Fake News: How We Can Save Ourselves From Disinformation (Eliot Higgins)

32:06It's about building networks. It's not about deciding what the new institutional gatekeeper is going to be. It's building up from the grassroots and looking for those opportunities. and I think without that we will be faced with a major problem of trust in institutions that's only going to get worse and we will see the rise of more kind of Trump-like figures across Europe and the rest of the world

32:31I really hope you're enjoying this conversation with Elliot Higgins the founder of this remarkable network institution whatever you want to call it called Bellingcat reinventing journalism and really annoying lots of governments all around the world if you are enjoying this conversation please do us a favour, just subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds and that way you won't miss future episodes. And if you do subscribe, just make sure you've got your push notifications turned on and that way you will get an alert every time we publish a new episode and you will never miss out. Thank you. And now back to Elliot Higgins.

33:07If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

33:48We talked about verification, VDA, verification, deliberation, and accountability as being three sort of pillars of democracy. Can we just go through what you have seen since you set up Bellingcat, what, 12 years ago now? Yeah. What have you seen about the impact of the internet, which has changed a lot in that time in social media, on those three things? So what has the internet done and what could it do for verification? well i think the issue that we have now as i said before is we are all responsible for verifying the information that we see and choose to share so verification has been individualized rather so it's gone the pattern it's gone from institutions to individuals yeah and that we're all these points of distribution now that we're not just sharing information we're feeding an algorithm that kind of draws people even more deeply into these systems and the problem is if we're just sharing stuff that's emotionally engaging then they're going to be seeing stuff that's emotionally engaging rather than true as well i i don't think there's ever going to be a pure version of the internet where everyone's fact checking everything they see i think i agree with you on that but if we can just review reduce some of that harm it would be useful what i want to avoid as well is where we have we have to resort to censorship or control as much as possible but that means individuals have to have a responsibility to the community that they're part of on these platforms what has the internet done and what could it do for deliberation the idea of a public space civilized conversation well um i like to think balancat is a way to kind of demonstrate how that can be done that we do open source investigation where you know there's a verification part of that but the evidence we use is open and public and we explain the methodologies that we use and that means anyone can come along and become part of the kind of investigation the conversation around that we've built spaces like we have a discord server with about 40 000 members where we have those discussions around these things and from that emerges these investigations and i think that also feeds into the accountability aspect i mean i realized doing the work i'm doing that really bellingcat is a functional counter public because it does those three functions of verification deliberation and accountability and i i was almost surprised when i realized that because i hadn't really ever thought of it in those terms but i saw how it fit those three functions really well and that accountability part is something that i find almost the most exciting part of that like the work we've done have been it's been used in multiple um trials we've developed methods that other organizations can use to investigate open source information for legal accountability so across those three areas i think bellingcat has demonstrated what you can do with the internet words i always wanted to say on this podcast and it is what is a discord server okay a discord server um it was originally um basically like a chat server it was popular for gaming um but we set one up it's open to the public where anyone can come join one of many discussion channels about different topics and help with investigations and we do have stuff that emerges from there that are topics that i don't think would have been investigative otherwise so one was an oil spill off the coast of trinidad and tobago that our community came together and they just started looking for things like marine traffic websites satellite imagery to figure out which boat was responsible for it and they figured that out and that led to uh not only publication on the bellingcat website but more reporting both through bellingcat and locally um we were able to identify the vessel involved track it back to its port of origin and then where it was being hidden at the moment and we had the UN Marine Insurance Agency come in and ask us for information on it because they didn't have that information and that all came from that community and I want more opportunities for that to happen in different communities.

