In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - Eliot Higgins: How Bellingcat Hunts Down the Truth

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

This live recorded episode of In Good Company features Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, the world's leading open source investigative collective — a self-taught college dropout who began tracking the Syrian war from his kitchen table. Together with Nicolai Tangen, he unpacks how his team unmasked Navalny's poisoners and tracked the downing of flight MH17 using nothing but publicly available data. Eliot explains the discipline at the heart of his work: never prejudge a situation, follow the evidence before forming an opinion, and guard against your own biases. The conversation also explores why speed matters when truth competes with lies, how AI gives people "permission to deny reality," and what disinformation means for democracy. Tune in for a fascinating conversation! In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management. New full episodes every Wednesday, and don't miss our Highlight episodes every Friday.  The production team for this episode includes Isabelle Karlsson, Halvor Njerve and PLAN-B's Niklas Figenschau Johansen and Håkon Klemsdal. Background research was conducted by Une Solheim. Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi everyone, I'm Nicola Tangan, the CEO of the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. And today we have a very special episode. We are recording in front of a live audience of nearly 200 people. These are my colleagues at the sovereign wealth fund. And we are joined by the very impressive, Elliot Higgins, the founder of Bellinget, the world's leading open source investigative collective. Now, Elliot is not a spy, not a trained journalist. It's actually a college dropout who taught himself to investigate war crimes from his kitchen

table in Leicester. He's unmasked Russian assassins, exposed chemical weapons used in Syria, helped identify Navalny's poisoner. And I've been really looking forward to this, Elliot. Warm Malcolm. Thanks for having me all. So just to start, what is Bellingat? So Bellingat does something called open source investigation.

So that's using publicly available material to investigate a range of different topics. And really over the last 15 years, what is publicly available material has just mushroomed to just a huge extent. It's stuff like social media posts, satellite imagery available through things like Google Maps or other services, all kinds of things like marine traffic data or airflight data that's also publicly available. So we take all that data and then we investigate different things and that's included chemical weapons attacks in Syria, the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MX17. More recently, a lot to do with America's bombing of Iran, ice and DHS raids in the US as well. How do you decide what to focus in on? Well, early on, the whole field of open source investigation was very much led by kind of obsessive nerds on the internet, just doing what was interesting to them. And really, the big events were initially the Arab Spring and Syria, then the shooting down of MH17, then Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

And so really, that kind of was just a bunch of volunteers doing things that were interesting to them. But now we have teams who work on financial investigations, what we call online ideologies, which is quite broad and conflict. So how many different hotspots are you looking at each point in time? It varies, but it's like at the moment we're looking at, of course, what's happening in Iran, but we're also looking at the DRC and Sudan and other places where there's on. conflicts. Sometimes an investigation is a really multi-month process. Sometimes it's reacting really quickly to events that are happening on the ground in different contexts. Now, you live here in Lester. You got an organization in Holland, but you have a big network. Just how does it work?

So we have the central Ballin Cat organization, which has about 35 staff members, mostly researchers and trainers. We then have a community of volunteers who we train and we can direct that's about 200 people. There's also a Discord server where we have lots of people. It's kind of our community server that has about 43,000 people on it. And what's great about that

is they kind of really have the values of Balin-cat, that it's really about the research first before they form an opinion about something. And that's something that's quite rare in online spaces. But also, they find stuff that we're not looking at, and then that becomes part of our process as well. So what are the values? What will make me become one of your,

kind of what should we say, reporters or helpers or investigators? You never prejudge a situation. Just because you feel something should be the truth doesn't mean it actually is the truth. So I think that's a very important over contentious issues as well, where there tends to be two sides who just want to pick fights with each other on the internet. We're not interested in that. We want to look at the evidence first and draw our conclusions based off that evidence. But also it's about inclusion as well.

It's saying it's not just about what we do at Ballincat, but teaching other people these skills so they can do their own investigations and form their own communities. So community building with those values is something that's really a core part of what we do at Balin-Kat. Now, we have just so much to learn

from the methodology here. So let's just always think, you know, how can we use this? But let's just start with the beginning. 2012, you're sitting at your kitchen table and you're looking at YouTube clips from the Syrian War. What did you see?

