1192: Eliot Higgins | The Digital Detectives Making Dictators Sweat

1192: Eliot Higgins | The Digital Detectives Making Dictators Sweat

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Eliot Higgins: [00:00:01] I remember one guy invited his girlfriend into their military campus. He just filmed it and posted it on social media. It's just really silly things like that. They had a social media account, the actual brigade, and all the soldiers were following the social media account.

And we spent a year basically mapping out their entire military unit with namespace ranks where they were on the day of the convoy, whether or not they were in the convoy, all there on the internet. It's just no one had pieced it together, but it's a network of information. And then if you can explore those networks, you can find gold.

Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional journalist turned poker champion, [00:01:00] Hollywood filmmaker or cold case homicide investigator.

If you're new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about the show, and I always appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime, and cults and more.

That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show we meet Elliot Higgins, the guy who went from pajama clad hobbyist to running Bellingcat, the citizen sleuth outfit that geolocates missile launchers from Instagram selfies and unmasked Russian GRU assassins with nothing but public data and caffeine.

We'll explore how open source intelligence cracks war crimes, punctures Kremlin disinformation and turns a soldier's duck face trench post into courtroom evidence. If you wanna see how scrappy digital detectives are reshaping global accountability, keep on listening. Here we go with Elliot Higgins.

I remember I followed [00:02:00] you for years and I was like, oh, I'm excited about this. And then the book came out. And I emailed you and you're like, I don't have time for this. And I was like, I believe you.

Eliot Higgins: It was a crazy period. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Ukraine war. So Syrian civil war. I was like, uh, I believe you. I'm not gonna fight you on that one.

I thought that was kind of funny. I'm curious what your take is on Iran and them getting nukes or Israel slash United States bombing them. Because a lot of people think, well, Iran has a right to defend itself and there's no proof that Iran would misuse. Nukes. And I'm like, I don't know if we need proof that a theocratic, Islamist regime that has militias that take over Lebanon, fight for Assad in Syria and try and take down any country they can in the middle.

I don't know if we need further proof that they would misuse nuclear weapons to get leverage over the Middle East, but maybe I'm a crazy right winger according to these kids.

Eliot Higgins: The way I see it though is that they aren't really debating the facts. They're. Giving information from their kind of algorithmically recommended communities to [00:03:00] where they find stuff that reinforces what they already believe.

They don't really understand the arguments they're making because they're more symbols of their kind of moral identity rather than actually something they're trying to debate with you. It's a stick to beat you over the head so they can show that, yes, I'm right about this thing and you are wrong.

Because the problem we have now with modern discourse is it's not really about deliberation, it's about performance. It's about me showing you that I am minority, right person. And that's not because they're bad people, it's because. How their kind of moral logic has been formed, has been informed by the information they receive, the environment they live in, the kind of doubts that are produced in societies.

When we have things like the Iraq War, for example, when we have a buildup that then turns out to have been false and it destroys people's trust.

Jordan Harbinger: That's what this guy said. He's like, you're just doing Iraq, WMD Bush era talking points all over again. And I'm like, no. That was obviously based on one source.

Iran tells us they are [00:04:00] making nuclear weapons. They show the inspectors or don't show them the facilities. We know they're enriching uranium, like we're not just sort of speculating based off intel from some one source. It's d.

Eliot Higgins: I mean, it's also complicated by the fact that with Israel, the Prime Minister has his own agenda that I think goes beyond just Iran.

But they do have a legitimate concern about Iranian power in the region because they have been using proxies to put pressure on Israel. So I think he sees this moment as an opportunity to remove all those pressure points on Israel and really undermine Iran's regional power. And with what's happened in Syria recently as well, that's been a huge blow what's happened in Gaza.

All these different situations have really weakened Iran, the region, and I think now the Israeli governments decided this is time to really strike and take out not just their nuclear capabilities, but their military and economic capability.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I feel bad for Iranian people, but we have a lot of Iranian show fans inside Iran and outside of Iran.

I'm surprised they haven't blocked our [00:05:00] show, honestly, inside the country. But universally, they tell me how much they hate the regime. Now, granted, this is an English speaking, educated intelligentsia segment of the Iranian population that's mostly in Iran and a couple other big cities that I see on the little download map that we have in Iran.

These are not people that live in rural Iran that are super religious. I'll concede that point. However, I feel bad for them because when your power gets cut because you're under a theocratic, oppressive regime, it's still your power, not just the power to the nuclear facility or whatever, right? It's still your internet that you can't use.

It's still your school you can't go to. It's still your hospital that got blown up or whatever, or is not usable. So I really feel for them in this situation. I did not intend to start off with the Iran topic though, so I've been following you. I've been following Belling cat for a while. 'cause you guys have broken some pretty damn serious news stories using techniques that are frankly cutting edge, but also kind of mind blowing.

I mean, uncovering FSB agents trying to kill someone in the UK and [00:06:00] finding out who they are. I mean, it's just like Chef's Kiss. Beautiful. When you put these guys on blast, and honestly, I'm actually kind of surprised that you haven't been targeted or whacked by Putin yet. He's not even the only enemy that you've made doing this stuff.

So why don't you tell us what Bellingcat is? First of all,

Eliot Higgins: Bellingcat does something called open source investigations. Really, this wasn't something that was really possible in this way until the early 2010s. And it's all thanks to smartphone technology, social media, and the wealth of information we have online.

Stuff like Google Maps, giving you satellite imagery like ship tracking websites, playing tracking websites, all kinds of information that's accessible to you now. So I started doing this in 2012 as a hobby, arguing with people on the internet, but looking at videos coming from Syria and trying to understand what they were actually showing.

I didn't speak a word of Arabic, so I focused on the arms and munitions being used in the conflicts, because early on they were kind of really weird and wild stuff being used. There was one I remember was basically a, uh, potato gun, but it [00:07:00] fired malt of cocktails instead of potatoes, and he saw one video of that.

So I suspect it wasn't very successful.

Jordan Harbinger: No. The guy who used it caught on fire on the third round and that was the end of that. Yeah.

Eliot Higgins: Yeah. It was just a ball of flame that shot out the end of this tube, so it wasn't very useful for them. I think what could go wrong, but I just got really obsessed with the idea in Syria that there was so much information that was being shared online by kind of opposition groups, media centers, and all kinds of different people on the ground that was just being ignored by the mainstream media, and that was understandable.

There was a notorious case early on in Syria where there was a blogger called Gay Girl in Damascus who turned out to be a white guy in America, but they were widely cited in multiple mainstream newspapers, and the media had lost trust in those kind of sources. I was frustrated that there was very clearly good stuff in there that was being ignored.

So I just tried to figure out how can you prove if a video is filmed somewhere? And I realized that you could compare landmarks visible in the video with satellite imagery and [00:08:00] do a kind of spot the difference fit. Now, that's a technique known as geolocation, but back then it was just me playing adult spot, the difference on social media platform.

That then just became a bit of an obsession of mine. I started blogging and found stories from Syria about chemical weapon use and war crimes and all kinds of different things, and more and more people getting interested in open source investigation, which is what I accidentally stumbled across. And then I launched Bellingcat in July, 2014, and the intention there was to show people how to do these investigations and give them a platform where they could publish their own investigations.

And that was really the starting ethos of Bellingcat.

Jordan Harbinger: What's the mission? The ethos is great. What is the mission? Is it like uncovering news stories that other journalists can't find? What sort of would you say is the core mission of

Eliot Higgins: Bellingcat itself? For me, it's really about taking open source investigation and guessing as many people as possible to use it.

We don't just do the investigations, but we also do education. We do run [00:09:00] workshops. We work with universities to design course material for students. We work with a whole variety of NGOs, media partners with investigations, partly to support their own investigative work to teach 'em these techniques as well.