37:34So we've talked somewhat tangentially about the work of Bellingcat I think that's a perfect illustration of the sort of work you're doing it allows us to help our listeners understand this new world of journalism so with that there's what happens a pop-up alert on the news uh bbc news website or wherever big oil spill off trinidad you said it was at what point does it become something that bellingcat is going to give attention to does someone pop up in your chat room and say guys let's get into this well it's more that someone will say oh there's been this oil spill just one of the random users on the channel and then someone will pop in and say oh i let's look at marine traffic which is a website that tracks marine traffic and a few of them will go off and they'll start looking for it and one of them will come back and be like is this it and they'll discuss it and then they'll figure out you know a likely candidate for it then they can come to us at balancat and ask us to get a satellite image of that area because we have subscription to those services and then that shows say a vessel you know only tiny on a satellite image but in the place where we think it could be and um because they've seen us do this kind of work in the past they know our methodology so then they start applying it themselves without us having to be directly interacting with them all the time on that but we can watch that unfold give some hints point them in the right direction you're almost mentoring them you're almost like a in old school journalistic terms you're almost like a news editor helping a reporter kind of get to the story yeah it's like we don't want to do the work for them because once they learn how to do it themselves there's one more investigating this community of investigators there's more chance of something being checked and proven to be true or false and for accountability to happen if you have more people doing it so how on that particular example how did you go from a vessel which popped up tiny as it was on satellite that could be in the sort of right area at the right time around the time of the spill to identifying the vessel so you can track them back through um they have transponders on some of the time but often when they're smuggling they'll turn it off and go dark but if you have satellite imagery of the same area you can see kind of the vessel and then with its transponder off but then you can see it over a period of time as it's moving in a certain direction and then pick up again when it turns its transponder back on so using the satellite images to track it until it becomes it turns on the transponder where you can again cross-reference the transponder position with the satellite imagery position and then um yeah just track it that way do you need specialist technical knowledge to do this work not like loads i mean it's being made pretty easy so um for example marine traffic that's literally log onto the website go to the location and you see like a little tag for the boat you click on it it pops up all the boats details often with a photograph of the boat as well um and with that we're able to track it across the world because once they got caught with the oil spill they tried to hide the vessel but we could also track the vessel as it was on its little escape route so that's one example can you take us through the script our case which is a very different one where you also found some remarkable revelations for people that don't I know the Skripal case was a poisoning in the UK and the government quite quickly, I think, put out the faces and names attached of two suspects.

40:44I think it was that was a launch pad, as it were, for Bellingcat and for what you did. How did you approach that case? So at the time, we couldn't really do much with the two identities. But then a few days later, there was a Russian news outlet that published a plane manifest of every passenger on that plane. their passports and that's when we discovered with a lot of other people that the passports were about three digits apart and that immediately was suspicious. One of our colleagues had experience in the past with what's called the Provid market in Russia which is basically the black market for data.

41:20Russia is a police state but it's also a corrupt police state so all that stuff gets sold on the black market. You can go to like online forums of someone who knows someone who has access to a police database. And it's been used in the past by Russians to check on cheating partners by getting their phone records and that kind of stuff. So my colleagues thought, well, you can order passport registration documents and surely they haven't been dumb enough to stamp secret service on it or something as dumb as that. So we'll order them and just see if we're lucky. And it was like 20 euros. So Christo used his money.

41:54Christo Grozev, we'll come to it. He was your Russian editor for a while. he was led your investigations there yeah so he was doing he was kind of paying for all of this and it was like his hobby at that point in time actually it was before he started working for us so he get these forms back and they literally have the um phone number of the russian ministry of defense switchboard stamped on the front of it saying if like if you see this call this number and he googled the number and it was there on the website he thought these are definitely not ordinary gentlemen so um we started then looking through all these databases um from like car registration house registration databases that again were all available kind of online and um we discovered they appeared from nowhere in moscow uh between two databases it's like they didn't exist in one database and then they appeared in the other database the following year we're able to track um basically they they use the same way of basically faking their um identity they always use their real first name and their real date of birth and their real place of birth.

42:56And because we had access to these databases, we just searched for everyone with those matching details and then looked into, it would be like 10 or 11 people, and then looked into them individually to identify them. And usually it was the one who was missing, who was the suspect we were looking into. And then we just found all these just connections. And we even had phone records where they were calling up the head of a secret chemical weapons lab in Russia who was making all of this poison in the first place. So is that the same character that appears in this documentary that I want to talk about called Kill List?

43:29Yeah. Okay, so this is an absolutely extraordinary documentary. And in a spirit of full disclosure, let me say the director and producer is someone who's a mate of mine, a guy called James Jones. He's done a film which is out on Channel 4 called Kill List. It's available on Channel 4's digital service. All around the world in cinemas, I think it will go out as a film called Antidote. And he basically follows Christo Grozif around. Who is Christo Grozif? So he started working for Bellingcat as a volunteer probably about 2017. He comes from a background of radio. He's Bulgarian. But he's already had, I think he's got the heart of an investigative journalist even though he worked in kind of radio as a producer.

44:07So he really got into looking into these various Russian spy stories that we'd hear in Bulgaria. And that led him to developing a series of kind of processes of using this kind of provid data from the Russian black markets to basically use their own police state against them to investigate poisonings of Alexei Navalny and several other people as well. And so, for instance, to take the Navalny story, he was able to identify what? He was able to basically identify Navalny and others had been poisoned by a chemical agent, which you were able, through a whistleblower, I think, to identify where that agent had come from, beyond any doubt.