Yeah, so I would really like to say I had the kind of noble intention. First of all, why were you looking at YouTube clips from the Syrian War? Well, this is the thing. I wish I could say I had this noble intention to become a great human rights or journalist. No, I was arguing with people on the internet, and I wanted to win the arguments. And there were all these videos coming from places like Libya and Syria. And really in those kind of online communities, they were just being used as sticks to be each

over their head with. They weren't fact-checking them. They were just saying, oh, this proves that I'm right and you're wrong. But I just wanted to know what was going on in these places. So I realized you could use satellite image. to figure out where stuff was filmed. And we call this geolocation. It's a core skill now.

By that point, it was just me winning arguments on the internet. But I just really thought, well, this is kind of deepening my understanding of what's actually happening in these conflicts. And I started posting about it on Twitter and then doing a blog, so I had more places to write.

With no intention of anyone ever taking me that seriously, but eventually they did. But what did you see? In Syria, I didn't speak any Arabic. because I was really looking at the content of the videos. And a lot of it showed unexploded munitions, eventually the aftermath of chemical weapon attacks. And I systematically tracked all the videos coming out of Syria

because they basically use YouTube as their main distribution platform. And those channels are usually run by, like, media centers or arms groups. So you could actually have a catalog of all these channels and check them every single day. And no one else had figured out you could do that. So every day I would just go through hundreds of videos, from Syria looking for stuff that was new or unusual, really focusing on ideaing weapons in particular. Then you started Bellingat and that the Malaysian airline was shut down.

Just how did that case develop? So I was blogging on a really awful looking blog spot website, and I thought I needed a more professional website and a better name. So I launched Balincat in July 2014 and three days later, MH17 was shot down. So you have this kind of real mass movement on social. media of people digging through stuff trying to figure things out. And Balin Cap kind of became the kind of center point of a lot of that. So I was publishing articles and then slowly building up a small team of volunteer researchers who every day were digging through every bit of information about

MH17 and searching for stuff. And that led us to finding all kinds of stuff that no one else anywhere had found like the origin of the missile launcher, where it had launched from and other details like that. So in the book, they go into the story in great detail. and you can just see how they're building in that case. Now, the Russian Ministry of Defense weren't particularly pleased with you. Yeah, so we've had kind of an escalating campaign against us coming from Russia. It really started in 2015. We have places like Russia today in Sputnik News writing critical articles of us.

That led to them trying to hack our emails, our website. Most recently, there's been six Bulgarians who were jailed because they were spying on one of my colleagues for two years. And that was linked to the Russian FSB. So there's really been an escalation over the years of how they've responded to our work. Now, we continued poisoning in the UK. What was that? Yeah, so when the Scribble poisoning happened, we couldn't really do much in the initial moment.

But when the identities of the poisoners were released, there was a Russian news site that got the flight manifest of the flight. And their passport numbers were just a few digits apart, which was very suspicious. So one of my former colleagues, Christo Grossov, he's very good at using the kind of, what you call the kind of grey market of data in Russia. In Russia, basically, all government data is for sale, if you know the right people to speak to. So we got their passport registration. Is that only in Russia?

Oh, is that everywhere? It's mainly in Russia, in our experience. There might be other places, but Russia is particularly bad for that because, you know, the snake rocks from the head. You know, it's, everyone's corrupt. So we were buying things like the registration forms of passports. discovering they had the Russian MOD's phone number stamped on these guys' passport forms and using government databases of house registrations and car registrations to kind of unpick

their identity. And eventually that allowed us to find the real identity of these suspects. And so what happened? So part of it is we were the first people to show that these two guys who had just been on Russia today saying they were tourists visiting Soulsbury Cathedral and, you know, talking about the 123 meter to spire. As they were on TV, we were getting the data ring showing that they were Russian spies, and we were able to publish straight away. And that had a huge impact. We had, like nearly every UK newspaper had our work on their front page the following day. And that really kind of led us then to the poisoning of Alexei Navani as well, because we discovered the network of chemical

