HIGHLIGHTS: Eliot Higgins

0:00Hi everybody, tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi everyone, I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund. And today we have a very special episode. We are recording in front of a live audience of nearly 200 people. These are my colleagues at the Sovereign Wealth Fund. And we are joined by the very impressive Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, the world's leading open source investigative collective. Now, Elliot is not a spy, not a trained journalist. He's actually a college dropout who taught himself to investigate war crimes from his kitchen table in Leicester.

0:43He's unmasked Russian assassins, exposed chemical weapons used in Syria, helped identify Navalny's poisoner. And I've been really looking forward to this, Elliot. Warm welcome. Thanks for having me on. So just to start, what is Bellingcat? So Bellingcat does something called open source investigation. So that's using publicly available material to investigate a range of different topics. And really over the last 15 years, what is publicly available material has just mushroomed to just a huge extent. It's stuff like social media posts, satellite imagery available through things like Google Maps or other services, all kinds of things like marine traffic data or air flight data that's also publicly available.

1:25So we take all that data and then we investigate different things. And that's included chemical weapons attacks in Syria, the downing of Malaysian airlines like MH17. More recently, a lot to do with America's bombing of Iran, ICE and DHS raids in the US as well. Let's just start with the beginning. 2012, you're sitting at your kitchen table and you're looking at YouTube clips from the Syrian war. What did you see? Yeah, so I would really like to say I had the kind of noble intention. First of all, why were you looking at YouTube clips from the zero-and-one? Well, this is the thing. I wish I could say I had this noble intention to become a great human rights or journalist.

2:02No, I was arguing with people on the internet, and I wanted to win the arguments. And there were all these videos coming from places like Libya and Syria. And really, in those kind of online communities, they were just being used as sticks to beat each over their heads with. They weren't fact-checking them. They were just saying, oh, this proves that I'm right and you're wrong. But I just wanted to know what was going on in these places. So I realized you could use satellite imagery to figure out where stuff was filmed. And we call this geolocation. It's a core skill now. But at that point, it was just me winning arguments on the internet.

2:32But I just really thought, well, this is kind of deepening my understanding of what's actually happening in these conflicts. And I started posting about it on Twitter and then doing a blog. So I had more places to write with no intention of anyone ever taking me that seriously. But eventually they did. But what did you see? So in Syria, I didn't speak any Arabic. So I was really looking at the content of the videos. And a lot of it showed unexploded munitions, eventually the aftermath of chemical weapon attacks. And I systematically tracked all the videos coming out of Syria, because they basically use YouTube as their main distribution platform.

3:11And those channels are usually run by media centers or armed groups. So you could actually have a catalogue of all these channels and check them every single day. And no one else had figured out you could do that. So every day I would just go through hundreds of videos from Syria looking for stuff that was new or unusual, really focusing on IDing weapons in particular. The difference between now and 2012 in terms of what's available online, in terms of material, what's the magnitude of change? Well, I think one real change is the access we now have to satellite imagery. So back in 2012, you were very reliant on things like Google Earth and Google Maps.

3:50Now for a monthly fee, we use Planet Labs, where we can not only get daily imagery of various sites, but we can actually task satellites to specific locations. So it's all very James Bond, but if there's this area we're interested in, we can put in a tasking request and get satellite imagery of that in the next few days, which for our kind of work, when you're trying to vary stuff as quickly as possible, is incredibly useful. each kind of conflict or situation has a kind of different kind of characteristics around how social media is used. So with Syria, you know, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube were where most stuff was being posted.

4:27With the conflicts in Ukraine, especially since 2022, Telegram was the kind of big website. It constantly changes. If you're looking into criminal activity, you might find a lot on TikTok, for example. There's lots of people who do crimes and post them on TikTok and then do that for months and months and months until someone like us comes across it and unpicks the whole thing. So, yeah, it's more you constantly have to learn. You have to see how different situations evolve, how technology is being used and look for opportunities. And, you know, there are like with Iran, the Internet was shut down there for a very long time in the early parts of the current conflict.

