‘We are Bellingcat’
An extended interview with Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat project, about his book, the importance of open-source investigations and media literacy efforts.
Hi there! My name is Vasile Decu, I’m a science journalist, amateur astronomer, and ‘professional’ book worm. I do longform interviews with some of the best authors of nonfiction books out there. If you’ll enjoy them, buy me a coffee and/or a chapter of a new and bloody expensive hardcover, via Buy Me a Coffee or Donorbox.
This isn’t probably news for you: We Are Bellingcat, written by founder Eliot Higgins, was and is (as it has a strong, ‘evergreen’ story) one of the most important titles in those “Best-Of 2021” lists, for everyone interested in media and world affairs. It’s an excellent biography, start-up story, and ‘manual’ for media literacy and open-source investigations. And also a great read, like a nonfiction version of some of the best spy/intelligence novels out there. But real :)
With the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the Bellingcat team is now working again full steam to verify, document, and archive this painful history of the present. You can support their efforts here: bellingcat.com/donate
And do buy the book (Bookshop.org or Amazon). It’s not only a must-read for journalists and media folks, but a necessary one for all of us, spending our days now reading the news and information on social media’s ‘first and loud drafts’ of facts.
“I felt it was a good time to kind of summarise what’s been happening since 2011, when I started doing this. Because my own personal journey through the world of open source investigation basically ran in parallel with the development of the whole field as well. And I kind of ended up being quite central to it”, says Eliot. “Over the last few years, in particular, there’s been an increasing interest in the kind of justice and accountability use of open source evidence. It’s gone from something that was pretty much done by people in their spare time, and by amateurs, and by bloggers — and now we’re at a point where the likes of the International Criminal Court are now looking into open source evidence and how it could be used. Plus, we had an almost near conclusion of things like the MH17 investigation. When I was writing the book, we had just started the investigation into the Skripal poisonings. All was kind of coming together for a rather nice point in time. So I thought that, as a book, it would work a lot better than it would have been a couple of years earlier.”
If you’ll enjoy this interview, please buy me a coffee and/or a chapter of a new and bloody expensive hardcover, via Buy Me a Coffee or Donorbox.
Vasile Decu: I bought the book the moment I saw the word Bellingcat on the cover. You managed to build a great team and an important media brand, with crucial contributions to the world of investigations. I also bought it for practical purposes, to learn your tools, to see inside your newsroom. But I also have to be honest and confess that I did had… even if just a shade of a thought that your spectacular investigations must sometimes use intelligence sources, institutional ones. But the book does its job of being very clear and effective in dispelling that argument — often used as an accusation or attack against you. It’s a super-exercise in editorial transparency.
Eliot Higgins: I wanted to be open and transparent about how we work. Probably more so over the last year and a half, more than anything since we’ve done the Skripal stuff, there have been more and more accusations coming from sides like the Russian state and some individuals who are very vocal on social media (laughs), saying, for example, that we’re working for the intelligence agencies and we can only get information by doing this or that, or getting it passed to us. But the whole reason we are trying to be as transparent as possible is to show that a lot of this information is open source, and when it’s not open source, like in the case of the Skripal poisoning investigations and all those assassination investigations, we’re at least transparent about how we get that information. And what’s quite good about that, as well, is that it then allows other people to basically copy what we did. Like in the case of the Navalny investigation, we did a piece that explains how the Russian data markets work, without pointing people to those sites, where to buy this stuff. But that still lets the Russian media use those kinds of websites to buy the same data that we got and compare it to what we are publishing. And they could say ‘yes, this matches with what Bellingcat is publishing’. So that transparency is important for us, not just to demonstrate how we do stuff, so people can learn from us, but also to show that those people who have these theories about us don’t know what they’re talking about. Because, actually, you can do this stuff without having the spy agencies involved. And I think, as well, that kind of allegation in itself is disempowering to people, because what we’re trying to say is that you don’t need special sources. You don’t need to be trained in investigation to contribute to an investigation. And if you start saying, oh, well, they can only get this data, you know, from this special source here or this special source there, then in a way, you’re robbing people from the kind of empowerment to actually do that themselves.
What’s your ‘philosophy’ on anonymous sources? In Romania, with a high degree of corruption and dysfunctional institutions, anonymous sources are really important. Especially for journalists of the ‘old school’ (in a good way). It’s not like Russia, but people can lose their job, their career, for speaking with a journalist. But, as you write in the book, using anonymous sources also says to the reader ‘trust me to trust them’. And sometimes even you are using them.
