Instant Genius - The creator of Bellingcat on using the internet to investigate global affairs

Episode Date: March 29, 2021

In this episode of the Science Focus Podcast, we speak to Elliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat. If you haven’t heard that name before, then you might be surprised to know that Bellingcat is behind some of the biggest news revelations of the decade. They use social media and information freely available online to carry out what they call open source investigation. Their work has uncovered the use of chemical weapons in Syria, identified suspects in the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury and identified the people responsible for downing flight MH17 over Ukraine. Eliot speaks to editor Dan Bennett about his new book, We Are Bellingcat (£20, Bloomsbury), which tells the story of how a group of amateur hobbyists ended up taking on Russian spies. Read an edited excerpt of this interview Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Read the full transcription of this episode [this will open in a new window] Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Dr Julia Shaw: Why do we do bad things? Marcel Danesi: Why do we want to believe lies? Project Discovery: Could computer games help find a cure for COVID-19? Chris Lintott: Can members of the public do real science? Lara Martin: Meet the computer scientist teaching an AI to play Dungeons and Dragons Rana el Kaliouby: What if computers could read our emotions? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome back to the BBC Science Focus podcast. I'm Dan Bennett, the editor of BBC Science Focus magazine. In today's episode, I'm speaking to Elliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingat. If you haven't heard that name before, then you might be surprised to know that Bellingcat is behind some of the biggest news revelations of the decade. They use social media and information freely available online to carry out what they call open source investigation. Their work has uncovered the use of chemical weapons in Syria,

identified suspects in the screepile poisoning in Salisbury, and identified the people responsible for Downing Flight M817. Today, Elliot's speaking to me about his new book, We Are Bellingcat, which tells the story of how a group of amateur hobbyists ended up taking on Russian spies. So today we're a small non-profit NGO. We have about 20 staff members. And what we do is something called online open source investigation. So that's using material that's available online from social media posts to satellite imagery on services like Google Maps to investigate all kinds of different incidents from war crimes in Syria to Russian poisonings to stalling. in animals to wildlife crimes, all kinds of different subjects.

And we've existed now since 2014, where it began, it was basically my blog then, and we had like 60,000 pounds of crowdfunding, myself and some volunteers, and it's just kind of groaned from there. And so you, you know, you say you're involved in investigations,

but, I mean, you've broken huge stories over the past few years. I mean, there's, obviously people won't be familiar with flight M817, what are some of the kind of crucial pieces of evidence that you've been able to shine a light on over the last few years? So our first big investigation would have been into MH17, which is really where our kind of investigation team forms,

which is a group of volunteers that most of which have become staff now. But that, first of all, we tracked the missile launcher that was believed to have shut it down through eastern Ukraine, through Separatis Hell Territory, to the launch site where the missile was believed to be launched from and found some evidence that that was the place it was launched from. We then identified the same missile launcher in a convoy in Russia a few weeks earlier that had headed to the Ukrainian border. Then we started identifying individuals who were on phone calls published by the criminal investigation, the joint investigation team, and by the Ukrainian security services, who didn't have names, but we figured out who they were based off the contents of the calls.

And they turned out to be Russian military officers and intelligence officers, along with other people. So that was kind of showing that Russia was involved with killing 298 people in this attack on this aircraft. We then, other big stories have been looking at the use of chemical weapons in Syria. We've identified the real identities of the people involved with the Scripple assassinations, as well as other people involved with that assassination and other Russian intelligence assassinations in Europe. We've also identified Russia's secret nerve agent program through that investigation. And that then led us to the FSB, this is domestic Russian intelligence team, who tried to assassinate Navalny, the opposition leader in Russia in August last year.

And that's led us to even more assassinations and attempted assassinations by the same FSB team, similarly using the same nerve agents that were used in the Scripple poisonings and other poisonings in Europe. We've also, we do other subjects. It's not just Russia. We've looked into things like border pushbacks by Frontex in the Mediterranean, which is now part of a EU investigation. We've published about the illegal wildlife trade in Dubai, and a whole range of different subjects, in particular the far right in Europe and in the US.