weapons who were producing these chemical weapons, where they worked, and were able to buy their phone records from people in Russia and see them phoening up FSB agents just before they're going to poison him. So we could track the FSB agents as well. Because the phone records aren't just who you've called. It's every single cell phone tower you connect to, which can then be mapped town. You can actually follow people as they're moving around to Europe and Russia, you know, minute by minute. And that's what we did with their data, because Russia's so hideously corrupt in that way. And then he called them up. Yeah, he called them up. So we, We had this filmmaker with us who was just filming interesting things we were doing.

And we thought, wouldn't it be fun to call these people up now? We've got their phone numbers. And we thought it would be like over in 10 minutes. They'd all hang up or swear us or something. And that happened for the first three of four calls. But then Navani was the guy calling them up. So then we spoofed the phone number of the FSB, called one of the guys up, and Nirvana pretended to be kind of an officer

assessing the assassination attempt. It's worth tracking down the video and watching the whole thing. It's in the documentary we did, but the full video is an hour long. And he got the guy to give him a blow-by-blow account of exactly how the poisoning had done. They'd basically got to his hotel room.

You put poison on the seam of his underpants, and then when he put them on and went to the airport, it activated and started to nearly kill. him. But he just gave us a blow-by-blow description of then how he, when they recovered Navani and he was injured, they got his clothes and then cleaned his kind of underpants really carefully to get rid of the poison they'd use in the assassination. And we recorded the whole thing, and then that became our documentary. But we'd actually Putin on the Friday after we did that phone call, had just given a big speech about, you know, I have nothing to do with this,

Navarthe, and this is all untrue. And then on the Monday, we were able to reveal this hour-long video of one of his spies explaining exactly how he did the poisoning. Amazing. Do you check your underpants every day? I mean, I would advise everyone does that every day. I mean, you're a high-value target, right? Well, I mean, it's something we have to take seriously.

So it's like at the moment I have West Midlands or East Midlands, Counterterrorism Police, pay me the occasional visit to let me know what's going on in their world, which is always a bit disconcerting. You do have to be kind of a lot more security aware, and aware of when something weird happens, is you kind of think about,

is that just general weirdness, or is that a weirdness that's particularly focused on me? It's like we had one guy, after a big event we did in the Netherlands, a couple of the team were walking around, and this guy was following them around, taking photos of them. So they managed to snap a photo of him,

thinking this guy is dodging, maybe a spy. And they spent weeks trying to figure out who this guy was. It was just a fan. It was just too shy to come up and say hello, So he's just taking photos from a distance, which is, yeah. We contacted and said, hey, by the way, probably best not to do that in the future. Yeah, well, the people taking photos today are fans, too. The difference between now and 2012 in terms of what's available online in terms of material,

what's the magnitude of change? Well, I think one real change is the access we now have to satellite imagery. So back in 2012, you were very reliant on things like Google Earth and Google Maps. Now for a monthly fee, we use Planet Labs where we can not only get daily imagery of various sites, but we can actually task satellites to specific locations. So, it's all very James Bond, but if there's this area we're interested in, we can put in a tasking request and get satellite imagery of that in the next few days, which for our kind of work when you're trying to very price stuff as quickly as possible is incredibly useful.

Each kind of conflict or situation has a kind of different kind of, characteristics around how social media is used. So with Syria, you know, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, where most stuff was being posted. With the conflicts in Ukraine, especially since 2022, Telegram was the kind of big website. It constantly changes. If you're looking into criminal activity, you might find a lot on TikTok, for example. There's lots of people who do crimes and post them on TikTok and then do that for months and months and months until someone like us comes across it and unpicks the whole thing. So yeah, it's much. It's much. you constantly have to learn, you have to see how different situations evolve, how technology

is being used, and look for opportunities. And there are, like we were around, the internet was shut down there for a very long time in the early parts of the current conflict. And that meant we had to use other techniques to analyze satellite data, for example, because there was no satellite data either. So we used a system that uses infrared's satellite imagery and compares the differences to them using a very complex program, I can't possibly explain. But that allows us to see a kind of heat map of where damages are occurring across Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East at a time when there was no visual satellite imagery of that kind of stuff.