I think there's something that's really valuable. I think when we live in an era where the truth is constantly contested, especially on the internet, it's good to have something where you can not only point to the evidence, but the actual process you use to come to your conclusions and open it up for debate.

And I think in this era, it's really important that we have places where you can do that, because there is a tendency for people just to read stuff that reinforces what they already believe and that causes a lot of problems.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure does. Yeah. So you weren't in a newsroom. You weren't in a war zone. You're in your PJ's with a laptop, which I can relate.

When did the hobby turn into a global investigative force? And don't worry folks, we're gonna get to geolocation and how that works. 'cause it's a pretty cool little set of techniques. But I'm curious, when the PJ Mission turned into, we needed an office, and by the way, who else makes up Bellingcat? [00:10:00] This is not just you and your Twitter handle.

Eliot Higgins: Yeah. Now we have about 40 staff members from across the world. They're working on a range of investigations. We've just actually published one today. About a non-consensual notify app, non-consensual pornography that you can use to remove clothes from the women in your life if you want.

Jordan Harbinger: Or the men equal opportunity sexual harassment,

Eliot Higgins: or the men.

Yeah, that's true. Fair enough. But early on, it was really just me working by myself. But Belling caps launched on July 14th, 2014, and then three days later, Malaysian Airlines. MH 17 was shot down over Eastern Ukraine. And that became a huge catalyst both for the growth of balling Kat, but open source investigation in general.

And from that point onwards, I started building a team of investigators who were really just interesting people online I was talking to who seemed to get what I was doing and could do it themselves. And we just formed an informal team, and then we just took from really just a volunteer blog to the organization.

It's today.

Jordan Harbinger: Give us like a digital gum shoe [00:11:00] 1 0 1, blow by blow of a day hunting, I don't know, war crimes armed with. Public posts and probably a shitload of caffeine.

Eliot Higgins: Yes, it's, that's definitely a part of it. With MH 17, for example, you have an incident that happens. There's lots of people online discussing it, arguing about it.

Some people are finding links to posts that are seemingly irrelevant, and that's the first kind of thing you're gathering. You're trying to find what people are sharing, where it's being shared. Dig into that, just look at that network of information that's emerging from the incident.

Jordan Harbinger: MH 17, to be clear, this is a Malaysian Airlines flight that got downed over.

Ukraine, correct?

Eliot Higgins: Yeah. So it was flying over Eastern Ukraine and then it was shut down from the sky. And the debate was who shot it down first? Was it Russia or was it Ukraine? So both sides blamed each other and immediately there were online arguments about it. There was state level arguments. It was a bit of a mess.

But what we started to discover were videos and photographs of a, what's known as a book, missile launches. It has a large [00:12:00] missile system, four missiles, and there were videos and photographs of it being transported supposedly through Eastern Ukraine. And this is where geolocation comes in. We need to know where those photos and videos were actually taken.

So we then use things in the background to help us identify possible locations. So there's one photograph that was taken. You have a missile launcher. It is transported on the trailer. You can see that clearly. You can see it's like a gas station, four courts. And in the background, there's a shop with a name on it.

But the shop's in Ukrainian, and I don't speak Ukrainian, but someone on the internet does. And they'll Google it and they'll find a result and share it. And then you find what they're sharing and you Google translate it to make sure it's correct and it gives you an address. And then you can search for that address on Google Maps.

And it takes you to that spot where you can see the satellite imagery, where there is the gas station. And in that specific case. We didn't have Google Street view, but we did have a guy who drove a car around with his dashboard, camera on playing very loud music and then posting it onto [00:13:00] YouTube with a list of the street seats driven down.

And that included the name of the street that we were looking for, which turned up in the Google search result. Thank God for people with their weird hobbies and YouTube, because that allowed us to see the actual location from the ground. See the shop sign, see the gas station, see all the little details that, again, confirmed where this was taken.

And then what you can also do, once you know the exact location of a camera, you can use shadows in that image to tell the time of day. So this is something we call chrono location. So establishing the time of day. You also have as well people posting on social media about seeing this. So we search through all the kind of Facebook pages V, which is a Russian Facebook, or the kind of social media channels where there might be people talking about seeing this thing.

And that's something that's really useful for kind of building a network of information around one object. Basically, you're trying to confirm it in as many ways as possible. So with the MH 17 investigation, we are able to do this with multiple images and build a timeline of the movements of this missile [00:14:00] launcher and show that it was heading towards the suspected launch site of the missile within the correct timeframe to be involved with the launch of the missile.

There were photographs of smoke coming from this field, satellite imagery showing it was burnt out, and other information that then would confirm this was the launch site. So it's all kind of building up all that information from just the internet.

Jordan Harbinger: This is fascinating stuff because basically a Twitter video becomes GPS coordinates by crowdsourcing where this might be and using tools.

One of the apps that I thought was fascinating was you mentioned you have to know what time of day a photo was taken, and there's an app that looks at shadows and GPS coordinates and says, at this location, at this time, this shadow would've been this, so this is 2:35 PM approximately Ukrainian standard time or whatever.

That is awesome. That is so ninja. Somehow.

Eliot Higgins: It's all these little tools that you find. I mean, there's something like that that's Al. But another tool we developed ourself, we make our own tools at Baca as well, which do fun things. What it tells you is if [00:15:00] there's shadows, a certain length and you know, over time of day you can say where in the planet is most likely to be.

And they're kind of band reverse engineering and turning these things around from that expected purpose. Another tool that used to be useful allowed us to do kind of geofence searches for photos. So you could select an area on the border of Russia with Ukraine, and then find all the Russian soldiers posting selfies from their military camp, which is useful for us.

'cause then we've got to have a good look around and see what was in their military camp. We did a video for Vice, probably back in 20 15, 20 16, called Selfie Soldiers, where a Russian soldier took one inside Ukraine, and then we geolocated the photograph and then managed to track the guy down to his hometown in the east of Russia.

And Simon Ostrowski, who we worked with, went and actually door knocked him and tried to sell Hello, and then immediately got arrested by the Russians and flown back to Moscow very quickly because he was exposing a lie that Russia was saying that there were no Russian troops in Ukraine, but we were finding troops, missile launchers, [00:16:00] tanks, the whole army there.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Hey, there's no one in Russia. Well, except for this guy who literally posted a selfie in front of a missile launcher with a tank behind it saying, I'm

Eliot Higgins: in Ukraine. They would paint logos on their tanks in Russia and for the USR and stuff like that. Then they'd end up in Russia being filmed and photographed, and then they'd come back to Russia and do a bad job painting over what they'd written, and you could still see it through the paint in like their regiment photos.

So they're really bad at hiding themselves doing a war in another country.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. People will say, oh, it's because they don't care. I mean, they do care that there's a lot of ineptitude and corruption and just ridiculousness. One thing I thought that was quite fascinating was the idea that you can fingerprint missile launcher.

It's like the side skirts. So the thing that covers the treads of the wheels of a missile launcher, it's like they get dinged, they get dented, they get shot at, they get hit by branches, rocks, trees, God knows what else. They bump up against other equipment over time. And that pattern of dents and scratches, it's unique to that particular missile launcher.

So you can get a high res photo of these things and say, here's this one [00:17:00] in, I don't know, the east of Russia on a train. Here it is on the border of Ukraine. Here it is in another part of Ukraine. Here it is in another part of Ukraine. Here it is back in Russia. We know this thing went from Russia into Ukraine.

It's not enemy equipment that the Russians are saying it is. It's not something that never left the country like the Russia. I mean, if they just can't argue with that 'cause it's like, well then how come this has the exact same scratch pattern? They just have to ignore it or try to bury it or, or like you said, arrest the journalists that found out about it.

Eliot Higgins: In our case, it was more about claiming that, first of all, we are amateurs who didn't know what we were doing. And then later that we were working for MI six or the CIA or whoever was the populist spy agency of the day.