It's a jaw-dropping spectrum of investigations, but just to pull back for a minute, although you become experts in what you do now, you're not professional investigators. You're not what people would traditionally think of when they think of an intelligence agency, an intelligence agency like the CIA or MI6. Yeah, we're kind of just really,

we're keen amateurs who have their hobbies get out of hands. So it's like the Russia stuff. All these Russian and poisonings are basically the work of one person who just really focuses on this kind of evidence and working in that particular way on those stories. I mean, often, you know, our investigations aren't included, you know, it might be 20 people in our staff, but that might be one or two people working on these.

investigations, but also we're part of a broader community that's both kind of community of experts, you know, journalists, people working NGOs, maybe military and arms experts, chemical weapons experts, but also members of the public who we connect to through social media. I'm a very kind of online person, so I was always had that community around me. But when we started doing this work, because it's using open source information, anyone can join in and look at it. It also means that anyone can also be part of the investigation because it's a very clear and transparent process. of how you come to your conclusion. So around Spelling Cat's work, there's been this community growing that we're often kind of

using an investigation, kind of crowdsourcing answers to certain questions or helping them find certain material or some people might figure out where something was filmed and then be able to explain it and then we can kind of use that as part of the investigation. So for us, collaboration is really core to what we're doing at kind of every single level. And you've been involved in some incredibly sophisticated projects. But just to rewind a little, can you explain how you initially got involved in this? And at the core of that, explain to our listeners what is an open source investigation. So really going back to when I started this, before I started doing this kind of work, I was basically just, you know, I worked working in admin jobs.

I had no specialisation in investigation or journalism or anything, really. But I was spending a lot of time on the internet arguing with people about what was happening in the world. And at the time in 2010, that was the Arab Spring. So in 2011, I was kind of on the Guardian Middle East Live blog arguing with people every day and, you know, looking for links and just being interested in what was happening. But something that came up was people would share videos and everyone would argue about whether they were real or not. But no one actually tried to figure out if they were kind of genuine, if they were where they were being filmed. So I had a video. It was in a place called Tiji in Libya, supposedly.

say they had just captured this town. And the video was basically a tank rolling down a road with two wide lanes of traffic, a mosque next to the road, and various buildings. So I thought, well, maybe I can find this road and mosque on satellite imagery. So I went to Google Maps, found the town very easily, just T.G. Libya is the first thing that came up. And when I looked at the satellite map, it was very clear there was a major road running for the middle of it. So I zoomed in, and it was two lanes of traffic. It was divided by a divider, just like the one in the video and I followed it along and there was a mosque on the road with a dome and a minaret that was identical to the one that I could see in the video. And then I watched the video again. I started

looking at smaller details like the walls that were around the mosque and the curve of the road and the utility poles that were visible. You could see them on the satellite imagery casting shadows so you could see where they were. And by comparing these smaller and smaller details, I could be more and more sure that this was exactly the location they claimed it was. So then I could kind of go back and win the internet argument about where this video was actually filmed. So it kind of started there, but I just found it really fascinating. You could do this. And I was just really interested in what was happening in Libya and just frustrated the reporting was so focused on the kind of perspective of the journalist on the ground.

Whilst there was so much information that was being shared online from a range of different sources, that was just being ignored because people felt they couldn't verify it or they were like, well, it's a YouTube video. What does that tell us? It's not a news report from the report on the ground. But if you actually examined them and analysed them and put them into context with other information and verified what you could see, it actually gave you a much more granular view of the conflict. You could actually see where the front lines were,

where the fighting was occurring on each day. So I just kept doing it. And in early 2012, I decided to start a blog, not with any intent of it being anything more than a place where I could put my kind of thoughts and write stuff down. But I also were seeing so many people who were using these videos already, basically been conspiracy theorists. They were turning up on these conspiracy websites where there'd be

some white guy in the background of the video and they'd be saying, there's the CIA agent who's working with Libyan rebels for Godaffi. And usually it was like some journalist or something who were just wandered into shot. But I wanted to write about what I could see, not what my opinions were. So I started writing about videos from Syria showing the weapons that were being used because I didn't speak Arabic. So there's no point me listening to what they were saying because I didn't know. but I could see the weapons and then I used online resources to identify the weapons

and I posted about that and then people were interested in weapons started to talk to me, people from MGOs. When I posted about cluster bombs, Human Rights Watch started asking questions like where did you get these videos from? Can you find more of them?

