end up being murdered or dying mysteriously. And your own investigations have underlined this. And do you ever worry about your own safety or your team's safety here? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've been targeted, you know, before now by Russian hackers, disinformation. We've had Russian officials at very high level attack our work and claim we're working for

intelligence services. And you know, now we're dealing in exposing Russian spies and assassination programs, we kind of have to assume that we have to be a lot more careful but it's kind of you know we think it's worthwhile because we are exposing you know assassination programs of Russian opposition figures we're showing how Russia is responsible for you know killing 298 people who are completely innocent so we're I think we're happy to take on the risk. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem.

Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast,

Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Related to this Navalny investigation and, you know, talking about this black market data that you mentioned, I want to ask you about some of the ethical considerations that come up in the work that you do. So for example, paying for this black market data, how do you know whether you can trust it? Well, what we do is when we get the data, we can actually cross-reference it against other information. So we have collections of these online databases, or they're offline now, but they were online, where we can actually compare old versions to the more recent versions or data that we're receiving. And if there's any discrepancies, we'll explore why there's a discrepancy, because we have seen the Russians change data as we've

been investigating. So we always try and triangulate each piece of information that we're using to make a claim from multiple different sources. And there's open sources as well, you can do for for that as well. You know, this idea of paying for black market stuff, it does strike me that this is a departure from your ethos, right? Which is accessing publicly available information. And can you tell me a little bit more about the considerations that you're making here? You know, do you worry that this is a slippery slope that by paying for information, then you could encourage people to give you fake information or that it could encourage people

to do illegal acts, right? Like if they think that they're going to be paid for it, then maybe they would break the law to do it. Well, this uses a pre-existing market that's existed for a long time and that lots of people in Russia use. For example, if you wanted to know where your boyfriend or husband was, you'd look up their phone records and get very detailed information and you'd pay someone a few hundred rubles for that.

So this has existed for a long time and people have been using this kind of data for all kinds of purposes. If someone comes to us and say, I have data I want to sell to you, we're just like, no, we aren't going to buy it. We'll never buy data if it's offered to us. And we do have people come to us saying, oh, I have this set of information that will help you crack the case, especially with MH17, but I want 10,000 euros for it.

We'd never accept that kind of data. We do have a lot of discussions about the ethics of this. I mean, in the case of the Skripal poisoning and all these other assassinations, we think that by taking these actions, we're stopping more people from being assassinated. We're stopping, you know, more nerve agent that, you know, in quantities that could kill thousands being used in cities across the world, as happened with the Skripal investigation.

So by not doing these investigations, you know, we could put people at risk by just saying, oh, we can't do that because it will allow more people to be assassinated by these Russian teams. I know so much of what you do, transparency is really underpinning it. You publish a lot of information that helps people understand how you got to the conclusions that you got to. And I do wonder, do you ever worry that by publishing all of this information that it could put people in harm's way? it could put people in harm's way. So for example, hypothetically, if you're linking to a Twitter account in Syria that is posting about these sort of bombs that turn out to be cluster bombs, do you worry that by amplifying that account, you could place a target on that person's back? It's certainly something we consider when we're dealing with conflict zones.

One thing I observed very early on is often you have people who film from the same location again and again and again, which would indicate it's probably their home that they're filming from or somewhere they can access on a regular occasion. So, you know, in our work and when we're doing training, we kind of make people aware of these considerations because they can be very dangerous for people. aware of these considerations because they can be very dangerous for people if we're publishing something and um there's a kind of a victim we're very careful about what we actually say about the victim um what images we reveal uh you know we don't want to kind of re-traumatize them and also because we're crowdsourcing a lot when we're crowdsourcing we're keeping the tasks very simple because we don't want people kind of going off and um doing complex investigations with lots of people because that's usually where it goes completely wrong like with the reddit boston because we don't want people kind of going off and doing complex investigations with lots of people,

because that's usually where it goes completely wrong, like with the Reddit Boston Marathon bombing investigation when they identified the wrong people, or the January 6th violence in Washington, D.C., where groups of people online are trying to identify the suspects and have misidentified people. So if we're crowdsourcing, it's about simple tasks, not complex ones. Have you ever gotten something wrong? You know, you mentioned the Boston Marathon bombing and the Capitol Hill attack. I know that wasn't your organization, but have you ever gotten anything wrong?