We have done a bit more recently, like when we’ve been using the sources from the data markets in Russia, but that’s to protect the sources more than anything. Then we cross-verify that as much as possible, with multiple, different sources. I think probably one of the best examples of what you mentioned, maybe this idea of new journalism versus old journalism, was the August 21st, 2013 sarin attacks in Damascus, when Seymour Hersh published an article about the attacks. It was based on a couple of anonymous sources. And it was contradicted by all the open source evidence that I was finding, and I think some of the people who were following me at that point they did see that in that context of ‘old journalism’ versus ‘new journalism’. Because, you know, Hersh’s reputation was basically based on the reliability of his sources. And what that research showed was his sources seemed not to be very reliable. Then, in 2017, he published another article on another chemical attack in Syria, which again was based on a few sources that were anonymous. And that was completely contradicted by all the open source investigation and the OPCW investigation. When you do rely on those anonymous sources… Before, you could always get away with being wrong because there was no other evidence to be put against it, to say, you know, this is the actual videos and photographs of what happened. But now you are in that situation. So as a journalist, if you are relying on those anonymous sources, you need to really trust that what they’re telling you is true. I do think some journalists get into a point in their careers where they just build a network of sources, who they just rely on. And if those sources start turning bad, for whatever reason, then they don’t really question what their source is feeding them. I certainly think, in that kind of Seymour Hersh example I use in the book, that his sources started giving him bad information. I’m sure they are sources he’s trusted and used in the past, who may have been giving him good information — or information he thought was good -, but when that starts happening… When you have that open source evidence to be used as a comparison, it can really undermine your credibility a massive amount. It makes those kind of people look silly, really. Like with Seymour Hersh and this 2017 chemical attack in Syria, what he was publishing was completely absurd to the point even the Russians and the Syrians weren’t even saying the same thing — and what he claimed would have kind of given them a way out. But it just didn’t make any sense. None of the evidence matched what he was saying.
I recently managed to annoy a group of anti-vaxxers (teachers, if you can imagine…) They’re trying to ban me on Facebook, I have a deluge of angry messages. But that’s nothing compared to what the Bellingcat newsroom, the Bellingcat collective may face. You have state actors like Russia targeting you. How do you manage those active threats?
There are various ways… Like the cybersecurity element. One thing we do a lot at Bellingcat is talk about cybersecurity and how to protect ourselves as best we can online. I mean, you can never be 100 percent perfect, but we try and do what we can to prevent any kind of hacking or stuff like that. And we certainly have been targeted in the past by state actors trying to access our emails and do other things to us. That’s happened multiple times over a number of years, really starting from 2015 onwards. Then there’s the kind of the physical security aspect as well, because… It’s not just about the Russian spies coming and poisoning our doorknobs, and stuff like that. It’s also the crazy people on the internet, who you’ve encountered, who decide that you’re ‘the enemy’. And in some of their heads the enemy may need to be destroyed, and it’s hard to know who are the people who are going to turn up at your talks and decide that it’s their chance to take you down, or something like that. So that becomes a lot more worrisome, especially for myself, when I attract so much of that kind of attention. In one sense, the coronavirus has been ‘good’ in the fact that I haven’t had to travel anywhere and worry about that kind of stuff too much. But even then, I mean, there are precautions I still have to take. Like, when I go to a hotel, I won’t eat the food in the hotel. And I don’t like eating at restaurants anymore, because even though the chance is very small… it’s still not zero. When we did the Navalny investigation, first they found Novichok on the water bottles in his hotel room — that put me off having water in hotel rooms. When we discovered it was actually applied to his underpants, it was like… Do we have to start carrying our underpants with us everywhere we go?! (laughs)
From the first pages of the book, you explain that you do believe that people still care about and look for the difference between evidence and falsehoods. Sometimes I let social media depress me into being cynical…
It can sometimes seem something that’s far away, especially when we’re dealing with, you know, anti-vaxxers and those kind of communities. But it’s also been interesting when we’ve kind of been training and get involved with different groups and communities and more and more, especially when we’re dealing with stuff where there can be kind of long term accountability, that is really when facts do matter. I mean, I think sometimes it’s very easy to focus on the kind of social media discourse and on who’s making the most noise about stuff — and actually miss that there’s a lot of stuff that’s being done quietly around issues of accountability that is based on evidence, based of good research and wouldn’t happen if it wasn’t for people spending time on establishing what the facts are around this. And what’s really changed, I think, over the past several years, is how that’s now not just the duty of official investigators working for official bodies, or journalists, or the police. But now there’s a way that, you know, ordinary people can get involved. And I think with Bellingcat we’ve demonstrated very many different ways that you can do that. One thing I’m really hoping that we can do in the future as well is start engaging with younger people and get them to learn how to do this kind of stuff at a younger age. Statistically, what really worries me in the UK they say that now half of 10 year olds have a smartphone, and I wouldn’t want a 10 year old on the internet. My daughter’s 10 years old and I know her friends spent probably too much time on the internet, usually just playing games (laughs). But even then, you