Then it just kind of slowly progressed step by step until 2013 where I came across weapons that I'd never seen before from the former Lugoslavia and I was in contact with New York Times journalist

I shared it with them, and they went off and said, you've spoken to US officials, and they're saying this is part of a secret Saudi smuggling operation that I had stumbled across on YouTube videos posted by the rebels themselves. And that then led to me getting a lot more kind of attention in the media, because this was such a new thing that someone could use YouTube videos to expose the Saudi arms, you know, smuggling operation. And it just kind of grew and grew from there. And then in 2014, that's when Bellencat was launched. So when did you decide to, quit your day job. And what convinced you that it was time to take this full time? Well, in 2012, I had this blog called the Brown-Moses blog, which was named after a Frank Zappa song, and I'd been

using that name as a pseudonym online. Then when in 2013, I published this story about the arms, I got loads of media attention. I had the Guardian interview me first, and then I had, like, CNN come along, talking about the stay-at-home, Mr. Mom, who was at home looking after his kid and finding weapons in the conflicts in Syria, which was not. I was not afraid when I enjoyed, but nevertheless. But I was still working full time then. But I was just come to a period when my, basically the company I was working for was having redundancies and I was kind of the chopping block.

And I had a company approach me saying, would you like to, it was like a business intelligence company, you know, finding out if all your workers are going to be attacked by Al Qaeda and that kind of thing. And they said, we'd like you to work for us. And they offered a fairly, you know, decent wage more than I was being paid before. But they said, you have to stop doing your block. And at that time, I was getting more and more kind of media attention. And I thought, well, I need to pay my mortgage.

So I'm just going to sell on Twitter. I can't do it. But I said that. I've got to stop doing what I'm doing. But then lots of people said, why do you crowd fund it? So I thought that was a good idea, which it probably wasn't. But I did it anyway. And it was, you know, I scraped like 12,000 pounds together for that crowdfunding.

And that allowed me to start working on it like full time. And I kind of then. started meeting more and more kind of activists who were like really like blown away with what you could do with this work, people from NGOs, being asked to speak at events about my work. And then that kind of led me to the August 21st, 2013 sound attacks where I kind of found myself in the position of having way more information about what happened than anyone else. Because I just was watching the YouTube videos and figuring out where all the rockets had landed and the munitions that were used. And I recognize the rockets as being used previously by the Syrian government. And this kind of came into sharp focus when Seymour Hersch did an article for a London review of books where he basically said it was a false flag.

It was jihadi rebels using Sarin from Turkey to do a false flag to draw the US into conflict. And I was like looking at these videos saying that's clearly just complete rubbish. So I wrote about that and Seymourst was not very happy. But a lot of journalists saw that as a kind of clash between old journalism versus. as new journalism, but for me it was never really about being against something, but having a new way to investigate things that could complement traditional forms of journalism. And then I just kind of got more and more well known. And then in July 2014, I crowdfunded a launch of a new website, Bellingcat, where it would give people a place they could publish articles using open source

investigations, but also offered resources to people to learn how to do it. And yeah, and then three days later, Malaysian Airlines flight, MA17 was shot down. And that became a, huge, our first really kind of huge story and a massive catalyst for Ballincat and open source investigation in general. So there's a, there's a tonne there that I just want to tease apart. But first off, can I just pick up on one thing that probably gets asked a lot? Belling Cat, where does the name come from? It's from Belling the Cat, which is a fable about a group of mice who are very scared of a large

cat, and they come up with the idea of putting a bell around its neck, but they don't have a plan to put the bell on the cat's neck. So we're kind of teaching people how to build the cat. And you gave us a short version there of the full sequence of events that, you know, the full sequences in the book. But I just want to clarify, you know, that everything you were able to do, like I've identified the missiles and the location they were sent from, it wasn't through any kind of specially trained computer skills or hacking.

These were discoveries you and your team made by information that was, you know, just freely out there on the internet. You just had to find it. It's a combination of things. I mean, initially when it was shot down, these videos and photographs emerged online, basically just through loads of people searching for videos and photographs related to it, of book missile launches.

So you had this kind of online Twitter community of people who just wanted to find stuff about it, like you do about any event nowadays. And they showed this book missile launcher, but the question was, where was these photographs and videos taken? So one example is there's a picture of this, missile launch shot on a low loader going through a town, a photograph taking from like a garage four court. And a guy called Eric Toller came to me saying, I kind of think I know where it is.