44:45Yeah, so first we were able to, it actually started with the chemical weapons scientists I mentioned before, because when the poisoning happened, Christo ordered that guy's phone records and checked who he'd been speaking to around the time of the poisoning. And from that, we were able to identify several of the numbers belonging to FSB agents. How were you able to get the numbers of FSB agents? So it's stupid, actually. So you have these apps like Get Contact, which is you get a phone number, pull it in, and it will search various databases. Like, you know, when you have these phone apps that pop up with names, that's all stored in a central database.

45:22And some of these databases have been leaked. So these phone lookup apps will look up the numbers and then say, you'll see it's like, oh, Eagle FSB will be the name someone's put in with it. Because they don't think someone else is going to see it. They just think this is for my notes. like we've literally seen like the one person's name and which military unit they're in which intelligence unit they're in next to the number you can go on skype for example it unfortunately it's been shut down now but you could type in a phone number and sometimes pop up if they had a skype account with the person's first name and second right yes yes so all these little techniques can be used to identify and generally you would find in any of these spies um top three calls were always going to be the mother-wife-girlfriend in that order.

46:06And the fourth one was the boss. So it was always that time and time again. But from that, you can piece together the kind of sequence of phone calls between different people. And these phone records have the cell phone towers they're connected to. So you can actually see where they were moving, and we can actually track them to where Navani was staying in this hotel. and what we identified this group of people and um we we thought we were trying to call them up with navani and we had a uh someone uh filming all of this and we thought there's no way they're gonna like confess to everything they've done in a huge amount of detail and the first couple of phone calls navani called them up and said hi i'm alexi navani why did you poison me they hung up And then he said, we're going to try a different trick.

46:56And they had a phone ID spoofer, which they set to the office of the FSB. So when the guy got a call, it looked like it was coming from the FSB. He picked up and Navani pretended to be a superior officer demanding a full rundown of exactly what happened for a report that he was writing. And this guy spent about 56 minutes on the phone detailing every single step of the operation, confirming names of people we were working with, like the whole thing. in detail and it's it's in the film it's really extraordinary but there are people who still like deny any of this is true they say oh that's just an actor you've hired to do that and it's just incredible we i was on the phone like on signal getting messages back and forth from christo saying we've got someone on the phone talking i thought he was oh he must be talking to someone who's not navani pretending to be like or an fsv officer but it's navani himself i was blown away One of the things that the documentary gets into in brutal detail is that there is a very big personal cost for people like Christo.

47:57He lived in Vienna for a very long time. He then moved to America. He was separated from his wife and his father was killed. And I think one of the powerful points in the film is that taking on Putin's Kremlin using the Bellingcat methods comes at a tremendous cost personally and for people's families. um often people go into hiding um do you as a conventional journalistic organization would do you feel this profound moral and legal duty of care and what do you do to look after the the brave investigators who are finding out these things yeah it's something um we've really approached in a number of different ways there's um kind of the sense of physical security like what can we do to protect people um we have a responsibility to all our staff so for example when we're arranging events and meetings with our staff we're very careful about you know what details are how it's shared even with the venue itself so it's harder for that to be tracked down like travel we have you know if we travel to another country we fill the security forms to make sure that everything's covered on that side there's psychological risks as well i mean it's very stressful not just to be the subject of you know the focus of this but even people around that start worrying about themselves also the exposure to kind of violent or traumatic material we have to make sure there's psychological support for that as well and be very open and transparent about that being important rather than you know as some organizations have done in the past say you know tough it out we're like no this is serious stuff that you need to be able to have a space to deal with but where is the distinction that you drew between bellingcat which is a sort of your node uh which creates a sort of a network within broader networks that's different to a traditional institution which has a kind of editor-in-chief and then sort of managing editor type of thing so where how do you see yourself in this are you sort of the leader you're the boss you're the founder obviously um but how do you see yourself do you think of yourself as a editor as an advocate as a democrat what is Elliot Higgins well in terms of my relationship to Ballingcat we have a executive team that shares basically the power we don't have a chief executive we kind of share power we've always had a very flat structure because we are very collaborative in the nature of the work we do um my role is really about looking about how how do you build those collaborations how do you look for those opportunities how do you think about the way um you know just the way we distribute our stories are changing you know it is a constantly changing world a constantly changing system and you've got to think about how you stay on top of that and one thing we've been doing for example is focusing more on partnerships where we rather than trying to build our own audience around a new topic, we can still publish our work, but then we find partners who have that audience and they can present our work and their work together in the way that works for their audience and for them.