are giving them access to basically a system of information that is skewed to providing them with bad information. And we’ve seen recently the leaks from Facebook, where they were saying that if you reply with an angry face 😡 instead of a smiley face 😃 that was weight five more times in whether or not you see it than the other thing. So people are pushed towards content that will make them angry and put them in conflict with other groups of people. And I don’t think that makes for a very healthy society. And I think what we need to do is actually, in fact, show people how you can actually possibly engage with issues, rather than an issue just being some of you get angry about me, find fellow people in the internet who are also angry about same thing, and you get this false sense of kind of power because you’re surrounded by people screaming the same thing as you are at people you don’t like. You can actually do stuff that’s evidence based, that can have an impact, so you can be part of a community, in a network that allows you to actually get that stuff to be actioned. That’s one thing for me that’s really cool of Bellingcat. Aside from the investigation stuff, is the fact that it is about building the community and connecting to people in a range of different fields. And then always seeing how do you connect the person who’s kind of solved an issue here with the person who needs the solution over there. And if you’re doing it as an individual, by yourself, it’s not always obvious. But if you do that as part of a community that’s connected to lots of different people, then those paths start emerging. And I think that’s something that can be very empowering. One thing I’ve been looking at is a possible collaboration with the UK based organisation called the Student View. They focus on media training for 16 to 18 year olds in deprived areas of the UK. And one example they give is a group of 16 to 18 year olds in Bradford who were taught by local journalists how to do Freedom of Information requests and shown that they could get information and why in their streets where they live there were always high speed police chases, because they couldn’t understand why it was happening so much where they live. And they requested the information and they discovered where they lived is one of the highest rates of high speed police chases in all of UK, and that became a local news story. And then a national news story, there were questions asked. So rather than having a question, not being able to find the answer, being frustrated and finding other frustrated people on the internet, they found the solution to that problem. They were connected to journalists. You could take that to the next level with more of an impact. It actually had a positive impact directly to them. And it also means it doesn’t always have to be about chemical weapons, attacks, or assassinations — you know, all this big stuff. It can be about very local issues that affect people directly. And if you can empower people to do that, I think personally them less inclined to then go on the internet and find some big issue that they don’t have any real power or position to change and get angry about that, because in their own world they just feel completely powerless. And I think if you can spread that idea and train more people to do that, as we try to do in a whole range of different ways, I think that could be very positive.
Media outlets started emulating your method of explaining their investigations, how they’ve done it, how they documented it. We need media literacy. And you do invest a lot of energy in your media guides, for example.
The two big media organisations who have taken up open source investigation in their own work have been the BBC and the New York Times. The New York Times digital investigation team that was set by Malachy Browne, who was actually one of the first people in the open source community that emerged in 2011. He was like one of the OGs of open source investigators, along with me (laughs). He then hired a bunch of other people from that same community, and now they’ve got a really good investigation team there. And because they use a lot of video and visual storytelling, that gives them the opportunity to explain, without always jumping into the details of it, at least show how, you know, if a camera’s position there you can see this thing. That kind of level of analysis I think is really interesting for an audience. And now you have more and more documentary series coming out like on Netflix, where they like that kind of long, you know, maybe too long, structure where they explain things step by step. I think open source investigation is really great for that, because you can go through that whole process. And I think there is a desire from people to see that kind of analysis being done, with the evidence. Because people like to see evidence and then see it analysed. Whilst before I think maybe people just wanted to see the end result. But now people, I think, are a bit more into the process. Everyone feels like they can do a bit of armchair, amateur detective work. Watching detective TV shows, we try to figure out what’s going on, but like real.
BBC as well, they have the BBC Africa Eye team, which involved a couple of Bellingcat members. It came out of training I did for the BBC. They did a lot of really successful work looking into issues in Africa, using open source, combined with more traditional, on the ground reporting. They’re now expanding into different parts of the world using the same kind of team. I think there is a growing interest from audiences in seeing that level of detail in it. Because I think it’s not just about the technique itself, but also it’s just a really interesting way to tell the story. It’s more engaging because it has that kind of graphical element to it, that is not kind of tertiary to the story, but actually part of the story. I think it’s a very engaging way to tell stories, and it’s something I’d like to do more at Bellingcat. But with our budget, we don’t really have the money to do it, we don’t have the BBC’s or New York Times’ budget to do that kind of visual stuff. We’ll often do that in partnership with other organisations like, for example, we did a partnership with Forensic Architecture to look into some stuff. When we did our January 6 investigation into the Capitol attack, we worked with NBC and they produced a film. Basically I was looking through thousands of videos and piecing them together. And then they took that to turn into kind of more traditional news storytelling.