5:04and that meant we had to use other techniques to analyze satellite data, for example, because there was no satellite data either. So we used a system that uses infrared satellite imagery and compares the differences to them using a very complex program I can't possibly explain. But that allows us to see a kind of heat map of where damage is occurring across Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East at a time when there was no visual satellite imagery of that kind of stuff. What's the weirdest source of data you've used ever? This wasn't one of our investigations, but I think it definitely ticks the weird box.

5:41So several years ago, there was an Instagram post that was being shared on social media. It had been copied and pasted. And it was supposedly from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's social media account. And it showed a pair of women's legs in the bath. It's like a saucy photo. Now, very quickly, the Wikifeet community, which is the foot fetish community who rakes people's feet, immediately said, that's not her feet. We know what her feet look like. It's actually this person's feet. And they found the original photograph of it. But, you know, in all of this work, I mean, if you go back to, you know, the rendition flights that were happening in the early 2000s, it was plane spotters who found that network.

6:25So people with really, really specific interests and hobbies can actually be a really useful source of information. You just have to kind of know what kind of people out there and how to interact with them safely, I guess. So nerds are good? Nerds and perverts, yes. How much more are governments lying now compared to 10 years ago? I mean, it depends on the government, I think. I didn't want to be specific. Certain governments that are kind of to the west of this country, they are lying. The thing is, it's kind of authoritarian capture, ultimately, because then it becomes about loyalty tests. It doesn't come about the truth.

7:06It becomes about how you demonstrate your loyalty to the in-group and then how you can define the out-group by their refusal to toe the line. So this is really what we're seeing in the US, this authoritarian capture of various institutions, the presidency, the kind of bending of the knee of various organizations where the truth is no longer important. It's all about those loyalty tests. How do you think this will develop? So a lot of my work at the moment looks at issues around disinformation and democratic theory and kind of how we've got to where we are at the moment. I think the one thing that really worries me about that work, and I've spent a long time doing this, is that the way we've kind of set up our society and information system now has changed completely.

7:54We've gone from this information system that was top-down, elite-controlled, and also normalized because of that. We had institutions, the media, who, you know, they kind of controlled the flow of information to the public to a large extent. And the public were recipients of information. And in that relationship, the public had to trust those institutions to produce verifiable information, that they could be deliberated on it procedurally through courts, through parliaments, and then people would be held to account for wrongdoing. And that was the public, the kind of social contract we had with those institutions.

8:28That's now collapsed into a peer-to-peer, many-to-many information system where institutions are competing for attention with the public in systems that rewards engagement over the truth. And those platforms like X, for example, that monetize their social media process rewards basically engagement more than anything. So what that leads to is a system where populist authoritarian and conspiratorial ideas perform really well because they don't need the procedural certainty behind it. You just say, this is true. And people nod their head because they're prepared to believe that in a way. An old click-based behavior.

9:07Yeah, it's just all about what engages people rather than what's truthful. And we see this often around conflicts where there's a lot of public engagement. You know, the situation in Gaza produced a lot of fake information because people just wanted to get the clicks and monetize the engagement that they were getting on platforms like X. What are the personal costs to you as a person? I mean, not monetary, but just as a human being. There is the security aspects of it because there's certain places I won't travel to at the moment. Obviously, Russia's off the table forever. I would have thought so.

9:41But I can't travel to the US at the moment because there's this conspiracy theory called the censorship industrial complex, which presents the idea that the Biden administration and academics and journalists basically colluded to do various things. And Balingcat kind of got tied up in that. Just weird kind of had nothing to do with it. But people don't like Balingcat in certain communities. So we got kind of named with everyone else. And there's people in the State Department who've been looking up communications between myself, Balingat, and the State Department to prove their case. But they don't exist.

10:17So that just makes them think there's a big cover-up around this stuff now. Elon Musk called us a psyop. So we know this. Yeah, the US administration definitely knows who we are. And we've been very critical of them, published embarrassing investigations. and I don't want to take the risk of turning up at an airport in America and then being off to a nice detention center for some reason. So you basically have to stay in Leicester. Well, I can travel a bit outside of it if I'm lucky, but yeah.