50:51How many people work for Bellingcat? It's roughly 40 at the moment. 40, but then you've also got this Discord server and the people who jump on a new story about Trinidad. So you've got a kind of core of 40 and then you've got thousands of volunteers around the world presumably people who you have to check out to make sure they that you've also not been infiltrated by the fsb there's kind of two levels to that we have um one trained volunteer community where we have that kind of higher level of checking because they have access to stuff that is in progress and we don't want them releasing stuff that's harmful or untrue so we need to make sure they're sensible people and not spies um but on our larger discourse server it's in a way easy to police that because if people come in and start sharing false information it's going to be open source and it can be checked and people can be called out for it and if someone gets a reputation for that people aren't going to listen to them so if they're an fsb officer or just someone bad at geolocation it's in a way the same result at the end of it the kremlin says that you're a spy that you're an agent of the british deep state and that you're doing the work of foreign intelligence agencies basically for governments to undermine or to undermine Russia, but to advance their state ambitions.

52:04So are you a spy? I'm not a spy. Definitely? Definitely not a spy. Where do you get your money from? We get it from various foundations, donors. We have a Patreon account if anyone wants to donate there. So various options. Aren't you part of a conspiracy by people, cranks, conspiracy theorists, theorists, all sorts, to try to undermine the sovereign will of a democratic country such as Russia? I would say I'm trying to do the opposite. I'm trying to make sure that the will of the people is recognised within not just Russia, but also the countries it chooses to invade. Good. Now we've got it out of the way.

52:42Would it be true to say that other than the specific stories and cases and remarkable kind of investigations you've conducted, you've gone on a bit of a sort of journey yourself over the past 12 years about what you think a the crisis is the crisis in democracy the crisis is in in terms of trust in public institutions but also you've gone from pure kind of journalism to something broader advocacy and education do you feel like you've been sort of dare I say radicalized by what you've seen because you think that the internet and the era of disinformation we're living in is causing very big problems to which you can be part of the solution.

53:18Yeah, I think it's partly driven by open source for me being something that is so useful and so empowering that I've seen that in my own life. And I think I come from a fairly ordinary background, really, compared to many people. I mean, I'm working in finance and admin at quite a low level. I should just say, you grew up all over the place, didn't you? And your dad was in the Royal Air Force. Yeah, that's right. So I've lived all over England. Further evidence that you're working for the British state. but i think it can be so empowering for everyone not everyone has to become an investigator who spends 18 hours a day on the internet doing this stuff like i do you can um just like contribute a little bit that's what i love about the discord server that people can just pop in and say oh i can i know this little trick i can do to figure this thing out and then everyone else in that community benefits from it it's the idea that we can all work together on issues that we actually care about and have an impact from that but i don't want to just say it i want to put in those systems those um places where that can happen because if you're just saying that you want that to happen then you aren't making it happen and you're doing it in fairness so i mean before we get on to what open source investigation can do for democracy which i think we've sort of outlined what do you think open source investigation can do for journalism at a time when journalism itself is undergoing various crises, a crisis of editorial confidence, a crisis of trust, and a commercial crisis as well in many places?

54:43Well, I think there's just the practical application of open source investigation in their work. And we've seen that more and more since 2022 with the invasion of Ukraine. The BBC RFI is doing that. The New York Times is a really good division investigation team who does that. Lots more US outlets are doing that kind of work. So that's something that I think is useful for the larger media organizations. But for smaller media organizations, it's tougher because they can't really have someone working on that all the time. So there, I think collaboration and partnerships with those hubs that we're setting up with universities, with Bellingcat, to do those investigations rather than having to have that internal skill set that is costly and especially for local media, something they may not be able to afford.

55:27I think that makes collaboration a really, really important part of this. And open source evidence is a good way to collaborate because you're all sharing the same thing. You're seeing the same stuff. You don't have a secret source you can't share with the rest of the people in your collaboration. So I think that's another way that open source, I think, is actually really useful for democracy because it is empowering in that way. You talked about local media. I mean, you mentioned when you discussed local media, I have this very romantic conception of local media, people cycling around maybe in Leicester or wherever you were growing up, people sort of throwing a paper onto people's front lawns, as you often see in American films from the 1980s.