A great quote from the book is that ‘social media is now the first draught of his history and everybody there is shouting’. The often toxic environment on social media can be disheartening. But you write that, loud as it may be, the ‘counterfactual community’ is basing its noise on just a few narratives, just a few outlets, a few sources of disinformation, that we can fight and have an impact on the spread of dis-or misinformation.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about more and more as well, especially during the coronavirus kind of disinformation and where that comes from and what is the common factor between the people who are drawn into those kind of communities and the main actors in those communities. Because of the (US) 2016 election, there was so much focus on Russia and outside actors doing stuff to us as a society and as a community. But really, for me, it’s what we do to ourselves as a society through online interaction in social media that is really the key to this. Bad actors are taking advantage of that; not just Russia, we’re seeing political groups in other countries, sometimes in quite powerful positions, who use that kind of activity for their own gain. We’ve certainly seen that happening in the US with the Republican Party and everything around Trump. And I think, to a certain extent, we’ve also seen that in the UK around things like Brexit, for example, and the failed response in the UK to coronavirus, as well. And that’s partly because there’s almost like a client media there; in the US you have Fox News, that pushes the Republican Party line, no matter how insane. And in the UK we have parties that always support the conservative government, even if they’re doing stuff that’s not necessarily a good idea. Often, when you’re dealing with these counterfactual communities, there’s almost this kind of traumatic moral injury that these people have; that sometime in their life they have a source of authority that they feel betrayed them or has turned against their beliefs. And I find, when you come to conflict, things like Syria, for example, that’s often focussed around the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the false information that was powered by the UK and US governments. It had a really big impact on society, in the UK and the West, where that did feel like a massive betrayal. That’s a perfectly legitimate feeling, but some people completely internalise it. It’s almost like a traumatic moment for them; it comes to define the way they view these sources of authority, that ‘you can’t trust them’, that ‘they’re always lying to you’. And when they see something about the conflict in Syria, where there’s talk of chemical weapons, they’re immediately thinking ‘Well, this is just that dodgy dossier all over again’. And then they go on the internet and find like-minded people, and they start blogs and websites and they chat to each other, and these communities form around it. A few years later, if you’re a person who’s thinking ‘Oh, I’m not sure about these chemical weapons attacks in Syria, I’ll google it’, you find these pre-existing communities that already got these very strong views… It’s not even that they’re talking about the chemical attacks, really, it’s about their hate of the Western governments who they think are just repeating what happened in 2003. Everything they can see and perceive is framed around that. So when they look at an organisation like Bellingcat, which is doing work on these chemical attacks and saying that the Syrian government is responsible, they’re like ‘Oh, well, they’re obviously just toeing the government line for access’, or ‘they’ve got people telling them that’, or ‘it’s a CIA operation’. They come up with these theories to explain why the very clear, open source evidence we’re using is fake. It’s that ‘oh, it’s the White Helmets faking this stuff’. They believe in these elaborate fakes around these chemical attacks, which fuel the conspiracy theories. And it’s very easy to look at that and say ‘Well, that’s just silly, isn’t it?’ But you look at, in my experience, the work we’ve done on MH 17, the flat-Earth movements, coronavirus conspiracy theories… At the base of it, there’s always this deep rooted distrust of authority, usually because of these traumatic moments in the individuals’ lives that make up these communities. With the medical community, with those alternative health communities, individuals who are most active there do have often this kind of traumatic kind of moral injury. It comes from doctors and medical professionals, where they may have been let down by a doctor — like a loved one died, or they were told that they wouldn’t get better and they found some ‘alternative’ cure. And then they pre-exist and then coronavirus comes along. The worst elements of those communities are ones that are more prone to conspiracy theories, start promoting these ideas around ivermectin and horse medicines, you know, all this kind of stuff that starts happening. And then you just have the same mechanism happening again. In a way, it’s a form of online radicalisation. There’s been a lot of work done in the past on how Islamists were radicalised to join ISIS in Syria. There are definite parallels between that and the way people get radicalised through these groups, because not every single person who’s worried about vaccines ends up thinking Bill Gates is putting microchips in them. It’s always like a percentage of that group, that then moves on to the next more extreme thing, and eventually they’re blowing up their 5G towers.
You write a lot about the power of the audience.
You can see it in terms of like a war over information. And you have two sides. You have like, say, the counterfactual community; and they have their own kind of engine for generating disinformation, and that might then be used by state actors. But they exist with or without those state actors. I mean, the flat-earthers have been around for a long time, and they didn’t need any state actors to help them with that.