The only time that's really happened is when we didn't actually use an open source. from someone at the OPCW that was a draft that was meant to be sent according to their lawyers and their experts to someone in response to something to do with the Duma chemical attack. And we published on the understanding it had 100% been sent and then it wasn't actually sent in the end. So we kind of had to retract that one. So that wasn't a very nice feeling. And the thing is, we hate being wrong. We really genuinely hate being wrong about anything. So we had kind of very long conversations editorially about how we kind of came to that moment. But that's probably the only example where anything like that has happened. You know, the Internet can feel like a very dark place these days.

I have to be honest, sometimes I wonder, you know, maybe we shouldn't have done it. And we've covered a lot of stories about the consequences of disinformation and conspiracies that I know you've investigated too. QAnon, you mentioned the Capitol attack, mass shooters who were apparently radicalized on 8chan. It can be quite bleak out there. And I know that you actually seem very optimistic about the internet and you say people shouldn't give in to what you call cyber-miserablism, which frankly I think maybe I have given into a little bit. And why aren't you feeling as gloomy about the internet as most of us are?

For me, I mean, I do see all these kind of communities emerge. You know, I think the most well-known is probably the communities that, you know, emerged around Donald Trump and resulted in the events of January 6th, you know, the QAnon communities, the far-right communities. On the other hand, I mean, with Bellingcat, we've built our own community. It's made up of lots of people from all over the world with different experiences, different skill levels, and different professionalism. You know, lots of keen amateurs on Twitter who've all contributed to investigations that have had real impact. One of my favorite examples of that is a, there's a video that was shared online a couple of years ago that showed a really horrific execution of two women and two very young children by soldiers somewhere

it seemed to be in africa but it could literally have been anywhere in the world but a group of people online started discussing this and balinkat were looking into it and we got together with them and the team from the bbc and amnesty international and other research groups and started looking into this video. And the BBC published some stuff about it and the Cameroonian government responded by calling it fake news and dismissing it and giving a very detailed explanation

why this couldn't possibly be in Cameroon. We kept investigating and a year later, this group of just people from all over the place had forced the Cameroonian government to put these people on trial where they were found guilty for the murder of these two women and two children and that only happened because people came together and looked into an incident that would have otherwise just been another horrible video on the internet and that makes me think that the more people we can have doing this the more likely it is those kind of horrible videos that do appear

on the internet will actually get something done about them that will there will be accountability for the victims of these crimes and we can do that as a community and you know the internet allows that to happen and i know it allows it to happen is because that's what we do all the time with bellingcat and the community it strikes me that the impulses for these amateur sleuths, the desire to use the internet to find clues, to uncover wrongdoing, to expose powerful people, are the same impulses that actually lead people down the conspiracy path as well, right? Like what fuels QAnon? And I wonder, for final question today, how do you appeal to people's better angels and appeal to them to try and harness this impulse for good? I think it's because there has been a kind of collapse in the traditional

sources of authority and a collapse in a sense between the barriers between an average person and the way to kind of seek knowledge, thanks to the internet. And unfortunately unfortunately because a lot of the people who feel kind of outside of the mainstream who feel that they've been let down by these traditional sources only really have places on the internet to go where um you know there's conspiracy theories there's fringe thinking they they get drawn into that at bellingcat i mean what we're hoping we can build is a community of people where we're doing evidence-based investigations that people who aren't sure can actually go to rather than being drawn into these conspiracy theories places people can go where we might not always agree with everything everyone says politically speaking but we aren't screaming at

each other because because of it but if we keep pushing people away to the fringes and the edges we can't be surprised when they become more extreme and more radicalized. We kind of have to find a better way. And we have to be proactive about doing that because sitting back and thinking democracy and society is going to be fine is clearly not going to happen. We've had more than ample demonstrations of that, you know, definitely on January 6, and probably in the four years leading up to that. Elliot Higgins, thank you so much for this really fascinating conversation. It was such a pleasure. Thank you.

Thank you. All right, so that is all for today. Some big U.S.-Canadian news to watch for tomorrow. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden's very first official meeting with a foreign leader will happen virtually with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. A statement from the White House signaled Biden is looking to renew the U.S.-Canadian relationship post-Trump, but some tense issues are expected to come up, including Biden's cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, and according to a source who spoke with CBC News confidentially, Trudeau is expected to raise the arbitrary detention of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in China. Other topics on the table include COVID-19, economic recovery,

maintaining cross-border supply chains, and climate change, among others. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.