Jordan Harbinger: I don't expect you to remember who you've replied to on Twitter, but I routinely would get, Hey, you should interview Elliot Higgins from Bellingcat or you should interview Crystal Gev.

And then someone will go, they're a CIA front and I think it was you or Christo who says, I would like any evidence that we are a CIA front. And of course they never respond to that ever, but that's happened at least five times to you and I and Christo. 'cause we get the suggestion and then immediately, whatever bot or [00:18:00] whoever's looking for everybody tweeting anything with you and the go-to is they're just a CIA front.

Sure. Show one thing that says that that might be the case and they can never do it. It's just more ad hom nonsense.

Eliot Higgins: What becomes really apparent to me, having gone through those kind of conversations a lot is how really they are being informed by a very small kind of information ecosystem. Because it's always the same arguments, it's always the exact same quotes that they're using to support their claims.

They can never actually address the claims directly because it's usually a quote that was from the head of the National Endowment of Democracy who funded us for a few years, and he said back in 1990 that, uh, I think it was a Washington Post piece that a lot of what the CIA used to do 25 years ago we do now.

So the conspiracy theists say, well, that's proof that they're the CIA. But what actually happened 25 years ago was the CIA was secretly funding pro-democracy organizations. And when that was exposed, it caused a huge scandal and damage the reputation of those organizations. So the National Endowment [00:19:00] for Democracy was set up to be more transparent about how the US was supporting democracy.

But the thing is that context is completely stripped out of it because they only ever see that quote on a website that's quoting that original article to make a point about being evil.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure. It's not a very convincing argument because one, it comes outta nowhere all the time. And two, the argument isn't very well thought out.

It's always I'll reply to those people and I'll say, Hey, you tell me why shouldn't I interview the guy from Belling C? Let me know why they're a CIA front. And they'll say something like, look at the techniques they use and it's okay. So looking at stuff on Twitter and social media and geolocating it as a CIA tactic and only the CIA can do it.

I guess there are tons of people in every country in the whole world who are not getting paid, many of whom are like high school kids and they're just all in the CIA now. Is that what your argument is? It's not quite as dumb as this, but it's very similar to the FBI. They drive cars, and so if you drive a car, you must be part of the FBI.

You know, a lot of people use Twitter. A lot of people use the internet. A lot of people are [00:20:00] curious if a video was taken during the Syrian Civil War or if it's from a video game called Armor 2025 or whatever the realistic looking ones are where they're like, look, it's the Iron Dome, and it's, nope, this is the intro from a cut scene.

You know? It's always a ridiculous argument. I get it. Like paranoid weed smokers who are unemployed sitting at home, everything is a conspiracy and everything is the CIA, but like the foundation of that argument is always just so weak. Anyway. How did you identify this gap? In the information system in your book you wrote, politicians and officials with far less of an understanding of the Syrian conflict than I had, were making decisions on whether or not to go to war.

And that's pretty scary. Like you're looking at Twitter and social media and news stories and you're saying you're in many ways better informed than a person who's gonna sign off on a bill to, I don't know, arm the opposition in a country that's scary.

Eliot Higgins: It was really frustrating for me to watch the UK parliamentary debate about the August 21st, 2013 sound [00:21:00] attacks in Damascus because it was really clear as someone who was really studying that attack carefully and had like images of the missiles used.

I could show they'd been used previously and all kinds of information. S and gas is a chemical weapon. Yeah, so we was over a thousand people died. Thousands more injured, but. The debate was really based around the latest colonists that MP had read at the time. It wasn't about their opinions, it was about just what they'd read recently and their biases.

And a lot of it was informed by the experience with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. So everyone's like, oh, we don't wanna have another Iraq in 2003. But that was their kind of moral logic that they were applying, that they'd been through this experience. They'd know they'd been lied to, they know they'd been at this terrible war, and there's no real accountability for it.

So now they didn't wanna get drawn into another war. So they were looking for reasons for it not to happen. Now, I'm not saying we should have bombed Syria, but I'm saying that if we're gonna have a debate about something, it should be on actual facts, not just the opinions [00:22:00] of a new newspaper columnist.

You've just read.

Jordan Harbinger: So you're finding in verifying all this, which I think is quite important because look, we can either trust mainstream media, which nobody does. We can trust the government, which now very few people do, or we can trust this. Essentially a group of crowdsourced third parties that just wants the truth, which.

Is the main reason I would say why people in say, or government actors in Iran and Russia wanna say that you're part of the government, because that immediately discredits you. Right? If it's like, Hey, we're just third party journalists trying to get to the truth. Yes, aside, use chemical weapons against its own people, it's, huh.

We can either argue that that didn't happen and try and really meet you where you are and address the actual argument, or we can accuse you of being part of the big machine, the big lie machine. That's much easier to do. And so that just sort of, to me, always proved that what you're doing at Bellingcat is really important because if it's not important, people ignore you.

If it's really important, people start accusing you of being a government shill, whatever it is. [00:23:00] I just wanna clarify, at this point that you're investigating the Syrian Civil War, MH 17. You're basically a blogger earning what ad revenue, how are you funding any of this early on?

Eliot Higgins: I'm doing, um, crowdfunding, so I'm literally working off probably the equivalent of about $25,000 a year at best.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, you baller. Yeah. Don't spend it all in one place.

Eliot Higgins: Yeah. I'm being accused of getting millions from the US government to do this, and I'm scraping by trying to pay my mortgage. I think one thing that's really important about this is that. I've become really interested in the idea of why people don't trust institutions.

And that's not to say they should trust institutions, but actually why don't they? It's very easy to say, oh, well it's because of Iraq, or it's Trump, or whatever it may be. But I think we have to have a much more serious think about this. And I think it's really about democracy gives us a promise in a way, and it promises really that the functions of democracy is, I define them as verification, deliberation, and accountability.

We have systems to attempt to find the truth about [00:24:00] the world. We have systems to deliberate that truth. And then we have accountability when we uncover what that truth may be. And that could be political account, be social, it could be laws being passed, it could be people being arrested. Now the problem is when the public asks the questions, can I know the truth?

If the answer's no, then you lose faith in verification. Can my voice be heard and does it matter if the answer's no? They lose faith in deliberation. And can the powerful be held to account? If that answer to that is no, then you also lose faith in the democratic process, the institution, the entire system.

And I think Iraq in 2003 was a really stark example for a lot of people of reality of that. The financial crisis 2008, when you know people lost their houses and the bankers still got their bonuses. That was another very stark example to the public that actually know none of these functions are actually being formed in a democracy.

So we get a bit of hope from Obama. But then again, the same pattern repeats. And then I think we enter almost this kind of crisis cycle where people really can't really [00:25:00] name what the problem is 'cause they aren't really that well educated about the functions of democracy. And then they get drawn towards more authoritarian figures who promise them the world that they themselves rarely can deliver

Jordan Harbinger: classy outfits like Belling cat might crowdfund and rely on donations.

But I've gotta show mattresses to keep the lights on. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Saley. We're heading to Portugal soon, and one thing I don't have to deal with when we land is scrambling for wifi or hunting down a local SIM card at the airport because we set up saly. It's a super easy EIM app from the team behind Nord VPN, that keeps you connected in over 190 countries.

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Now back to Elliot Higgins. [00:28:00] All right. Why the name Belling Cat? How does this name come about? Because O of course, it sounds like a cat with a bell on this collar or, or what am I missing?

Eliot Higgins: That's right. Yes. When I was coming up with the name for Belling Cat, I'm really uncreative when it comes to names.

Jordan Harbinger: You're talking to a guy who's naming, this is The Jordan Harbinger Show. You don't have to apologize for a lack of creativity when it comes to naming things continue.

Eliot Higgins: My first attempt was the open source.com, which was terrible, but I had a friend, Peter Dukes, he's a uh, playwright. So I gave him a call and I thought he'll know some clever words to use.