56:03The reason local media has died is because local newspapers are not as convenient as Facebook. And, you know, for all that, and, you know, a lot which is precious has been lost. Local court reporting, a sense of community, accountability of local councils who spend huge amounts of money. I mean, in real practical terms, Isn't it the case that if you want a thriving local media, people have to pay for it? Yeah, absolutely. One of the proposals in the House of Lords report actually was for there to be attacks on social media companies to help support local public interest media. Whether or not they'll actually do that, I think it might be more down to how angry Donald Trump gets about it.

56:40That's one of those ideas I heard about eight years ago. I think that Frances Cancross, the great Frances Cancross, did a Cancross review where that was one of the things she might have mooted or treating journalism like a utility. Not much seems to happen in these... Yeah, this is a problem. I don't think there's the vision anywhere in government to actually make this stuff happen. It's kind of, let's just toddle along and hope we don't have another crisis in the next four years. Yeah, I mean, so if you were to work out how open source investigations could actually help with local media, you would need local media to have a functioning business model, perhaps through Substack, could be through podcasts, it could be through corporate partnerships, whatever, some sort of income revenue stream, ideally from a paying audience.

57:17And then open source investigation would allow them to just do really good stuff, for instance, on local councils, and you want to partner with them on that. Yeah, and I think as well it would allow, for me, it's like looking at universities, is how do we stop them becoming just diploma factories and turn them into something that actually serves a public good? And I think this is an opportunity to do that and also equip students with really useful skills and connections that they can carry forward with them, but also understand what it means to be part of a local community. that is something i think we've really lost because these spaces have gone away that we've become more individuals who are online finding people who agree with us on the internet no matter where they're from and that becomes our community there's something interesting about how you're you're someone who as you say sometimes spends 18 hours a day uh kind of obsessively pursuing detail around you know bits of information for places about places and events far away and yet what you're really here advocating is create a sense of participation and activity in the offline world yeah you're someone who wants people to spend almost not less time on the internet but you think the internet should be an agent to help us have more fulfilling lives away from the internet yeah absolutely it's like how can we spend time on the internet that actually adds something to the community in a way that we actually want to do i'm not like saying everyone has to become a fact checker now whether you like it or not that's a terrible way forwards but we have to create the opportunities and the spaces for people who want to do this stuff and we've been doing that fairly well with bellingcat but that has very much relied on the online platforms to be the medium of that now we're doing work with universities that's been really really satisfying because actually seeing people working together in those spaces creating a hub for people from a range of different disciplines you know from kind of more uh kind of conflict focused stuff all the way through kind of art and design bringing those together to think about these problems in new ways for me is really exciting to see but in this context i've got to ask you finally how concerned you are about the dangers as well as all the excited possibilities of artificial intelligence because if you're worried about information and bad information ai can put that stuff on steroids can't it my fear has been more that it will actually result in people disengaging more because they're saying well i don't know what's true anymore it's like even now i quit posting on x but i still have my account open and when i go through the for you feed and it's becoming more increasingly sexist and racist as the time goes on but it's also increasingly clearly more ai generated content in there so it gets to the point where i just like i can't even though i'm looking at this stuff i can't believe any of it anymore and if that starts spreading then people just lose trust in the information they're receiving and then when do where do they go it's kind of like this thing with epstein at the moment you've got all these epstein truthers who voted for donald trump and now they're seeing the reality of the world Where do they go when they got what they wanted?

1:00:02They got the power and it was just taken away from them. So where do they go? So that's, for me, the question of where do people go when they have their trust betrayed? You've sounded the alarm in this conversation about democracy. What gives you hope? Well, there are good people who are working on solutions around this. It's very, very difficult work. But for me as well, you just don't give up because it's difficult work. I mean, it's always difficult. if you look at what happened after world war one without collapsing trust of democracy you had basically two outcomes of that the countries who dealt with that became healthier democracies the us the uk the countries like germany and isli who didn't deal with that went another direction and if you look over what's happening at the us at the moment you kind of feel this same thing's happening it may not be you know nazism or fascism you can tell me whatever you like but it's certainly a switch towards authoritarianism in democratic systems that everyone thought were healthy democracies that were resilient against this how quickly it's happened should be a really big warning to the rest of europe and do you think that that's the way britain's going i think it certainly could go that way i mean there's nothing at the moment that i'm seeing that is kind of building those more functional democratic structures and there's plenty of things that are building those disordered democratic structures i mean the algorithm is built almost to do that to us so for me the default state without any serious interaction or any interventions is a slide towards authoritarianism and disordered democracy so if people listen to this who share your sense of alarm but also want to feel a sense of agency want to help you know improve the world make britain's democracy more functional and less hollow or disorderly they want to get involved what's your advice to them based on all you've learned since you left your job in admin of finance about how they can use the tools of your trade well to become more democratic first of all i would actually look at organizations in your local community who may support stuff that you're interested in doing there's some really great organizations out there um but they often only get headlines when they're in some controversy which isn't always ideal the um there's a lot of people doing a lot of really interesting thinking around these ideas at the moment demos is doing this upgrading democracy uh report at the moment and work around that that's worth you know read this stuff is what i encourage people to do because i think we kind of take democracy for granted that you know we won world war ii and we beat authoritarianism and democracy is the default state of europe and the u.s but i think that's a naive idea and actually understanding what democracy is and the functions of democracy i I think is something that everyone needs to think about a bit more carefully.