And he explained he had used a shop sign in the background in Russian. He had then used that to basically Googled it and the name of towns in eastern Ukraine. He then found a match, which was a court document where there'd been a fight in the shop, which gave the full address, which then pointed him to this location, but also discovered dashboard camera. video someone had uploaded online of them driving around eastern Ukraine past this same location. So you then not only had a satellite imagery, but actual video footage from the ground. Just because someone had a hobby of filming stuff on their dashboard camera, putting it on YouTube and listing the streets had to come down.

So we were then able to find video footage of the same location. And when we published that, journalists who were on the ground saw that and actually went to the same location and interviewed the locals who confirmed that there was a missile launcher there and someone even took a photograph from exactly the same spot recreating the scene. So that was, that's always been an interesting interplay now between what we're doing and what people on the ground are able to do with the information. Because we're so transparent and we're using open source evidence, people can look at what we're doing and saying, oh, actually I might have a go at, you know, looking into this

bit of it myself and expand on our work. And that's kind of always be the nature of what we're doing with Balin-Cat, because I understand that it's often, it's about networks of people and it's not just about, you know, connecting to people and you know to work together but also putting the information out there that if someone sees what you're doing they're able to pick it up and do something themselves with it and they might do that publicly they might do it privately but in a way it keeps that information kind of alive after you've published it it's always about what can be done with that information not what we've done with it and so I'm curious because so as we talk about it you know you just talk about all the the big findings

and the big moments but I'm wondering what it's like day to day as somebody's doing this investigation, you know, is it, are we talking about, you know, days and days where you're just sifting through footage and you're looking for something specific? What is it like if you're one of these, you know, one of your contributors or even yourself in the early days where you've, you've got a puzzle that you're trying to crack? Is it not, I mean, is it the glamorous idea that you find this and you find this, you know, like a movie by the, by nighttime, the mystery sold? Or is it what's that process like? I mean, it's often like very kind of intensive and it takes a long time. You're constantly kind of digging through material, but you're kind of looking for those

kind of eureka moments where you find one thing that actually matches. And that might take you looking for like 1,000 kind of, you know, Facebook pages or social media profiles or photographs or videos just endlessly digging through stuff. So it can be extremely time consuming. But on the other hand, you know, it is extremely rewarding when you find those bits of information you need that kind of help you make your cases. It's just kind of digging through kind of the internet haystack looking for needles. So if someone's listening and they think, you know, they might want to try their hand at a bit of open source investigation. What are the risks? Well, I mean, for one thing, when we're kind of crowdsourcing stuff, well, we do use that as a technique, but we've got a big

audience of people who like to investigate, but we want to give them simple tasks. Because when you crowdsource an investigation, if it's complicated, you end up having this kind of group think happening. It happened with Boston Reddit marathon bombing where they basically had a group of people on Reddit, hundreds of people who identified the wrong person. But because there was this kind of group think about what was a valuable crew and what wasn't, they went down the wrong paths. You're seeing the same thing happening with January 6 and identifying suspects there because there's been several individuals misidentified by groups who are 100% sure they found the right person. It's that same group think going again. But if you give people a simple task, for example, when we've

done the Europe Holter Trace and Object Stop Child Abuse campaign, where people being asked to identify individual objects taking from abuse imagery, like a bottle of shampoo or a bag. That's a lot easy because it's a simple task. It's like, do you know what this object is? Yes or no. So that's kind of better to do. So you kind of have to, you know, use that kind of audience in the right way. You also, you know, if you didn't with footage from conflict, you will see horrific stuff. And vicarious trauma can be a big issue. So when we're working with that, we have to be kind of very aware of that. And, you know, I would strongly discourage people from, you know, jumping into an investigation of a war crime because if you're not prepared to work with that kind of material,

you'll see stuff that will stay with you for a long time. So you also have to kind of educate people around those kind of dangers as well. And also for people, sometimes people can, you know, who aren't, you know, good investigators will just kind of build up a kind of house of cards of mistakes and, you know, come to really sort of... Right, yeah. And that kind of also leads into kind of the, you know, this other communities who investigate stuff online, kind of conspiracy communities. The way they operate is they, if they come to a conclusion,

you know, they find evidence that contradicts what they're saying because of their kind of almost cult-like addiction to it, they'll find a reason to dismiss it or run another experiment that shows that the last experiment wasn't that accurate. There's, you know, a clear example of that is in the film behind the curve about the flat earfers where at the end of the film they do an experiment, prove themselves wrong and then just really complicated experiment because they can't accept the results and then they say, oh, well, it's too complicated to find an accurate result, therefore we're still right.

