HIGHLIGHTS: Eliot Higgins

Hi, 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 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 trade not a trade journalist. He's actually a college dropout who taught himself to investigate war crimes from his kitchen table in Leicester. 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 doubt 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. So 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 what did you see? Yeah. So, I would really like to say I had the kind of noble intention looking at YouTube because this is your point. I I wish I could say I had this noble intention to become a great human rights or journalist or something. No. 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 the head 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. So we call this geolocation. It's a core skill now. By that point, it was just me winning arguments on the Internet. But I just really thought, well, this is kind of deepening my understanding of what's actually happening in these conflicts. And I started, like, posting about …