1:02:44Elliot Higgins, it's such a privilege to chat to you. And let's not leave it six years before we chat again, shall we? Great. Thanks for having me on.

1:02:54I mean, my immediate thought listening to Elliot Higgins is that aside from the astonishing detail of the scoops and the way in which they've got them that he chronicled, he's kind of a wonderfully charming bundle of contradictions. because on the one hand he is someone who spends as he himself admitted sometimes obsessively around 18 hours a day on the internet some days he actually wants to encourage people to spend less time on the internet in a way he wants to revive the offline world and he inhabits all of these online digital spaces and what he's most concerned about is the lack of offline public spaces where we still come together as a society to verify things to deliberate things and to hold people in power accountable There's also this kind of sense of contradiction or tension in what he was describing between, on the one hand, the very, very, very modern techniques and skills and knowledge that he deployed.

1:03:51And at the same time, you have in this character, Elliot Higgins, a kind of nostalgia for the old world, a kind of nostalgia for a time when local democracy was flourishing because people read local newspapers, a time when the BBC was Walter Cronkite in America, the famous news anchor, or the BBC was this trusted top-down source of information. And I don't mean by that, just to be clear, I don't mean he wants to go back to that world because actually what he was most, I think, persuasive and powerful on was this idea that we have a democracy built according to and in response to a 20th century information system.

1:04:26And today we have, if you like, democratic structures without democratic content. And therefore we have a democratic kind of scaffolding in this country which hasn't responded to the fundamental change in the information system, which is the great change of our age, which has been my great interest for the past 20-odd years in journalism. I thought that was so interesting, all those contradictions. And then the way, let's be honest, the way he spoke in detail about some of those stories, when he was going on about that oil spill in Trinidad and the marine websites and transponders, and then when he's talking about various Russian cases, it reminded me above all of my mum when she talks about how easy it is to cook food And she actually goes off in incredible detail about the complicated techniques she uses to become the best cook in the world, which is what she is.

1:05:10And he made it sound easy. Some of it is quite hard. But the thing that's striking about Bellingcat is that it is sort of open to all. If you're a volunteer who's really into open source investigation and they kind of prove your skill using geolocation, whatever, you can get involved. And there is something very democratic about that. The one other thing that really struck me, you know, the last time I spoke to him, as I mentioned, was for the media show on Radio 4 in 2019. The big change in Bellingcat between then and now is not just that they've had even more success and uncovered even more extraordinary stories.

1:05:46The big change is they've kind of evolved from journalism to something else. They're now advocates, they're now educators in universities, and above all, they're Democrats trying to revive the idea of a public space where we come together to verify, deliberate, and hold people to account. God, that was interesting. Well, that is it for this episode. To make sure you don't miss future conversations, please do subscribe to Radical with Amol Rajan on BBC Sounds. And of course, you can. If you can't get quite enough of us, you can watch us. How about that for your summer holidays? is just you're lying on a beach, you're thinking about what to do.

1:06:21You could talk to your children, maybe read a book, but instead you watch Radical on the iPlayer. That would be a summer treat, wouldn't it? Speak to you next week.

1:06:36I'm Rory Stewart, and I want to talk about heroes. When I was a child, I imagined a heroic future for myself in which I would achieve great things and die sacrificing my life for a noble cause before I was 30. But my experiences in the Middle East and in politics showed me that there was something deeply wrong with my idea of heroism. From BBC Radio 4, my podcast, The Long History of Heroism, explores ideas of what it meant to be a hero through time. How have these ideas changed? Who are the heroes we need today? Listen to Rory Stewart, The Long History of Heroism, first on BBC Sounds.

1:07:17If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau Putin and the Apartment Bombs Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts