Eliot Higgins: How Bellingcat Hunts Down the Truth

Hi, everyone. I'm Nicolas 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 Elliot 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 Lesser. He's unmasked Russian assassins, exposed chemical weapons used in Syria, helped identify Navalny's poisoner, and I've been really looking forward to this, Elliot. Warm 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 fifteen 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. So we take all that data, and then we investigate different things, and that's included chemical weapons attacks in Syria, the down downing of Malaysian Airlines flight m x 17, more recently, a lot to do with America's bombing of Iran, ICE and DHS raids in The US as well. How do you decide what to what to focus in on? Well, early on, it's, I mean, the whole field of open source investigation was very much led by, kind of obsessive nerds on the Internet just doing what was interesting to them. And, really, the big events were initially the Arab Spring in Syria, then the shooting down of MH seventeen, then Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And so, really, that's kind of was just a bunch of volunteers doing things that were interesting to to them. But now we have teams who work on financial investigations, what we call online ideologies, which is quite broad, and conflict. And they So how many how many different hotspots are you looking at at each point in time? It it varies. But it's it's like at the moment, we're looking at, of course, what's happening in Iran, but we're also looking at, The DRC and Sudan and other places where there's ongoing conflicts. Sometimes an investigation is a really, you know, multi month month process. Sometimes it's reacting really quickly to events that are happening on the ground in different contexts. Now you live here in Leicester. You got an organization in Holland, but you have a big network. Just how does it work? So, we have the central Ballon Cat organization, which has about 35 staff members, mostly researchers and trainers. We then have a community of volunteers who we train and, we can direct. That's about 200 …