Supposedly, Israel hacked into normal surveillance camera all over Iran, right, to check out where the leaders were. Do you hack into systems like that, too? No, and we try to avoid crimes whenever possible. But what does that mean, try to avoid? Well, it's, for example, the, sometimes, I mean, pretty much everything we do is a criminal offence in Russia at the moment, mainly because we did it and then they made it a criminal offense to do it.

So, for example, the Russian soldiers used to post loads of social, on social media about where they were, what they're up to, their friends, and we use that to reconstruct exactly where they were on MH17. But then the Russian government passed a law to ban soldiers from doing that ever again, partly because of what we were doing in terms of that. But it's also like the stuff we were doing with the Navani and Scripple investigations. We wouldn't buy data anymore because that's become, that's kind of a gray area we felt even when we were doing it,

but it's kind of a choice of, you know, we knew where the data was. And if we ignored it, then people were literally being killed with chemical weapons. And we found that there were multiple people who were killed like that that hadn't even really made it to the media. So there was that kind of complex, ethical conversation we had around that. What's the weirdest source of data you've used ever? This wasn't one of our investigations, but I think it definitely ticks the weird box. So several years ago, there was a Instagram post that was being shared on social media,

it had been copied and based, and it was supposedly from Alexandria Cassio-Cortez's social media account, and it showed a pair of women's leg in the bath. It's like a saucy photo. Now, very quickly, the Wiki feet community, which is the foot fetish community, who rakes people's feet, immediately said, that's not her feet. We know what her feet looked like. It's actually this person's feet, and they found the original photograph of it. So, but, you know, in all of this work, I mean, if you go back to, you know, the rendition flights that were happening in the early 2000s, it was plane spotters who found that network. So people with really, really specific interests and hobbies, can actually be a really useful source of information. You just have to kind of know what kind of people out there and how to interact with them safely, I guess. So nerds are good.

Nerds and perverts, yes. We have the old nerd too. We love them. What's the most shocking piece of disinformation that you've seen ever? Oh, God, I mean, it's so, so constant. It's like there's an ongoing campaign from Russia at the moment. It's called various things.

One of them is the Russian doll campaign because what they've been doing is making fake videos of news sites, including myself. And they made a 3D animated kind of PlayStation 2-Eiro graphics avatar of me to do some of the videos.

Another thing they did in that campaign. So a typical video would be like, you know, the Armenian president is a drug addicts. Not that anyone would even bother interacting with that post, but they just churned dozens of these out every single week. And they sent email

them to us directly so we engage with them, which we don't. But they included jigsaw pieces in some of these posts. So it would be the fake news video and a jigsaw piece. And they were all numbers. So I started piecing them together over a period of weeks and weeks. And what it was, it was a jigsaw puzzle of my face on a pile of poo with Belling Shittings as the logo. Sorry, my language. But they'd included this in their disinformation as a kind of weird, personalized message to me. But things, I like doing jigsawes. So for me, this is just fun.

And then I had, like, something I could kind of post on social media as well. So it was like, this is just keep doing it. They actually started a third jigsaw puzzle. There were two, and they did a third one. And I think I had posted so much about the second one they did. They actually got told to stop doing it, which I was very disappointed about because it looked good. What are we up against in terms of number of people? What kind of other resources?

let's say in Russia to conduct those gun on campaigns? What are we up against here? Well, I mean, it's kind of what we're looking at as a kind of development of the Internet Research Agency, which really kind of dominated the kind of 2016 scene. That was linked to people who are now being killed by the Russian government, so now it's being run by another oligarch, but they're dealing with hundreds of people who are doing this.