His first suggestion was, what about belling the cat? I said, what's that? And he said, there's a fable where this group of mice are very frightened of a large ferocious cat. So they have a meeting and someone suggests putting a bell on the cat's neck so they can be warned. But a very old and wise mouse says, who's gonna bell the cat?

You know, who's gonna be the one who's brave enough to do it? And I thought, that seems quite good. So I searched belling the cat.com and that was $4,000 and Belling cat dot com's $40. So I went with that.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, smart. It's got a good ring to it. [00:29:00] How does, for those of us that aren't English majors, how does that relate to the mission of what you do?

Eliot Higgins: So what we are really trying to do is expose power in a way, show people how to do that. It's coming back to those ideas of verification, deliberation, accountability. We are very much about all of those free things, but accountability the most important. I was talking to someone today about WikiLeaks and the work that they were doing by publishing all this stuff, but I always found the problem with WikiLeaks is often they didn't see themselves as part of a system of accountability.

It was more like, get the stuff out there and then accountability will happen. And that's not how the world works. You need those systems and processes in place, and that's as much as part of our mission as it is doing the investigations.

Jordan Harbinger: I agree, but I also feel like WikiLeaks turned into, I'm gonna exercise this power that I have.

Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, I'm gonna exercise this as power by strategically leaking Hillary Clinton stuff during the election. And it's like that wasn't about, Hey, everybody needs to know everything. Regardless of how damaging [00:30:00] it is, I'm gonna pull this lever because ha ha can, and you can't stop me.

And that was not really what I was looking for in an organization like WikiLeaks, honestly. 'cause I'm all about get the information out there. Accountability. That's why I like Belling cat. That's why I previously really liked WikiLeaks, but I just think they just jumped the shark in many ways.

Eliot Higgins: I think the DOMA leaks.

So basically in 2018 there was a chemical attack in Duma in Syria, and WikiLeaks published emails that they framed as undermining the OPCW investigation, which was the efficient investigation by the organization for the prohibition of chemical weapons. But they were leaked in a very selective way to purposely damage the investigation.

The thing is, I look at this through the lens of kind of I moral logic that often when we look at people in the other camp, we can then see them as being immoral that somehow they are bad people because of what they believe, but really they're following their own moral logic. So in the case of WikiLeaks, they know the government lies.

They know the government likes invading [00:31:00] countries by claiming they've got WND. They know they've been targeted for telling the truth. So in their moral logic, they're actually doing something that is a moral act. But for me, that moral logic can actually capture your behavior. That when you are led by your moral logic in terms of who's the right person, who can say things, who's the people we ignore?

Who are the batting cats? Who are the CIA? Then what you're actually saying is a large amount of information doesn't need to be looked at, that we can just automatically say, no, that doesn't count. And that creates a kind of process, which is fundamentally flawed in trying to actually come to the truth and establish accountability because you aren't starting with the idea that we need to verify information.

You are starting with the idea that you need to filter information, the good information versus the bad. Based off my past experiences of dealing with a completely different situation, but now I'm so almost morally injured by that situation. I'm now applying that to every situation.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah, I can. I, I can definitely see that.

Okay. So look, [00:32:00] take us to a holy crap moment where you're muttering into your coffee when a shaky Instagram clip clicked as courtroom grade evidence. And I know that's not a ha, we got you with this one little thing. Maybe a good example is some of the cell phone metadata stuff where you exposed the GRU.

I know that's not an Instagram post, but I would love to hear that story because I think the cell phone metadata thing is just one of those, like you can just see the GRU going, how did we not cover that one? Dammit, somebody got fired for that.

Eliot Higgins: So, for a bit of context, Russia is a incredibly corrupt police state, which means that a lot of information that the police state gathers is actually for sale, and it has been for a long time.

I read an article from about 15 years ago in the Financial Times about a market that was selling DVDs of Russian databases in Moscow, and it's just stuff like that. So all this information was quite easy to get access to. Now, normally we wouldn't use this stuff, but the SRI poisoning was a rather unique event.

Sergey Gripple was a former [00:33:00] Russian spy who defected to the uk and several years ago he was poisoned and it became a huge thing in the UK because a few months later, two civilians picked up a perfume bottle that had been thrown away. And it turned out it contained a nerve agent, the same one that nearly killed Sergey Gripple.

And it did actually kill one of these people in that situation. At that moment, we didn't have too much information, but then the UK police released the identity of both of the suspects, and a Russian newspaper purchased the flight records of the flight they flew in on, and their passport numbers were there and they were literally like five or six digits apart, which is really suspicious.

'cause there were two supposed strangers who had very close passport numbers. Our colleague thought, wouldn't it be interesting if we use this kind of data market in Russia to buy their passport registration forms to just see how they filled it in? And we're thinking they surely wouldn't have Secret Service and put the Russian M Mod D's phone number on there.

But that's actually what they did. They had actually stamped it with Secret Service and the phone [00:34:00] number of the Russian MOD. And that was like, oh, a real oh God moment. But that was just the start of it because then using all these Russian databases, we could find their entries in like Moscow, where like in 2012 they didn't exist.

And then 2013 they'd been living there for years. So these identities were clearly fake, but they were also linked to addresses and phone numbers. And eventually, as part of this investigation, we were able to get phone metadata and it allowed our investigator to take all that metadata, so it was not just who they'd called, but every single cell phone tower, their phone had pinged as they were carrying it.

So it's basically like a GPS or their whole route that they'd been taken. And he, we were able to chat them throughout Europe showing that they'd visited other locations shortly before there were mysterious like warehouse explosions that were later connected to them. And this is all in their phone metadata, but also we could see them phoning up their commanders.

One fun thing is that there was three top phone numbers. It was their boss, their wife, and their girlfriend. Always the top three phone numbers that they were [00:35:00] calling. One of the guys was also the head of the chemical weapons lab. You'd have to see in the phone calls as well. Wife, girlfriend, girlfriend, as they clearly trying to organize their, uh, evening.

Oh my gosh. Yeah. So the one of the guys was the head of the Chemical Weapons Production Lab, which was secret at the time that produced these chemical weapons. And when Alexi Navani, the Russian opposition leader was poisoned, his phone metadata, which we were still able to get hold of, showed him shortly beforehand talking to officers of the Russian Intelligence Service.

We got their phone data and showed they'd been following Navani for a long time on all his trips, including the one where he was poisoned. So the Russian state's fingerprints were all over these attempted assassinations.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. This is a little tangential, I suppose, but I just love how you find these poisoners and they're registering their vehicles as well to GRU headquarters, so it's, oh, where's this car registered?

Oh, this is a weird address. Let's find out where that is. Oh, it's not residential. It's the headquarters of the GRU. So the Russian CIA, then it's, I wonder who else is registered their vehicle to this building. And you find [00:36:00] all of these supposed top secret covert agents traveling all over the world, and it's like, here's 24 people who have all registered their cars to the Ministry of Defense, GRU Office.

Very covert guys. And I would imagine now every single one of those agents is blown because once you find out who they are and find out what they look like, they can't go abroad and pretend that they're tourists looking at a church ever again.

Eliot Higgins: Well, there's that. And also the other issue they had is the passports.

When they faked them, it seems like they were given like a batch of passports that were sequential and then whoever faked them would print them all out. But it meant that we discovered several passport numbers of a range of about 150 numbers. So you can safely assume every one of those 150 numbers in between.

There are likely a Russian agent of some sort. So immediately, even without knowing who they are, they're at risk if they're traveling abroad. So I think what we did was very disruptive for the Russian intelligence services and that certainly put us on their radar.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that cracks me up because all that the West has to do is go, did anybody within this [00:37:00] range of 150 numbers travel to any country that we have access to?

Their immigration database. Okay, where's the photo that they took when they entered? Alright, here are photos of every Russian intelligence agent. Wow, that guy. Okay. He works at an embassy. This person has nonofficial cover. Every single one of those people is blown, even if they change passports because they can't change their face and their fingerprints.

So that's a multi multimillion dollar setback for their intelligence service because COVID agents are expensive to train, and if you blow 150 of them at once, that is years and years of work. I mean, it might even be like a decade of work.

Eliot Higgins: What starts happening now is you are getting Russia using basically telegram channels to find people in the west who will be paid a thousand pounds to burn down a building or throw a bomb into a warehouse or something like that.

So they're kind of outsourcing intelligence operations. 'cause those people get arrested and that telegram channel disappears, and then they're the ones who have to bear the brunt of it. So it's like a cheap way of doing espionage, but it's also not a very effective way of doing [00:38:00] espionage because you're dealing with just ordinary members of the public who are trying to make a quick buck.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I can also imagine that's a great vector to get into something, right? Like, okay, I'll take this. And then the FBI certainly must be all over that particular vector. I mean, if somebody proves themselves, you can eventually, I would imagine lure these people out hiding. Who knows? I love that. This is the alchemy that turns a a duck face Instagram story into prosecutable intel.

I mean, I love the idea that these Russian soldiers are taking photos just on a little vacation to Ukraine, and you can imagine a year later, their commander or somebody in the intelligence office going, why did you do that new rule stop fricking posting on social media? You morons, which I believe now is a rule in the Russian military.

Eliot Higgins: Yeah. They actually passed a law at the state DOR to actually make sure that soldiers couldn't share information about their military service. There were a lot of more photos being shared of mobile phones being nailed to the wall when people were using them, when they shouldn't have been using them.

They are very strict on that because it was incredible the amount of information we're [00:39:00] finding. I remember one guy invited his girlfriend into their ministry camp and she just filmed it and posted it on social media and it is just really silly things like that. Or like the wives girlfriends and mothers of soldiers in Russia have internet forms where they discuss what's going on.

Like, oh, my son's just been sent off to this training facility on the border of Ukraine. It's like, okay, let's find out what he's up to. Like with MH 17, we identified that the missile launcher came from the 53rd Air Defense Brigade in Kirs in Russia. First by following videos that Russians were taking of this military convoy back to the base.

And this was like a 500 kilometer distance, and it was just people filming it across the route that gave us where they came from. But they had a social media account, the actual brigade, and all the soldiers were following the social media account. And we spent a year. Basically mapping out their entire military unit with names, faces, ranks, where they were on the day of the convoy, whether or not they were in the convoy, like that whole thing was just all there on the internet.

It's just no one had pieced it together. But it's a network of information. And then if you can [00:40:00] explore those networks, you can find gold.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm gonna laugh when in 20 years someone's doing a history of the Russian regime during the Putin era and they're like, man, these Russian records are really sloppy.

Who's got the best records? These Belling cat guys have the whole organization mapped out and it's better than what we got from the Russians. It's actually quite possible that your data on that unit is better than what they have in Moscow.

Eliot Higgins: It's a real mess out there as well. And it is just, what I love about this is there's always kind of new doors to open and walk through.

People often say, oh, weren't you worried about Russia stopping soldiers from posting? Or are you worried people figuring out what you do? As if they figure out what we do? Then we've got like lots of other options to. Use because the thing with the internet is it's constantly evolving and growing and new stuff's out there, and there's new problems with websites, which means you can find leak data, you know, all kinds of things.

So there's never a point where I think we've done everything and there's nothing more we can do because there's just so much.

Jordan Harbinger: Especially you're talking about buying databases that are leaked from Russian sources, and Russia's, [00:41:00] like you said, a deeply corrupt police state. Okay, what can we do to fix this?

You can fix your entire society so that people at the cell phone company don't sell tons of metadata records for a thousand bucks or 500 bucks. Can you give us a ballpark of what you've paid for these?

Eliot Higgins: It was my colleague, Christo Griff, who he, he was buying it with his own money, which I'm not sure his wife was too impressed with.

He claims to have spent now by this point, which includes a lot of investigations, like $150,000, but record by record, it would be like 20 euros for someone's flight data, for example. So it's not like breaking the bank. But now with Batting Cap, we really try and focus on purely open source material.

'cause it's all about being as inclusive as possible, and it's not just about allowing people to see our working, but giving them the ways to actually do it themselves. Yet if we start saying, oh, you have to buy a Russian database, so $150,000, that immediately starts kind of, you know, excluding people.

Jordan Harbinger: It does.

I just think it's quite funny that the only real solution to the problem that Russia has is fix the entire society from the bottom up so that it's not corrupt and people [00:42:00] don't sell personal and private information for a pittance so that they can survive because they can't really plug that hole. It would be harder than disarming the gun owners in the United States from a government policy level.

Okay. No more corruption or what? It's a crime. It's already a crime. We're gonna start enforcing it. Okay. If you find out about it, but you're not really, because I'm gonna bribe the police when they find me, which is what I've been doing for the last decade. You know,

Eliot Higgins: they're screwed. You find this time and time again that it's the thing with Russia, that it's corrupt from the top all the way down to the bottom, and the people down the bottom know that the tops corrupt.

So why the hell shouldn't they be?

Jordan Harbinger: Right? Exactly. And especially because what's the harm? It's just flight records. Nobody's even be gonna find out that I'm the one that sold it without a massive investigation, which they're not gonna do for 20 euros. It's just not a thing. Do you ever scroll past a trench selfie and just think, okay, congrats.

You've just geotagged your own indict.

Eliot Higgins: I've been actually quite impressed in terms of this current conflict in the way that Ukraine has really stopped that kind of stuff coming out to you frequently. They're very controlled of that. On the Russian side, it's very similar. I mean, there have been [00:43:00] cases early on in the conflict where a Russian soldier posted a photograph of where he was in Ukraine, and very shortly afterwards that place was destroyed.

So we know the Ukrainians are looking for this information. I think that's partly because Belling Kat, before the 2022 invasion, spent eight years doing open source investigations, not just on MH 17, but Russia's other involvement in the conflict. And within Ukraine, we had a very high profile because of our work.

And I think that actually really influenced the way the Ukrainian intelligence services then approached the conflict. They realized open source was a fantastic source of information for what they were trying to do. The conflicts in Ukraine has been quite remarkable in that regard. But also things like the use of drones in warfare, a huge development that I think sometimes people underestimate is really gonna change the way wars are fought.

Yeah. Seeing how the shift in how the internet works, how we've moved from a kind of top down media model where we have newspapers and TV kind of telling us what's going on to this kind of more peer to peer, many to many network where [00:44:00] everyone is like the point of contact for information. You are the one who verifies it.

You are the one who shares it, and that can be very dangerous but also very powerful. And in conflict, you'll seeing the same patterns happen again and again. Where the people who are trying to tell us what's happening in the conflict from these official sources constantly being undermined by people like balling Kat, who are actually saying, actually this is the stuff that's coming from the ground that shows that you are actually lying about this.

And that's something that I think is very powerful for the truth.

Jordan Harbinger: I agree. Look, you're not a career spy soldier or even a traditional journalist, and it seems incredible that, would you say you had no formal training when you started uncovering state level crimes and assassination plots?

Eliot Higgins: Literally

Jordan Harbinger: just figured this

Eliot Higgins: out with a whole bunch of internet, and then somehow it worked.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Was there ever a moment where you were like, I'm in way over my head, or was it like, screw it, I've already come this far?

Eliot Higgins: Oh, I, I've figured that right now. I think that every single day. I bet every hour, I bet. But I think it's also for me, really important to not turn myself into the hero of this story because the [00:45:00] work that we do at Balling Kat isn't just about me.

It's about our organization, our community, the people around us. It's about the stuff that we do where people learn from us and they go off and do it themselves. That's the stuff that really excites me when other people do their own balance casting and some other subjects I've not even thought about.

Because to me, that's showing us that there's value even beyond what I can imagine in terms of what open source investigation can do.