So you've kind of got to use the kind of resources as a community very carefully. You've got to make sure people aren't being exposed to stuff that can be damaging to those too. Yeah, I was wondering, do you see it that way? Do you see that, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot right now, even we report in it, a lot of talk about the failings of the internet. And one of those is obviously the conspiracy theories that come out of it. I'm going to name one,

you know, the Q and on where people are basically, I think manipulating audiences with a set of dots and saying, here's some things and then letting the public at large join them themselves and form their own conspiracies. Do you see yourselves as almost the opposite? of that in a way? In a sense, yeah, because I think what there is, though,

there's a fundamental distrust in traditional sources of authority. Lots of people have that, the media, the government, medical professionals. Now, if you have that and you go online and you're looking for an alternative kind of source of authority, there are groups who will give you that. Now, those groups may be more to focus on conspiracy theories. You might find, like, the alternative health community. That's not to say these people are all conspiracy theorists, but it's kind of the first step onto finding more people who have that way of thinking.

If you will say someone who is particularly against war or conflict, you'll find communities online who are saying that Assad has never done any chemical weapons attacks in his life or actually Ukraine shot down MHM and team. But they're all basically the same. If it's the earth being flat, if it's Q&N being real, if it's coronavirus being Bill Gates' conspiracy to put microchips into people, if it's MHM17 being shot down by, Ukraine, if it's chemical weapons attacks didn't happen in Syria, there's that fundamental distrust of some form of authority that they then reject. They then get drawn into communities

that reinforce those opinions. They have websites, bloggers, personalities, podcasts who will tell them that actually you're right and everyone outside of our community is being deceived and they're wrong. We're the only people who know the truth. So they start building a foolness, this heroic sense of themselves that actually we're the ones who know the truth. And the people outside it. They either pull misguided fools or they're part of the conspiracy. And so they start becoming detached from reality in these bubbles. And once they're there, it's very hard to reach them. So I think what we do have to do more as a kind of society community is look at ways how we actually engage people who are looking for alternative sources of authority in developing

their own sources of authority through evidence-based investigation, which is why we do so much training that we're looking at kind of training, you know, people who are more of a school age, university age to do investigations. You know, tell them that actually you're not powerless. You can actually do stuff with a laptop. Because if I can sit on a laptop and expose Russian spies left, right and center, anyone can do this. There's nothing special about what we've done.

There's no special spy tool that we've used. I've used Google Earth and Google searches and quite a lot of Google stuff. But YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, this is kind of our tools. It's not kind of some super James Bond spy machine that we're using. And that's interesting because, you know, when I was reading the story and the story of how you started out, it sort of resonated me quite a lot, the kind of way you started as an avid gamer.

And you were obviously doing something that I was doing at the same time, which was spending long evenings, playing online video games with groups of people and having a great time. But, you know, there, it just, it reminded me of the thing that we, I guess, both shared there is kind of solving puzzles with groups, of people and figuring out how to crack a problem. Is that something you found is similar in the people you've worked with since in Bellingat? Is there a sort of a type of person, I suppose, that it's drawn to this kind of stuff?

I think so. I mean, if you're the kind of person you can kind of find four hours in an evening to raid a world of Warcraft kind of raid and keep killing the same monster over and over again until you get it right. That same kind of obsession, I would say, is something that transfers very well over into investigations because you need to, you know, sit down and do stuff that is often fairly kind of relentless and, you know, tough and tiring, I'd be prepared to do it, but be, you know, have that reward at the end of it of finding what you need. It's a bit more open-ending because there's no kind of monsters to slay or anything like that. But I think you still need that

kind of level of obsessiveness. And I think as well, you know, being part of those kind of online communities, you know, not just the kind of game communities, but, you know, these early online communities coming from that there's something awful forums, which kind of spawned four-channel. and H channel, all these terrible things, you do have a better sense of how the kind of the internet works as well. Because I deal a lot with kind of, we get, do a lot on disinformation in our work, because we do, you know, get approached by kind of policymakers who are like saying, oh, can you know, talk to us about disinformation. It's so much focused on the idea that this kind of stuff comes from the outside. It's coming from Russia or being confused by Russia. But really, it's kind of

generated by these online communities. And they don't get that because they haven't spent their lives on the internet. They've spent their lives being serious people doing serious things. I've spent my time kind of posting memes on internet forums and trying to think of funny tweets. But if you're part of those communities and you come from there, you actually have a much better understanding of where this is coming from, why you have Q, why you have kind of, you know, all these kind of far rights groups appearing on places like 8chan and 4 channel. All this stuff is kind of second nature to you. But if you come from outside of that and you're trying to understand the problems, it just doesn't seem to make any sense. So you start thinking it must be coming from the outside. Because

what these people believe is completely mad. So you've kind of got a, it's really hard to explain that to policy makers as well. You've got telling that, yeah, these Q people, they actually believe this stuff. They think it's real and they think you're the bad guy because they can't fix the problem of wise because then they think, oh, we'll put some more money into countering disinformation with fact-checking websites. It's like, no, you need to get at much earlier age in a more systematic way where you can teach people, 16 to 18-year-olds, how to basically investigate stuff.

And you can frame that as in journalism, but really investigation isn't something that belongs to one particular field or another, and it doesn't belong to experts. It can belong to all of us. And the kind of open source investigation in particular enables that because the evidence is so transparent.

We aren't relying on sources telling us stuff. We're finding videos, photographs, and other evidence that can make a very clear case. You can use it to present a case. And if you can equip people with those skills, then they won't go off finding these alternative kind of ecosystems where they're finding about how cratchee coronavirus is made up or that, you know, there's no chemical weapon attacks in Syria.

Yeah, and that's another, I think, another point that I'd just like to touch on, which is because I suppose as, not a massive fan of this term, but, you know, you're native to the internet, you've been around these communities and forums for a long time. I think that comes out in the way that, you know, Bellingcat is so distinctly apolitical or almost not just apolitical but you you you know you never make assertions or intinuations or anything you're just about shining a light on the evidence is that and I think that's bred out of where you've come from is that fair to say yeah I mean everything we do is you know based off evidence we lay it out and we explain how we came to our conclusions

and we try and be quite cautious about what we're saying as well I mean even though we do make some quite you know big stories it's always based off evidence if we can't say I mean We're always trying to be transparent of sources, even when we've done the Russian investigations, which were actually used basically black market data that is very available in Russian. You can kind of find a web forum where someone's selling someone's phone records for anyone in Russia, including FSB officers, which we found. And you can get that information quite easily, but we explained how we did that in our website. And what that meant is other people who actually went off and brought that material to make sure we were actually telling the truth,

because we were being accused of being MI6, MI5, CIA, you know, the whole bunch of them and by the Russian government. But what Russian journalists did is they just brought the same information we did and said, no, this is actually just available. If you find the right internet form, you can buy it. But we also don't even trust that by itself because it's not an open source. So we'll cross-reference those data points we find from those data sets against other independent data sources. So we have like two or three points of verification for each claim that we're making. So even when it's not open source, we're being as careful as we can to verify every thing that we're using.

Most recently, you hit the news for tracking down the assassins who had tried to poison the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. And then when Navalny called his own assassins, he got them to effectively pin themselves. How do you deal with the idea that you're potentially annoying some quite traditionally powerful people. Does it worry you? Do you worry when you've got a delivery at the door? Well, I have to be more cautious now. I mean, we've obviously exposed Russian spies, which I'll go to in a second, but now when I'm traveling, I won't eat food in hotels. Like, I won't have room service because I just don't know where it's come from.

At one time, I was saying at a hotel, I'd been staying at for quite a number of years, and there was a knock on the door quite late at night at 8 o'clock, and I thought, what could this be? door opened and there was a guy in a suit with a name badge on and say, oh, I'm, I'm the, manager tonight. I would like to thank you for staying 10 times at our hotel. We'd like to give you some cookies in these sweets as a thank you. And I was like, okay, I took a man and I thought, I thought, I've no idea who that person was. Like, you know, he was weighing a name badge in a suit, but you can get a name badge anywhere. I started getting suspicious. And in the end, I left the cookies and sweets in the bin of the room and left the next morning. And then when I was leaving,

another manager came up and said, oh, we hope you enjoyed the cookies. cookies and stuff we gave you last night. And I was like, oh, no, I've already checked out. But with the Nirvana stuff, I mean, that really started with when we exposed the Scrippel assassins because they turned up on Russia today saying they were sports nutrition salesmen. But using this kind of rushing data market, we'd already acquired their passport registration files, which were like stamped with the number of the Russian MOD and like held all kinds of pretty suspicious stuff on it. So already knew there was something going on there. But based off that, we could actually, we discovered they actually use a systematic way of

creating their identities. They have the same first name, the same place of birth and the same birth date. And we had access to all these leaked rushing databases that have just been floating around for years. So we kind of used that to search these databases with those free things, found a list of like a dozen potential people, found 11 of them of social media, and then that left us with, you know, one or two guys who didn't have those profiles, got their registration forms for passports, and it was the same guys, but it was their real identities. We looked into them, and they were both serving GRU officers, that then led us to a third suspect

who was involved with another poisoning with eight other GRU officers of her arms dealer called Emini Gerev in 2015, and that was another nerve agent poisoning. But at the time, the local authorities dismissed it as food poisoning and didn't investigate it properly. But once we discovered this link, they did investigate it properly

and found all sorts of CCTV footage of some guy walking up to his car the day before he's poisoning and kind of fiddling around of it. So that then led us to those kinds of, ice phones records, and we discovered they've been calling up scientists who worked at a lab that supposedly manufactured sports nutrition drinks. But they didn't have a background in sports nutrition. They had a background in Novichok manufacturing. And it was a group of these scientists

with this kind of Novichok experience. So we had that. We had the Russia's secret chemical weapons program. Then in 2020, when Nirvana was poisoned, we checked the phone records of these same people. They've been calling FSB officers who themselves had been following Navani for 40 times since 2017, including the day he was poisoned. And we had phone records of them, travel records, all this leaked information. So we found that figured out they poisoned Navani. We then had Navani call one of them up and trick him into confessing everything in a 50-minute phone conversations by pretending to be his boss's boss's kind of assistant. So we did that. That was a big story. And then we discovered at least four more poisonings that we've published about so far, three of which was successful, one that failed. One was opposition leader called Vladimir Kazimura, Mara Koza. And he was one of Boris Nemstov's allies. He'd been poisoned twice into a coma in 2015 and 2017, and the team had been following just before his poisonings. We had three people who were successfully murdered, including two

quite minor activists in the caucus regions who had been followed by the team just before they died, a member of the official opposition, and we still have four more cases we're still working on, and we think that's just the tip of the iceberg, just is slow to work through all the material, so there could be loads more of these killings. So we kind of, the short version is we found Russia's secret assassination program that uses a secret nerve agent program. Okay, so I want to then quickly just move on to sort of what's next, in particular in the book, you talk about a couple really interesting developments in your area. One is mnemonic.

Can you just tell us a little bit about that and what you're building there? Yes, so we've been working with a number of organisations over the years on tech projects, and we've been working with a group called the Syrian Archive, who renamed themselves from Menomac Labs, who were collecting videos from the conflict in Syria. and they've collected over a million videos along with over-contents, and that's a vast amount of information. But what we want to do is turn that into kind of more organized data,

because these are things like YouTube videos that just have like a YouTube description and when they're uploaded. But we don't have metadata like geolocation information. So what we'd like to do is build a volunteer section, and that's what we're working towards at the moment, where it'll be possible to actually put some of those videos from that archive to our volunteers and have them geolocate them. There's also other technology that's being developed that allows videos to be grouped together by similarity.

So if a building is filmed from one direction and then appears in another video, they're connected. So you can actually have kind of networks of videos that are physically related to each other in physical space, give them to the group of volunteers to geolocate. And because they are similar locations, they actually have loads more material than they can use to geolocate this one more building. So you can have 50 videos of the same building that can kind of almost be deolocated in a batch. And when you're dealing with a million videos, it's a lot quicker. to do that, then go video by video. So I hope is that we're able then to create a kind of data-riched data set of these videos,

which would allow you to basically set a geofenced area on a map, you know, circle a town, set a date, and it will show you all the videos that have been tagged there on that date with their geolocation data we're providing. And for researchers into the conflicts, human rights, justice and accountability, it could be a very useful discovery tool for people who don't want to have to sort through a million in random videos. And you talk as well about, I suppose, one of the, not a threat,

but one of the things that, you know, could be a problem in the future is, is trying to find ways to save all this data and keep it somewhere, particularly in terms of, you know, you talk about the volume, there's a million videos collected from Syria. So is that a way of sort of preserving the history of this,

so that, that that history can be hopefully written in the most accurate way. Yeah, because this is a massive archive of information, and we can't assume that YouTube will keep these videos online forever, because we know they've deleted videos from the conflict before. A few years ago, they deleted hundreds of thousands of videos because they started using a new algorithm to detect kind of violent content and jihadi videos.

And it picked up loads of videos from Syria. A lot of them were incorrect, you know, false positives. And these channels got free strike, Because they had like 50,000 videos on their channel examined. They'll be like free that kind of trigger the system. And then reviewed by someone who couldn't tell the difference between a jihadi and kind of like a normal Syrian rebel group because you need contextual information. And, you know, some people, they just don't know the difference, unfortunately.

And then it triggers it. The channel gets banned. And that's, you know, 50,000 videos from the conflict in Syria just gone in a blink of an eye. I mean, in some cases, they would get banned. And we'd work with Syrian archive and, you know, talking to YouTube. about this, they'd restore them, and then, like, a day later, they'd be banned again while the algorithm found three more videos. There were some channels that were banned several times, even though we had them restored, and they were always banned for the same reason.

I had my own personal channel band, and that included one video that wasn't even listed, that just, and that included, like, all my playlists of, like, literally thousands of videos sorted by weapon type and all these details, just gone in the blink of the eye, and lots of people had been using those for research. So fortunately I got it restored, but it was, you know, it still wasn't easy to do. And there's plenty of people, you know, Syrians who are recording these videos, some of whom, you know, are dead and, you know, don't have any way to, you know, look after their accounts in these circumstances.

And those videos could be lost forever. So that really showed to everyone, I think, how important archiving this stuff off these platforms is for the future of kind of understanding conflict and analysis. Yeah. And then a final, I think, sort of threat or something you see down the road is the sort of rise of the deep fake and combating, or at least having safeguards against that, how do you see, or what do you feel open source investigation

can contribute to the rise of the deep break? Well, to be honest, I don't think it's an issue at the moment, but the way we approach it is there's open source information as evidence. And if there's a deep fake, it's actually pretty easy to figure it out at the moment, you'd be looking for other sources. If there's a video of a speech and someone's saying something, you find the original video of the speech. You look at the account that posted it.

So that's not hard to do. The problem is, if you tweet it, 50,000 people have retweeted it before you have chance to do that kind of analysis. So I think what we're going to see more is a kind of arms race between the tech companies who are developing deep fakes and the tech companies who are developing deep fake detection technology. It's an incredible story from where you were just over a decade ago to where you find yourself now.

what would you say to someone who was perhaps where you were 10 years ago who was in a job that I didn't like and you had this passionate hobby? What would you say to yourself even? What is it kind of taught you about passion and doing these kinds of things? Find something that interests you, you know, give it a go because I just started with kind of no idea before what I was actually doing. And I figured this stuff out for myself. but now you have loads of resources online and you don't have to always do a huge investigation and it doesn't always have to be something

a million people read. It can be just, you know, do it for yourself. Write something because you're interested in it and you want to learn more. And think of it a way to build your skills. You don't have to start geolocating 10,000 videos and figure out who killed who. You can just take one video and say,

can I figure out where it was filmed? And just that process itself and writing that up as well, make a blog. People don't have to read it, but just give you the chance to kind of have that process makes you think about the process itself and how you explain that process to other people. And always be careful not to make leaps of logic. Only write about what you can definitely see and definitely say, not what you think you're seeing. And then, you know, you'll be a lot more accurate

and you'll be producing useful information that other people might come across and start using themselves in their own work. And you can be part of a community that's doing that. And I think that can be very positive to anyone who wants to try and do it. That was Elliot Higgins there, talking to me about his new book, We Are Bellingat, which is on sale now and published by Bloom Spring. Thank you for listening, and if you enjoyed this episode, please do leave us to review. This podcast was brought to you by the team

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