The thing with disinformation, though, we tend to treat it as a kind of foreign actor issue, but a lot of disinformation and misinformation misinformation comes from online communities who generally believe they're creating good, useful information, but also have kind of grifters in that community and sometimes Russian or foreign interference that's kind of amplifying those communities. But for disinformation to work, you need people who want to engage with it. And this is why a lot of this recent Russian disinformation doesn't work. They did a huge campaign around Armenia. Hundreds of videos, fakes,

all sorts. It got no engagement because not really that many people who speak English, on social media, really care about what's happening in Armenian politics, so it got no genuine uplift. When you start these investigations, how do you make sure, do you have like a hypothesis and you test it, or how do you work? How do you make sure that you aren't biased in your research? Yeah, I mean, it depends on the starting point and the scale of something. So with Alex Presley and really good shootings in Minnesota, there straight away, you had videos that were being shared and dissected on social media. So in that case, what we were trying to do is get information out quickly

that looked at certain key claims, which we could say, yes, this is true or not. So Alex Preti was disarmed and then shot. And that became a point of contention, but we released a video that kind of synchronized multiple videos to show the moment he was disarmed and then shot in one complete sequence rather than the fragments that were out there.

So that's when you kind of have to respond quickly because there is a discourse and you know the government's going to lie about. it too. But in other cases it could be a lot more, you know, gather a huge amount of information, start looking at what patterns it's showing you, try to verify as much of that information as possible. So we're looking at kind of Israelis, air strikes in Lebanon very, very recently, and that was a huge data set we're looking at rather than kind of individual videos and focusing on just one particular incident. So there's just, it's a matter of scale and, you know,

what question we're trying to answer. You mentioned the importance of speed in the Minnesota case. Just why is speed so important? Why is it so important to get the truth out before false perceptions have kind of established themselves? Because generally, once people feel they know the truth about subjects, they'll not change their mind about it. And in those moments when there's, you know, just a few hours where there's a really vigorous discourse online, and you know that there's going to be a government that's going to come out with a version of events that's probably not going to match reality, trying to get as much information into that discourse

is important because people take those kind of objects you create and then spread them across multiple websites where all this discourse is occurring. So you don't have to distribute it just as like a single note. You kind of can rely on other people to pick that up and take it elsewhere. When it's something that's kind of longer-term, kind of deeper investigation, you don't have that kind of engagement happening. So you have to really approach that in a different way. both in how you investigate it, but also then how you distribute that information. How do you reach the audiences you want to see it? It's a whole far as you need to be now.

Let's say there is a shooting, which is bad. How quickly do you need to be out there with the narrative? Well, I mean, I think you've got, at best, two or three hours in many cases, if it's something like those shootings in Minnesota, something that took a little bit longer, but we still kind of influenced the discourse. We look at the Iranian score bombing, where the girls, were killed. We found a video of Tomahawk missiles striking close to that building, but not on it, but we got that information out there. Probably within about 48 hours of the

airstrikes happening. And then Donald Trump was being asked about, you know, why is there a video of Tomahawk missiles by journalists who had seen our work, nowhere reliable, and then could actually ask that question knowing that, you know, that is a fact, not just something that they've kind of read on the internet and rumored. And then Donald Trump responded by saying, well, the Iranians have Tomahawk missiles as well, which is completely ridiculous, but he was forced into that position because we could present verifiable evidence. How much more are governments lying now compared to 10 years ago? It depends on the government, I think, more than that.

I didn't want to be specific. Certain governments that are kind of to the west of this country, they are lying. The face, it's kind of a, it's authoritarian capture, ultimately, because it becomes about loyalty tests. It doesn't come about the truth. it becomes about how you demonstrate your loyalty to the in-group, and then how you can define the out-group by their refusal to Tover-Ly. So this is really what we're seeing in the US,

this authoritarian capture of various institutions, the presidency, the kind of bending of the knee of various organisations, where the truth is no longer important. It's all about those loyalty tests. How do you think this will develop? So a lot of my work at the moment looks at issues around disinformation and democratic theory and kind of where we've, how we've got to where we are at the moment. I think the one thing that really worries me

about that work, and I've spent a long time doing this, is that the way we've kind of set up our society and information system now has changed completely. We've gone from this information system that was top-down, elite-controlled, and also normalized because of that. We had institutions, the media who, you know, they kind of controlled the flow of information to the public to a large extent. And the public were recipients of information. And in that relationship, the public had to trust those institutions to produce verifiable information, that they could be deliberated on it procedurally through courts, through parliaments. And then people would be held to account for wrongdoing. And that was the public, the kind of social contract we had with those institutions. That's now

collapsed into a peer-to-peer many-to-many information system where institutions are competing for attention with the public in systems that reward. engagement over the truth. And those platforms like X, for example, that monetize their social media process rewards basically engagement more than anything. So what that leads to is a system where populist, authoritarian, and conspiratorial ideas

perform really well, because they don't need the procedural certainty behind it. You just say, this is true, and people nod their head because they're prepared to believe that in a way. And a whole click-based behavior. Yeah, it's just all about, you know, what engages people rather than what's truthful.

And we see this often around conflicts where there's a lot of public engagement. You know, the situation in Gaza produced a lot of fake information because people just wanted to get the clicks and monetize the engagement that they were getting on platforms like X. One of the bigger questions on democracy.

I mean, you talk about verification, deliberation, accountability. Could you just explain briefly in the concept? Yes, so you can understand democracy as having free core functional. when it works well. That's verification. How do we know what's true? Deliberation. How do we decide what we do on that? And then accountability is how we hold the powerful to account. And when that functions, it restrains power. But what we tend to see more in our democracies is a kind of performative

version of that where it's not really about holding the powerful to account or real verification. It's about getting elected. It's about building a coalition of voters who will be enough to get you in. But that then slides into a form of simulated democracy, which becomes disordered, where verification is now about a pre-decided set of truths. And if you go outside of that, you become attacked by the in-group. Deliberation is also about really identifying who's loyal rather than identifying what to do on this information. And accountability is always targeted outwards from the in-group. And you can look over to the US and see that happening very, very clearly every single day. And so what can democracies do to counteract this?

Well, unfortunately, it's a big issue, and it requires a lot of involvement with lots of different sectors. I speak to policymakers, government, people working in civil society about these issues, and there's a recognition there's a huge problem. The problem we've got is really since 2016 is being defined as an issue of foreign interference of disinformation. And that if somehow we can get rid of that false information, society will fix itself and democracy will fix itself, and democracy will flourish again. Problem is that's complete nonsense. It treats disinformation and the problems it causes as a kind of supply side issue. But if only we get rid of the supply, then all these problems will fix itself. But really that's driven when people feel a sense of betrayal, of distrust in those institutions, and they look for alternative sources in these online spaces

where engagement is rewarded over accuracy. So even though they might be trying to seek this truth, They're going into environments which are not designed for truth-seeking. They're designed for engagement. So people get drawn towards more conspiratorial ways of thinking. And again, authoritarianism, populism and conspiracy theories perform extremely well. And slow procedural verification through institutions, the media, through Bellingcat, doesn't perform as well in those environments. Do you think any of this is important for us as a long-term investor?

Well, I think when reality becomes contest, I mean, Does anyone work on anything to do with Iran at the moment? And do you know what the hell's going on? Because day to day, the story of what's happening changes. So without that reliability, without being able to rely on what could be truthful and what's not, then it's very hard to make any real, you know, tactical, strategic decisions about things.

And this is where open source investigation is so valuable. I mean, we train people in all kinds of different sectors. I mean, we've trained investment firms, journalists, you know, all kinds of people to do this kind of work. But if you take the Iran, conflict as an example, how much information flow is there now from each side? I mean, how do you think they compare? Information, I mean, because we got so little from one side and so much. There's lots of information. It's just very poor quality information that you can't trust.

So you then have to use other ways of figuring out what's going on. And this is why a balance count where we've been looking at around, there is a limit on SaaSlight imagery and social media information that has been useful in the past, but there other ways to look at what's going on there. How is AI changing all of this? I think AI gives people a permission structure to deny reality. So if they see a picture they don't like or a video, they can just say, well, that's AI. And that's the kind of end of their engagement with that particular object.

It also allows people to kind of make cases for stuff that's not really true. It's kind of you see so often people will engage with an AI image. They know it's AI, but it supports something that they think is true. So it's this kind of truthfulness of the imagery comes across rather than it being factual. I mean, one example of that is there was a far right UK rapper who was entirely AI generated, the music, the face, everything was fake, but lots of people engaged with it because it was content that they wanted to see and that they thought other people should see as well. In terms of actual open source investigation, I haven't really seen AI really add much to a actual

you know, processes so far. You can do stuff like vibe coding sometimes to, like, scrape a website that's being awkward, but there's nothing that's really, like, completely changing the game around open source investigation. I think that's a bit surprising. Do you think it will happen when you get more kind of agents in place? It might do. I mean, I use AI a lot for various experiments and stuff like that. So, you know, just recently, I've, for years, wanted to scrape all the Syria documents of the organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons website because that's my thing I'm into. That's another thing.

Don't worry about it. But I just basically went to Claude and said, how should I do this? And it wrote me a Python script. And within 10 minutes, it's done a job that I'd been putting off for eight years. So that can be really, really useful for just kind of experimenting and poking around. We've tried to get AIS to do geolocation. And they have a mixed set of results. I think it's fair to say, but they can also provide context clues that you might miss.

Like it might identify a certain type of tree that's only going to grow in a certain range of, you know, hills in some country. And then you're like, okay, I'll know where to look now. You've course got a double check that's actually true, but it can provide extra clues. And geolocation is a game you play with your son, I gather. Yeah, so... Tell me about the game. I mean, how do you play a geolocation game?

Well, I'll just, like, find some photo and, you know, he'll kind of try and find it on... You know, nothing like a war crime, but, you know, you know, It's just a fun thing to do. We're actually saying that there's a game that's based off geolocation that's being released soon, and we'll probably do a live stream of that for our fundraising. So it's kind of weirdly, like there's this guy called Rainbolt who does this thing called GeoGessor. So Geogessor, it gives you an image, and then you click on a map of where you think it could be in the world.

And he's like the world expert in it. He'll look at a picture, immediately click, and then be within like 100 meters of where the picture is taking. He can see all the context clues. immediately. But yeah, he often gets photos from people saying, like, here's a family member, you know, where could he be? And they'll find it in like five minutes. Cool. Now, you've been spending a lot of your life trying to find the truth, right? Which is in a way what you do? What's driving you here? Well, I mean, it was, as I said, when I started,

it was argue with people on the internet, to be honest, but over the years, it became really clear how important this information was in a lot of different contexts. But, You know, this, like with MH17, immediately the Russian government were lying and producing fake evidence. But we could say that was fake evidence because we could do open source investigation to examine it and verify if it was true or not. It turned out, it wasn't true. With Syria and chemical weapons use, which I spent a lot of time on, there's a huge amount of disinformation and propaganda about that, coming from online communities and the Russian government. And again, it's, there's always going to be things that are contested.

but usually when there's that contestation happening, it's just two people or two communities arguing with each other about what they think should be correct rather than doing analysis. So we're trying to build communities around those values and ideas that you do the investigation, you verify information, and then you have your opinion. You don't have your opinion and then fit the investigation around that

is often kind of what happens around that discourse. What are the personal costs to you as a person? I mean, not monitor it, but just as a human being. There is the security aspects of it because there's certain places I won't travel to at the moment. Obviously, Russia's off the table forever. But I can't travel to the US at the moment because there's this conspiracy theory called the censorship industrial complex, which presents the idea that the Biden administration and academics and journalists basically colluded to do various things.