Jordan Harbinger: I would've loved this probably back in the my social engineering days. I remember mapping out the MCI at the time was the telephone company telecom network of Iraq before the war.

And I mean this isn't like in pursuit of the truth, we were kind of doing some patriotic stuff. 'cause I'm old enough to remember when America was the good guys. But we mapped out the telephone network and the idea was we were gonna take it down, but it was just very similar stuff. It was like use some social engineering here, request some documents there, pretend where these guys get the MCI blueprint for Baghdad and surrounding areas.

And it was just like, we just did that and we're a bunch of random teenagers and college kids. This is pretty cool. I remember the kind [00:46:00] of high when something clicks and you go, I can't believe we just got away with that and it's, you didn't do anything illegal. You just put stuff together. And I have to wonder, have professionals, war crimes, prosecutors, maybe even intelligence agencies come to you and said, wait, how did you figure that out?

How often are three letter agency folks and prosecutors sliding into your dms? I guess that's my question.

Eliot Higgins: We avoid the intelligent services because otherwise it'll be a Twitter thing. So

Jordan Harbinger: avoid that. I think you should. Yeah, that makes sense.

Eliot Higgins: With the MH 17 investigation, a few months after we started doing our work, I was invited to my local police station to talk to the investigators, and I spent about eight hours just going through every single post we did line by line.

And I have now realized that was me actually giving them a free workshop. But I think they were really impressed by how every kind of line we wrote was based off a piece of evidence, and that we explained our conclusions very clearly. I heard that several months after that they sent up their own open source unit within the team who are doing the investigation.

But now, I mean, most recently we've been working with the International Criminal Court [00:47:00] on investigations related to Ukraine. We've designed a whole process to do investigations specifically for war crime investigations for use in places like the International Criminal Court. So for me, it was really important to say, it's one thing to have an argument with someone on the internet and say, I've got all these pictures that prove that I'm right, is to go to a courtroom and present to a judge that you have enough evidence to convict someone.

That's the standard I want to meet with the work that we're doing. 'cause there are plenty of crimes that we've documented throughout our work, and some of them have led to real accountability, but the vast majority don't. And my question is, how do we actually make accountability something that happens more frequently?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, look, it's tough as an attorney, I know talking to a judge who doesn't understand the evidence you're showing them is very frustrating. I've been in litigation where I say, look, here's this person doing this and this and this, and they go, that's the internet. Anybody can post that. And I'm like, but it's coming from their account.

Here's the IP address. It's mapped to his house. That might be fake. And it's like, why would you assume that it's fake? That [00:48:00] is so much harder than assuming that this is potentially real and taking it into consideration. And they just go, I'm throwing out this whole binder of evidence where this person literally confessed to everything.

And it's like, because you don't understand how the web works, you're gonna throw away literal confessions and all of this evidence. And I would imagine people now are gonna go, that's ai. And it's, no, that's you shooting someone in the head. Well, it's AI and it's, oh gosh, how do we prove this? It's just so frustrating because a judge watched a TikTok that showed fake AI and now they can't believe any photographs anymore.

It's, oh my God.

Eliot Higgins: This is the kind of risk with ai for me, it's not about tricking people into stuff they wouldn't believe anyway. It's actually, it creates a permission structure for people to deny reality. 'cause now they can just say, oh, that thing I don't agree with, it's ai. And we see that happening all the time already.

For me, a lot of this is really about how different communities create permission structures to deny reality by saying, Baquet is the CIA, or that's ai. Or You can't trust that community or this community to tell the truth. And you hear that happening just all over the place now. And it really undermines the fundamental [00:49:00] principles of democracy that if we can't establish some form of shared truth, then we can't even start discussing what to do about it.

And I think you'll see this kind of fracture happening more and more, not just in the US but all over the world.

Jordan Harbinger: So while Elliot's out there pinpointing missile launchers, I'm about to pinpoint some great deals on the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back.

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If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, email usJordan@jordanharbinger.com. We are happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Elliot Higgins, the crazy amount of depth that you go into to find the intelligence, I love it.

I mean, is this, you've already given a brief overview of finding examples of Russian soldiers entering Ukraine, but. I just want people to appreciate how exhaustive this is. I should say, you look up their family members, everybody who comments on any post, look up those people, their profiles, all of their photos, and you can really find this 3D full image.

Not necessarily an actual image, but you get this impression, I should say, of who this person is and where they've been. And is this legitimate because it just becomes impossible to fake after a while when grandma's like, I miss him so much, he's in this place. No, I thought he was over here. He was in that place earlier.

And you just map the whole thing. That's probably not fake. And then all Russia can do [00:53:00] is go, eh, fake news and just pray that people don't look into what you're doing. You're really combating disinformation, especially against Russia in this case, and doing a good job of providing real intelligence proof.

Are you not worried that Putin, who by the way, as you have yourself seen, seems to have no problem killing people he doesn't like, even if they live in the uk. Are you not worried that he might have you, uh, a string in your picture tied to some place on his wall?

Eliot Higgins: Yeah, I mean we've had had people followed, I mean there's just six Bulgarian convicted in the UK 'cause they were spying on Christo Graze for two years and that was directed by, this is such a weird story.

So Jan Ick was Chief Financial officer of Wirecard, which is a financial transaction company in Europe, and he disappeared with about a billion dollars. And he reappeared based on what we were finding, taking a fight into Russia. And he ended up actually being the person who was running a six member Bulgarian team who was spying on Christo [00:54:00] Gev and planning things like kidnapping, murder, breaking into his apartment, all kinds of different things.

They've all been convicted now, but Jan Masick is still on the run, but it looks like he's been a kind of proxy for the Russian Intelligence services running this operation on their behalf. And the whole thing is very bizarre because. There was like in the trial that Foso produced of me sat with Christo that one of the spice had taken, drawn their spying off him.

They followed him on multiple occasions. They broke into one of his apartments, a whole bunch of stuff that was very disturbing. But at the same time, what we do is important, and this is exactly what those people want. They want people like us to be scared of actually trying to find the truth. And if we let the world just be run by people who want you to shut up, then it's gonna be a very dark place.

Indeed,

Jordan Harbinger: I agree with you. I would imagine you, at least if you're not getting followed, broken into attempted poisoning by the Russians, they're at least hacking Belling cat. I mean, Russia has groups like Fancy Bear and other sort of offensive cyber units. Do you [00:55:00] find, oh, our systems, this got deleted, this got penetrated, this got all scrambled.

This got stolen. Surely the office has some great cybersecurity, but it's probably also getting pinged every day, all day by groups like this.

Eliot Higgins: They certainly try. We were actually targeted by the same phishing campaign that ended up with the pedestrian emails being published on the 2015 campaign with Hillary Clinton.

They sent us the same emails, but we saw them and thought, this is misspelled. They misspelled like Google and stuff like that. It's really obvious. So we just thought there were like some kind of Nigerian print scam thing going on. So that was the Russian intelligence services trying to hack our emails.

Jordan Harbinger: They just don't run spell check.

Eliot Higgins: They tried that again with proton email. There was a period I used to do a lot of speaking events in public, which I do less now for security reasons, but there would always be someone from the Russian embassy sat at the back taking notes on what I was saying. So I always like to say hello to them.

Jordan Harbinger: Do you wave to them and say, Hey Vladimir, I'm glad you made my talk.

Eliot Higgins: Yeah. You always wanna acknowledge them to say, yeah, hey, how are you doing? And then we've had various cyber attacks against us. We've had lots of disinformation, [00:56:00] state backed, different information campaigns, both kind of rushes today going after us.

There's a really weird campaign that's going on at the moment, the Russian Doll campaign. So what Russia's been doing for the past few years is they make videos that mimic the style of legitimate news organizations. And that's like France 24, the BB, C, all kinds of news organizations and balling cap and realize, oh that's nice.

They're included us with all this international media. And one thing they do, they'll deep fake Oreo. So they'll have a deep fake version of me saying Ukraine span and that kind of thing like that. But they do loads and loads of these. And we noticed last year they started including barcodes with verified written on each of them and a little jigsaw puzzle piece.

And I thought that's weird, but I didn't really think about. Anymore. Then in the last week, they've started a new campaign and again, these jigsaw puzzle pieces have come back, but now they're kind of larger and clearer and I've started piecing them together. And the jigsaw is a big pile of poo with my face on it, with, uh, the [00:57:00] title shit a lot shitting of Belling shit.

And they've put this in their disinformation campaign as a jigsaw puzzle apparently, specifically for me to piece together. And it's said they've pieced together the previous puzzle and it was CIA, but with the Belling cat logo as the IFBI with Belling cat logo as an i, a slur, and then a middle finger that was the jigsaw puzzle.

So these Russian trolls, for some reason, have decided that I'm the one they need to communicate with through these kind of weird puzzle pieces.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. This reminds me of. Oh God, I might butcher this, but there was a hacking group, this is several years ago, where they were finding little bits in the code and that was how they identified, I think they were like North Koreans.

And then when they tried to do that again to another hack, they put the bits of code that were out of place together and it said something like, screw you capitalist pigs. They're like, screw you America, or screw UCI. It was 'cause they were like, this is how they found us last time. We know they're gonna look for that again.

So let's just put this little insult in there. And I can't remember if it [00:58:00] was North Korea or Russia, but it's interesting because this is like their spies going. It's the intelligence equivalent of writing something on a missile that lands in the enemy territory. They're not gonna see it. They might see a photo of it later.

They might find the piece after they drag it out of the building we hit and it's gonna say something like, screw you Yankees or whatever. But it's the digital equivalent of that. It's funny, but at the core level it's still a little scary, right? Because these people are really thinking about me a lot.

Eliot Higgins: I have to know.

It's kind of one of the nicest things anyone's ever done for me. I've got my own jigsaw puzzle now, honestly. Want to print it up and, uh, get it all the pieces and build it and frame it. 'cause it's just, it's such a weird objects now and I love weird objects. It just, it's almost like a kind of outsider art piece that kind of is specifically for me.

You should

Jordan Harbinger: absolutely put that in the office. Tell me about the effect that looking at all of this stuff online has on people working at Belling Cat, we talked about some of the dangers you face doing this. We talked about Putin maybe slash maybe not trying to kill you, but cyber threats. We talked about [00:59:00] authoritarian regimes are always dangerous, but what about psychological issues?

Because aren't Belling cat researchers looking through? Lots of war footage, lots of airline wreckage with people's body parts in it and like it just, after a while, it's not good for you to look

Eliot Higgins: at that all the time. People tend to handle it differently, and that's not to say there's tough people and soft people.

I've never had too much of an issue with the kind of violence of it because it's almost like you have to learn to disassociate yourself from the person. It's really about the image and what the image is telling you about something. You are looking not at the kind of bodies but the missile parts and they might be there, but we have like a psychological support at Bating Cat, we're very open about talking about things around trauma.

There's other types of trauma that sometimes are a bit easier to miss, so there's the very obvious trauma. We've seen all this horrific stuff, but then there's moral injury. When you're doing this stuff and you're looking at hours and hours of horrific footage, and then you go on Twitter and someone's saying that's fake news and being really abusive about that, that [01:00:00] really heightens kind of your sense of injury from that.

You are so offended at a deep level that actually can be very serious in a lot of people, so it's kind of assessing that as well. The fear of the threat from Russia as well is something that some people find. Overwhelming. So what we try and do is at least create spaces where people can talk about that one-on-one.

We talk about it as a team. It's important to have that healthy environment. I know when I was first doing this, I would hear tales from certain human rights NGOs when they were first encountering this imagery for the first time, coming from places like Syria and Libya and Egypt. They were told just to tough it out because it wasn't real.

It was like a picture on the internet. You are not out there in the war zone. You are here in an office, nice and safe. Because they didn't really understand the dangers of vicarious trauma. And that's also something that I've really kind of put at the center of like how we deal with our staff at Bunning Cat, that we make sure that's front and center, not something we just say get on with it.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's not safe to do that. PTSD, a lot of people who have been in war zones have this, and [01:01:00] there's other people in the military who might have just worked in a warehouse in the green zone and their PTSD doesn't get taken seriously because they didn't see any combat. But when you see people coming home in boxes and people at the hospital, I mean, it's still affects you.

It's still that vicarious trauma. And also the more familiar something is to you, the more it could hit you. One example, I think that was in your book was what happens when you see a toy that your own child has in airplane wreckage? And then you just, you immediately, of course, you're thinking, oh, this is from a baby that was in that plane that crashed in Ukraine.

Eliot Higgins: I had the same issue as well around the time my children were born. There were quite a few chemical attacks in Syria and I would see a baby wearing a nappy that was the same brand as my children's who'd just being hit by chlorine. I was like coughing up bloody mucus because of it and that kind of stuff.

'cause it's quite, you can, can compartmentalize, but then when you see something kind of almost subconsciously that you associate with your real life, it just brings you right back into that moment and makes it very real for you. And you've gotta [01:02:00] know about those moments because that will happen to kind of anyone doing this work.

And that's the kind of moment where you stop, there's a temptation to say, now I must really look into this. But that's the moment where you have to stop, step away, and give yourself that chance to just process what you've just seen. Trying to kind of push through that is a really bad idea and it's just gonna make things worse.

Jordan Harbinger: How will Bellingcat try to fight things like DeepFakes and ai? You touched on that earlier, but it seems like that is just a major enemy of what you're doing here. I took an AI training on Monday that was run by a friend of mine and he showed me something that took him, I think it was like 10 or 15 minutes and a half of that is waiting for the computer to do its thing.

It was a woman riding a bicycle and she just sort of went back and forth on the bicycle side to side 'cause it was on a stand or something. And then they said they did modify video and it became her with different hair, slightly different face, full makeup, a different outfit on a motorbike, going really fast in an urban environment.

And I said, wow, this is incredibly, he goes, this is about 14 minutes for me to make [01:03:00] that. And like I said, half of it was waiting for it to render. And it's like you can essentially film yourself in a garage waving your hands around and then you can say, turn this into a torture scene with isis and it will just make that, and how can you combat that?

Eliot Higgins: I think it's really about this idea that the verification part of how we kind of build our understanding of the world used to be done by institutions who really have the control of the knowledge we had. It's really documented well by Walter Lipman who wrote a book in 1922 called Public Opinion, how basically, rather than actually having a full understanding of the world, we actually have that mediated through gatekeeping institutions for better or for worse, and we build what we call pseudo environments about our understanding of the world.

So now what we have is we've all become the verification element of that process because we are seeing this stuff for the first time. So it's up to us to make the decision of whether or not we share it or even look at it for long enough for the algorithm to notice that we're looking at it for too long.

So what we need to do is really lead this by education. There's no silver bullet where we can say, oh, there's a [01:04:00] piece of software or a course that you can take. We need to actually create an education system that's based around critical thinking skills, not checking, not media literacy, but fundamentally across all subjects, critical thinking skills.

Jordan Harbinger: I like this because media literacy is one thing, but now you've gotta be on the bleeding edge of everything and it's scary. It doesn't bode well for people like my dear parents who really can't tell an advertisement on the internet from a news story, and I was reading, this might have been in your book, but I was reading somewhere something like 80% of middle school students also can't tell the difference between an ad and a real news story.

My mom will ask me something like, oh, did you know this? I just read it in the news, and I'm like, show me the news story. And it's like a thing she clicked on that was an ad inside a newspaper that takes you to a blog that is definitely just marketing that sort of looks like. The same newspaper where they ran the ad, depending on where you come from.