But on the other side, you have people who do push back on them on social media, because they disagree with them. And in a sense, you need to equip those people with the weaponry to fight that war. And that’s good and truthful analysis, stuff that’s transparent. I often observe people taking the articles we’ve written at Bellingcat, where we look at certain things and pick them apart and say ‘this is fake’, ‘this isn’t’, being shared time and time again. Like after the Beirut explosion, there were videos that started circulating, claiming to show evidence of missiles being fired, hitting the target. Various fake, misattributed stuff. There’s one video where someone had added a cartoon missile into a couple of frames. You only really realised it was a cartoon if you stopped the video. It was like a hand-drawn missile, but it’s so quick in the video you wouldn’t notice it. There’s another one where someone had inverted the colours on one of the videos to claim it was like night vision and then photoshopped a missile into that one as well. We quickly got those videos, did a post debunking them. And then, when people were bringing them up, because of that kind of intensity around social media discussion of what was happening, that article we did propagated very quickly. And the community sharing that debunked materials became the white blood cells against disinformation in the bloodstream, against the disinformation virus. And that’s, I think, one of the most effective ways to actually figure out how to fight disinformation. Is looking at the communities that grow around topics. Sometimes it can be instantaneous, like with the Beirut explosion — that was a community of people discussing that topic that just emerged as explosively as the explosion itself, because it was a big incident. It’s the same with MH17. These communities appear within minutes of these events happening, and then they kind of crystallise over time. But if you can get in early enough with those debunks and those communities connect to then propagate it through the community… Because when you have the conspiracy theory, people spreading disinformation on these kinds of incidents like the Beirut explosion, that community spreading the disinformation is also very fragmented. It’s not like people have come together to start the conspiracy communities, it’s individuals who are seeing a video and sharing it. And if you can counter that sharing by showing these debunks, it can actually stop, I think, these communities maybe forming in the first place; because you don’t have people believing it for a long time, then connecting with other people who believe it for a long time. Of course, that doesn’t always work. Often, in things like chemical attacks in Syria and the conflicts in Ukraine and then MH17, there were already two communities kind of battling it out over what was happening. So MH 17 was just another part of that battle. But when it’s something that’s completely fresh, you can actually have that kind of impact on it. But it’s difficult. You’ve got the EU funding disinformation projects, organisations that do put lots of money into countering disinformation. But the problem is… Where they usually fall down, is they aren’t really integrated into the communities that already exist. So they can be putting out all the fact-checks they want. But if only 10 people are reading them, it’s not going to mean anything. I was someone who you could describe as being ‘very online’, I spent a lot of time on social media, building a following, talking to the people who would later on become these kind of white blood cells. There’s a community around Bellingcat. So when we put something out, it propagates through that community. Often, around other disinformation countering projects, you don’t have that community, they just exist on the internet as a separate thing. And does it really have the impact that it needs to have?
Like in your motto — Identify, Verify and then Amplify. You have another great quote: that you cannot ‘fix’ the internet, like you cannot ‘fix’ life, in general; but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. What’s your relationship with the social media giants?
It’s changed over the years. When I was first blogging in 2012, especially in 2013 with the Croatian weapons story, which had a big impact and then raised my profile, that then got me invited to speak at a Google event in New York, and then they got to know me. And they were, like, really big fans of my work. I was using YouTube and Google Earth and all their tools to do these amazing human rights things. And they invited me to have meetings and we had a positive relationship. The problem is, then ISIS started using social media to share all their terrible things. And there was almost moral panic in response of that, in the media. And I think that resulted in a lot of social media companies go ‘Oh God, actually, this could be quite bad’, and then pull back a lot from what they were trying to do. It’s understandable, because, yeah, you need to react to that kind of stuff. But now it’s a bit more difficult to have those kind of conversations, because there are so many more complicated concerns around such evidence and stuff like that. Like with Facebook, because how quickly those videos showing horrible stuff get taken down… That’s the evidence we need to use in our work. There was this Mahmoud al-Werfalli case, in August 2018, when the International Criminal Court put out an arrest warrant for Libyan brigade commander called Mahmoud Al-Werfalli. He had been posting videos on Facebook showing him executing prisoners, which is obviously terrible content. But one of the problems was this content was taken down really quickly. The thing with the ICC is it takes them a long time to actually get to the point where they can investigate stuff. And they can’t collect evidence until they get to that point. In the world of the internet there’s lots of this evidence being shared, but then be taken down very quickly. It’s very hard for them to be in a position where they can start those investigations. And the Al-Werfalli example was actually a kind of a blip where they managed to push through really quickly, so they could grab those videos and do the investigation before it was wiped off the internet. And that proved key to what was happening. I think this is one of the big questions now — how do we respond to the fact that this is important evidence, but it’s been taken down quickly. What we need is for organisations, the kind of first responders almost to this content, like Bellingcat, to learn how to archive this material in a way that makes it useful in the future. One thing we’re trying to do at the moment is develop a system for archiving and investigation, teachable to other organisations who might be these kind of frontline organisations in internet terms, collecting this stuff. And we want to make sure, when they collect it, that 1) it’s collected properly, 2) is accessible in the future. Because it’s one thing to download thousands of videos from the conflicts, it’s another for people to be able to actually find them in the future. When I say people, I mean the likes of the International Criminal Court. If you have 400 organisations who have collected conflict videos from the internet, how do you create a system where one organisation can view all of them all the time? And we do have this. We have a whole system planned for that. I think I’ve mentioned it in the book, but it’s a really big, complicated issue, and I think it’s one that’s really important to answer if we are to use this kind of content seriously in the future. Because I don’t envision Bellingcat as being a huge organisation that’s doing all of this by itself. I see it as being part of a community that we can train to do this themselves. We never know where there might be a conflict in the world. But if we train enough organisations with these skills and these ideas, when stuff starts happening they know that they have what they need to start capturing this information and make it accessible for people in the future.
The ‘Bellingcat concept’, of horizontal collaboration between organisations.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, even within Bellingcat, we’re a very flat organisation, structurally. We have 25 ‘staff’ members now, but it’s not really hierarchical. We have like ‘free’ directors. But that’s just to do all the paperwork. And then we have the investigation team, pretty much below that. And then we have like an accountant and a fundraising team. But everyone has a voice. Everyone can participate in different projects. No one’s the boss of anyone else in that sense. That means there’s a lot of individual responsibility in the team to be part of the team. But I work with people I hope want to be part of Bellingcat and enjoy doing the work.
That then translates into how we see networks of organisations working together. It’s not about us being the ‘king’ of open source investigation (laughs) and telling everyone else what to do. It’s about saying ‘OK, we’re in a position where we can see kind of the problems in the future and actually develop stuff around it; how do you do that so it benefits the entire community’.
Bellingcat is not afraid of being ‘scooped’. You talk about applying a concept of ‘scientific journalism’, applying a sort of scientific method to journalism.
It’s always ties to what we’re trying to do with this project, for this archiving, and investigation thing, because when you’re doing an investigation, you can identify steps that you have to go through to check everything, basically. The old list of the who, the what, the why, that kind of stuff. And that itself can be broken down into more steps. And then you need to kind of think: OK, we also have these tools and technologies; how do we use them in the correct way to make sure there’s integrity to our investigation? Alongside, we have a process. And if you can document that and you can actually make that a repeatable thing, it almost becomes a scientific approach to how you’re actually doing journalism. It always becomes analytical, because in a way that’s what it is. It’s analysing the information that’s out there, in a systematic and consistent fashion. That’s important. Hopefully, it makes for better journalism, this base of better evidence. Bellingcat is a weird hybrid organisation. I would say primarily we’re more an investigative organisation, than a journalistic kind of organisation. You mentioned the amplification stage of our process. That amplification of that verified evidence that we’ve done using this process can be used in a variety of ways. It could be like a more traditional kind of media output, be a podcast or, you know, whatever it may be, or it might be something that ends up in the front of the International Criminal Court. And because you’ve done that process before (and this is something we’ve been testing actually, with mock trials), because you’ve done that process in a consistent way and you’ve done it in a way that works for a court, then it’s a lot easier to actually get that stuff used in a courtroom environment. And that can be very impactful, when it comes to barriers around advocacy as well, because even if it’s not being used in a court, those people who might be interested in using it or are encountering it in areas where there can be actual change effected, be they policymakers or politicians, they can see that the methodology we’ve used in the investigation has been maybe used in a court case on something different. But it’s the same methodology that we’re willing to stand behind, to the point of it being in a courtroom. That’s because we try and base it around this more solid methodology of investigation. And that’s what we want to share with other organisations, as well, because I always think it’s a bit sad when there’s a really great news story and there’s no kind of real follow up. You know, what’s the point for me? For me, it’s like, what’s the point of putting all the effort into investigating something, especially when it’s a war crime or something terrible, if you aren’t going to bother to try and make sure it has the impact it needs to have. And my kind of philosophy is that you can approach problems from multiple different directions at once. It’s like the work we did on the Frontex border pushbacks. We worked with a range of different organisations and that meant, when we came to publish, that it wasn’t just one organisation saying it. It was a whole group of them pushing it from different directions. And I think that’s what happened. What had the impact in the European Parliament, which led to MEPs taking it further than they might have done otherwise, was that it was backed up by solid evidence and transparent investigative methodology. That made it very, very hard for Frontex to wriggle out of the situation, because they were making statements to which we would say ‘No, here’s the video of you doing the thing you said you didn’t do, and here’s how you verify the video’. And that can be very, very powerful.
You promoted geolocation, using open tools, like Google Maps. What’s the new ‘star-app’, the new tools of 2021–2022 that really impress you?
There’s a few. This kind of more and more facial recognition options. They come and go depending on how social media companies are feeling about things. Yandex reverse image search has been an increasingly useful tool in our work, because that will pick up faces in all kinds of materials. That’s actually a really good tool! Also, the accessibility of bots now, especially in Russia. This provides you with information that otherwise only the government would have. It became quite handy for our research. But the thing is… I try not to say one tool is, you know, the real game changer, because it’s really like having a big toolbox. When you see a problem, you say, OK, within my toolbox, which tools can I use to solve the problem? And if that tool doesn’t help me solve it, what’s the next tool along? You look at a problem, you say, Oh, I need satellite imagery for this. There are four satellite imagery providers I can go to to get that imagery. And if they don’t have it on this one, it might be on this next one. And if none of them have it, well, I need to look for some other kind of way to get information from the ground. To use this whole kind of range of tools. There are always tools that are great. Like a few years ago, there was a fantastic tool that would, for free, search for geotagged Instagram posts. We used that to go up and down the Russian border with Ukraine to find soldiers posting selfies from their army camp. Then, because it was geotagged, you could find the exact location of the army camps, even though it wasn’t clear on satellite imagery. That was great, but that tool shut down after about a year and a half. But for that year and a half, it was the most amazing, incredible tool you could use.
There are other tools, like facial recognition sites. PimEyes is one that we’ve been using quite a bit, but they seem to have cut down the capabilities of that. We think they’re doing it so they can sell subscriptions to people for the full capabilities, which is like $300 a year, which makes it a bit less accessible to more people. But on the other hand, as well, now we’ve got the satellite imagery account with Planet Labs, who provide satellite imagery, and they include five satellite tasking for us so we can send satellites where we want to now, if we want, which is obviously fantastic for investigation. There’s always different kind of tools for an investigator. It’s hard to be an open source investigator as a side job. If you’re a journalist with a full time job, you can do the open source investigation course and learn about how it’s done. But unless you’re a practitioner of it every single day, it’s not something where you can just dive in and out of it, because stuff can change so rapidly. That’s why I think the BBC New York Times has been so successful, by having dedicated open source investigation teams, rather than giving it as a side job to someone else, who’s already got plenty to do.
For me, one of the biggest lessons of your book is that your biggest instrument is your audience. Some outlets are scared of their audience, disabling the comments section, and some still have that old mentality of having all the kinds of expertise in their newsroom. But you can’t have a ‘beat’ on every niche subject. So, sometimes, it’s better and more efficient to trust your audience, find the expert voices in your audience, and use them.
Yeah, and sometimes it’s about identifying these communities as well. Like the wikiFeet community. They did a debunk on a photo that was supposedly of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the bath, just her feet, but supposedly she took it in the bath and posted on Instagram. And then it was screenshot and posted on 4chan, but it was a fake screenshot. They just faked the image to post on 4chan and cause some drama, as they do. But the wikiFeet community, which is the community of foot fetish people, they immediately identified the feet as belonging to a model and said ‘No, no, this is completely fake’. But it was their specialised knowledge, as weird as it was, that allowed them to identify, to find the original photograph and say ‘Look, this is a fake’. But that even goes back almost to a kind of pre- or early-internet era. If you look at the story around the CIA rendition flights and how they were identified, back in the 90s, they were identified by plane spotters who were recording all the planes, landing at different airports and then using that network of information to say these certain aircraft are landing at certain places and being able to connect that then to the CIA rendition flights. And that kind of information now is part of internet forums where you have plane spotters, rather than writing it down in their notebooks, they’re now putting on databases alongside all the flight tracking software we have now. So that’s become a really useful resource, especially with private planes or planes that may not fly with their transponders on all time. It’s really about identifying the kind of, I guess, the ‘nerds’ who are already out there, because they’re the geniuses who know every single tiny little thing. When I was doing arms identification, I would find these Russian communities where they would list every single part number, and those part numbers would be stamped onto some wire that would come out of a bomb. That was all that was left of a bomb that was dropped on a Syrian hospital. But because these guys had spent the time writing down every single part number, when he googled what was written on the wire, it would pop up and say that this is a connector from this specific kind of bomb only. And then you’d be able to start to say ‘Oh, well, this indicates that this is likely this bomb was used, because why else would it be there?’ There’s all this knowledge out there. You need to double check stuff, it’s like you can’t just trust Wikipedia, but there’s so much information out there. There’s so many people’s minds you can now look into and connect to those communities as well. Like around MH17, you had the pilots forum discussing all the elements of MH17 from a pilot’s perspective. And those discussions were things that I would read through and see what they were thinking of. And then that would help inform my own understanding of certain elements of the story that may not have been clear.
And then you have other parts of the engagement where you have some little communities that will appear online, suddenly, like when Russia started bombing Syria in 2015. They put all the gun camera videos on their YouTube channel saying ‘We’re bombing ISIS position 20 kilometres outside of this town’. But this group of like three or four people, who were interested in the conflict, were following Syria, started geolocating every single one of those videos by comparing it to satellite imagery. And it would always turn out that it wasn’t where the Russians were claiming it was. I saw them doing that and then I said why don’t we just get a spreadsheet, lists all the videos, and, as you’re going through, we can put your results into the spreadsheet and figure out what pattern it is here. Out of the first, like 30 videos, only one of them actually was correct in where it was describing. Some of the videos showed the same place being bombed more than once, but claimed different locations each time. It wouldn’t have been noticed if it wasn’t for this very small group of people taking the time to actually look into this and then for us to take that and amplifying it again in a way that more people could look at. And as a result, Russia started posting less videos and claiming much more vague things, like ‘somewhere in Syria we’re bombing terrorists’, rather than it being ‘this is ISIS 10 km outside this town’. It showed again that Russia had been lying about where they were bombing in Syria and that ‘they were only bombing ISIS’. That was just down to a bunch of a few people coming together on the internet and deciding to take the time to look at this stuff. And if you can harness that, you can actually have a real impact, I think, on the people’s perception of what’s happening in the world.
What’s the future for Bellingcat?