And Ballincat kind of got tied up in that. Just we'd kind of had nothing to do with it, but people don't like Ballenka in certain communities. So we got kind of named with everyone else. And there's people in the State Department who've been looking up communications between myself, Ballincat, and the State Department, to prove their case. But they don't exist. So that just makes them think there's a big cover up around this stuff now. So basically you have to, I'm sorry, Elon Musk. Yeah, so Elon Musk called us a sci-op.

So we know this, yeah, the US administration is definitely knows who we are. And we've been very critical of them, published embarrassing investigations. And I don't want to take the risk of, you know, turning up at an airport in America and then being off to a nice detention center for some reason. So you basically have to stay in Leicester. Well, I can travel a bit outside of it if I'm lucky. But, yeah. How do you fund, how does Bellinghead fund itself?

Yeah. So when I started, I crowdfunded using Kickstarter. But then as we've grown, there's been foundational funders like the Open Society Foundations, Family Foundations. We raise about 30% of our income from workshops. We have small donations. But one of the things that's happened recently, there's been a real shock to the whole kind of sector has been the USAID funding cuts.

About 25 to 40% of the global funding for the kind of, you know, investigative journalism NGOs was lost overnight because of those USAID funding cuts. So even though Ballincat didn't take any of USAID funding money, the whole funding environment is a nightmare now. So you have to kind of really rely now on kind of small donors, high net worth individuals, because the foundations are now under a huge amount of pressure to basically save a lot of organisations that are going under. And especially in the global South where a lot of that funding was coming from USAID, a lot of these small media NGOs who are doing really high-quality investigative journalism

just shut down overnight because of it. So when you look at the world, are you an optimist or pessimist? I would say I'm a cynical optimist, is the best way to think of it. The things in my work, I've seen what you can do. You know, getting not just what we do at BallinCat, but showing other people these skills, be they, you know, journalists in lots of organizations we've trained.

And we've probably trained several thousand journalists and activists in open source investigation. But also the online communities that've seen our work and learn how to do open source investigation just by the way we kind of include all the details in our articles, do case studies. And then they find stuff themselves that is really, really impactful and does actually make a difference. That's something that gives me hope. The difficult part is doing that at scale. How do we get as many people involved for that as possible? especially now we live in this environment where, you know, the attention is really the name of the game, not the truth. And that's really kind of poisoned the information environment for a lot of people.

And is that a temporary thing? Are we just temporarily in a bad spot when it comes to lies and truth and democracies? Or is this just a step on, you know, is this just going to continue and get worse? I think the situation we're now in the moment fuels the kind of worst aspects and is the default state unless we actually take real action against it. It's been interesting to look at Kier Starrmer's recent, kind of the reporting on what he's been saying about online safety, 16-year-olds being banned from social media. I think there needs to be more around education in terms of building critical thinking skills in young people. So a lot of our work at the moment is working with things like Cambridge University Press and Assessment, the National Institute of Teaching, about developing those critical thinking skills and teacher training material and for students. We work with universities to build investigative hubs and open source training materials

so students can do their own investigations and build their own communities around that. So you have to proactively build this stuff. A lot of people look back at the kind of interwar period where, you know, there's the rise of fascism and they think that democracy just kind of fixed itself and figured it out. And, you know, Nazi journalism and he was an outlier. But that took real action to build democratic systems to work. actually make people feel they could trust those institutions again after World War I. And nowadays it's just kind of like, well, you know, people figure it out for themselves

because democracy is the default and that's really not the case. So last question, Elliot. What would be your advice to young people who would want to try to make this a better place? Well, that's a very big question. I think they need to really consider what they, you know, when they share information, When they look at something and they think maybe I should do that, they need to think about what impact that does have. It's like my daughter's 14, and a lot of her friends use a lot of social media.

We really try not to let her use that much social media, but they'll mimic trends they're seeing. And some of those trends are really about making stuff up because it'll get engagement. And it's kind of actually talking to people about what impact that actually hasn't. That has a big impact on society if everyone's just telling lies for engagement. And that's just the basics we need to start with. Yeah, a big thank you to you. Thank you.

Thanks for everything you're doing. Thank you.