Well, one thing I’m going to be working on at the moment is we just set up a production company. We’ve had a couple of series of the Bellingcat podcast where we’ve looked at MH17 and these executions in Cameroon. That went down really well. And now we’re seeking longer term financing to have a more constant stream of podcasts coming out to that same high quality, but on more subjects. Because we do loads of research and I think there’s a lot that deserves, you know, an interesting podcast. We’re going to also start producing documentary TV series and films as well. We’ve got some stuff in the pipeline already. It’s still early days, so it won’t be coming out ‘next week’. Like I said before, there’s so much interest from Netflix in these long documentaries and with lots of details. And that’s exactly what we’ve got, lots of investigations with lots of details. So we’re hoping to start having those coming out hopefully next year, if not the following year. That’s exciting. I’m focussing on that.
We’re expanding, looking into some new areas of research. We’ve been doing some work on conservation related issues recently. We’re working with a group called CLIP in Latin America, which is a group of journalists from different countries, and they’re very interested in looking at things related to deforestation and the impact on the Amazon, and those kind of issues, and using open source analysis skills to do that. We’re training them how to do that themselves, because we’re more interested in training other organisations to do stuff, then like dropping in and doing it ourselves, because then they can do kind lots of fun stuff with that.
We continue to expand and fundraise. We’ve been recently declared a ‘foreign agent’ by Russia, so we’re looking at what an appropriate response to that will be. Because that is becoming a real problem… I mean, it’s quite a chilling effect it can have because ‘foreign agent’ is one thing for us, it doesn’t really have an impact on us. But if they escalate it to us being an undesirable organisation, even though we don’t have any presence in Russia and, really, this law shouldn’t apply to us, the way it’s worded in Russia it can be applied to anyone. And we think that isn’t something that should be, technically, legal internationally. So we’re looking at the European Court of Human Rights and other options to campaign around that. And also support Russian organisations that already find themselves in a position of being targeted like this. Because it’s purely an attempt to stifle freedom of speech and censor organisations. And I don’t think the international community should stand for that. The fact they’ve now gone after us, an organisation that does not have a presence in Russia and our main crime is publishing articles about Russia, is a clear indication that if they can do it to us, they can do it to any organisation they want — unless someone stands up against it. I think that’s going to be taking up a lot of 2022 for me (laughs).
We’ve got a bunch more stuff to publish. We’ve still got quite literally a backlog of assassinations you’ve got to work through. There’s just so many of them, and they’re intense investigations. We’ve got plenty to do for the next year, that’s for sure.
This interview is for a book blog. So I must ask what you’re reading? What do you recommend us?
Actually, I can show you what I got. This one is an important one for me, Investigative Aesthetics. We’ve worked with the authors, at a place called Forensics Architecture, based at Goldsmiths University. And they basically use architectural ideas and concepts to reconstruct events in 3D models. When we investigated the bombing of a mosque by U.S. forces in Syria, we collected video footage, photographs, witness statements and used that to build a 3D model of the mosque, which the Americans claimed was an Al Qaeda meeting hall. And we reconstructed it to prove that this building that they destroyed was definitely a mosque. They used 3D models to map the photographs and videos across it to show where they all kind of appeared in time and space.
I don’t know if you know about the Grenfell Tower fire. They used footage of the fire and loads of information to reconstruct the entire building and the timeline of events mapped onto the building as it was burning, and also spoke to people who lived there and recreated the interior of the building based on their statements and what their homes look like. Through this 3D model, they went through and reconstructed the events. It allowed them to jog their memory about different things.
There’s another one they did, which is fantastic, where they went to Hebron and they took a photogrammetry model of the street on Hebron, where there’d been a number of incidents. It’s a perfect virtual reality 3D reconstruction of this street with photographic, realistic imagery. And then they would talk to the soldiers who were there, and Palestinians who are there, about the incidents, and they’d let them go into VR and be in the location, without actually being the location. When they were recalling the events of what were happening, some people realised that what they thought they’d seen they couldn’t possibly have seen. Their memory of the event had been altered because of what they had heard from other people, and they kind of had integrated it, as people do, because memories are unreliable. But then you could also see the soldiers were saying ‘we were here’, ‘we were shooting in this direction’. And then, because they were allowed to almost revisit that moment in this model, with all the different people’s kind of memories, they can actually get a much more accurate representation of what’s happening.
That, I think, will have a lot of impact, both on how stuff is reported, investigated, but maybe, in the future, how evidence is presented in court. Because if you can recreate a scene of a crime scene as a 3D photorealistic model and then have the witnesses walk through that, that is a really powerful way of describing very complicated incidents in places that aren’t necessarily accessible anymore.
You seem even more excited, even more determined now than when you started out, in your ‘Brown Moses’ days.
It’s exciting because there are so many more options now, so much opportunity. We’re kind of overwhelmed with the amount of things we could be doing. And sometimes that’s quite sad, because, you know, when it comes to war crimes and conflicts, there’s a lot of recognition of Bellingcat’s work and the usefulness of it. But we’re a small organisation and we can’t do everything ourselves. We can at least train other organisations who are working on these issues to address those. And of course, being able to turn this work into documentaries, for example, and reach new audiences, that’s also very exciting, because, again, for us the audience doesn’t just mean passive receivers of information — they can be active participants. So the more people are engaged, I think the better it is for the whole community.
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