And I've seen that ad elsewhere and I started clicking on it and it just, whatever they've done, they've made several clone sites of whatever site where they run the ad [01:05:00] and it knows which site you came from, and it's just designed to look like another article on that site. But it's just a ad for some product.

And this is the weight loss miracle everyone's been waiting for. And it's, oh, this is not real. It's an ad that looks like cnn.com. I can't believe they allow this. And I'm sure that they try and combat that at some level, but they're also being paid to promote it. So it's just like you really have this massive.

Uphill battle, but it's just bad acting or it's corny acting, or the dialogue seems stilted, but within a few months, all of that could be more human-like, and all of the glitches that you see with your brain and go, that doesn't look totally real, all that's gonna be resolved. So it's almost like you train someone to look for that, and then six months later, Adobe or whatever fixes that, and you're just always, here's the update.

Now you gotta look for this because the other thing got fixed. This is how I feel old. I have to ask 20 year olds on Reddit why something is fake. Because they go, that's fake. And I go, crap, how do you know? And they gotta explain it to me like the lighting is too good. And I'm like, oh God, I would never have spotted that.

Eliot Higgins: Yeah. [01:06:00] It's also something that is catching out mainstream media in some countries. So there was a recent conflict between India and Pakistan where a video emerged that showed a Pakistani general saying that two aircraft had been shot down by the Indian military. That was then picked up by the Indian media who kind of trump this great success.

But it turned out the audio and the lip movements had been deep faked and that this person hadn't said it at all. But it took me having to go through the YouTube channel of the kind of Pakistani military media to find the speech and match his arm and kind of face movements with the fake video to show that what he was saying had been changed to actually categorically prove that.

And that takes time. If we don't train media, not just in our own countries, but you've gotta really do it internationally because everything is an international thing. Now, a story that's reported in India will be picked up, you know, in my hometown of Leicester, and then become the fact of the community who they've it.

You need to teach everyone these fundamental skills, and it can't be about, here's how you fact check a TikTok video, because the next [01:07:00] generation might be using something completely different. It has to be about how do you actually think about things, and we're really actually often very poor about teaching students that certain countries are better than others.

Certain US states are better than others, but generally speaking, it's not taught broadly enough. It's like an add-on. It's. It's like, oh, now you're 16. You can take an extra class on critical thinking. No, it has to be the minute you're starting school, you're being taught these skills. And it doesn't have to be like, how do you fact check a fairytale?

But it can be just little questions that teach children to ask an extra question when they're looking at something and then build it from there. And there's already education organizations doing this, like Cambridge education is starting to do this. Bating cap works with universities, develop course material around not just critical thinking, but actually implementing open source investigation ideas, creating investigative hubs at universities.

All these different things have to contribute. There's not one solution. It has to be a whole society solution if we want to really deal with this problem.

Jordan Harbinger: I wholeheartedly agree. I don't know what that curriculum looks like, but I would love to see that [01:08:00] implemented. And I think countries like Denmark, and I think Estonia and the Baltic states have done a really good job with this because they were getting bombarded with Russian disinformation, I think, since the nineties, aside from when they were occupied, which was obviously a massive disinformation landscape that they couldn't do anything about because they were under the thumb of the Soviet Union.

So they kind of realized how important this was early on when I talked to Estonian and Finnish, for example, show fans. They're the first people to be like, oh, this is just a disinformation campaign. And I'm like, oh, cool. Oh, they're the online equivalent of me asking the 20 year olds how they know something is ai, because they go, ah, this has all the hallmarks of fake Russian news.

Look at this. And I'm just like, wow. I would never notice that. I would never ever pick that up. And we need that here in the States. I routinely have friends of mine go, have you seen this video? And it's something from rt, which is just a Kremlin mouthpiece, and they go, this is the only legit news source in the US now.

And I'm like, no, this is actually just completely fake and I'm sad that you believe it.

Eliot Higgins: The IO ask, why do they think that? And it always comes back to how these institutions [01:09:00] have had their trust completely destroyed across large sections of society. So part of the solution is, yes, we need to teach these critical education skills, but we also need to teach people how to engage in democracy and even the what the value of democracy is.

If you ask the average person on the street, why is democracy important, you're gonna get an answer that, oh, I get to vote and help what happens in this country? And they don't actually really dig into that, but almost our, we won World War ii, so we beat fascism, then we had the sixties and seventies. So we fixed racism and sexism, and now we kind of got managed into the eighties where we all got to make lots of money if we worked really hard.

And now we're in a situation where no one trusts anything that they're being told. Because what actually happened was all these institutions that were used to deal with these issues, these what they are known as counter publics, were hollowed out. That we were told that democracy is healthiest when there's free markets, that everyone can work really hard.

But there's this idea of negative freedom and positive freedom. So negative freedom is what you are free from. So freedom of speech, [01:10:00] freedom of religion, freedom of assembly. We get lots and lots of that in Westing democracies, which is great. But the positive freedom is like what your free to do. Are you free to actually influence the democracy you live in?

And we don't really have that anymore. It's like we are still also living in a system where if you wanna become a politician, you go to a great university, work really hard, and you get an internship. And by the time you are in your thirties, if you're lucky, you might be elected to some office where you might have a bit of influence.

But now in the current system, you can do that. Or you can just go on Twitter and just make a lot of noise telling people what they want to hear. And now you're an influencer in a political system that is so broken that everyone's constantly thinking why everything's going wrong without actually examining the deep rooted issues that are behind it.

And they just point their finger to Clinton, Trump, Democrat, Republican. But really it's a much, much deeper issue, and what we're seeing are symptoms of those issues. So yeah, we need to start with critical thinking skills, but you also need to. Think about democracy a lot more and [01:11:00] teach students about that in school because it's not obvious now to a lot of young people why democracy is important.

And it's really obvious to a lot of older people that democracy doesn't work the way that we've been told it works. We have a media culture that tells us about the kind of lawyer fighting against the bad business. You've got the police officer solving crimes. You know that if you find the evidence, if you expose it to light or fight justice, is that really what you feel that America, the uk, Europe is about at the moment?

No. Maybe you get to be a big influencer and maybe have a voice then. But as an individual, a normal day-to-day individual, does your voice matter? Can you actually find out what the truth is? You've got a Fox News truth. You've got a CNN truth, you've got a Trump truth, you've got a Democrat. You get given the truths that you want to hear rather than the truth that actually exist.

And then finally is, can we hold a powerful to account? Do you think we can hold the powerful to account at the moment? 'cause it certainly doesn't feel so.

Jordan Harbinger: No, of course not, man. This has been [01:12:00] fascinating. How do people join Bellingcat? Or is that not something you're looking for?

Eliot Higgins: Well, we have a Discord service, got about 40,000 members on, and that's a great community.

Often we'll actually identify investigations the community are doing and help them finish it and publish it, which is great fun. We have a volunteers program that people can sign up for if they wanna really get into the weeds of it. That's very popular, so you'll be waiting for a while, but that's fun.

Read the website, go to our YouTube channel, just see what we're putting out there and see what inspires you to do something.

Jordan Harbinger: I like that. So are there ways for folks to start learning this stuff at home? Is the Discord server kind of the best place to find those resources?

Eliot Higgins: Well, if you, a Discord is a great place to find like-minded people.

If you go to the Banging Cap website, we have guide and resources. The YouTube channel has hands-on kind of case studies. We can watch our researchers explain how to do stuff. Yeah, I'll just say, give it a go if you're interested. 'cause that's what I did and I turned out quite well.

Jordan Harbinger: What if Earth isn't the exception, but one of millions of planets that could host life?

Astrophysicist [01:13:00] Lisa. Cult Niger takes us on a mind-bending journey through the cosmos revealing how close we actually are to answering the question. Are we alone?

JHS Clip: We have found more than 5,600 plants or beating other stars, but we haven't seen most of them. And that's what we are looking for, that we live in this incredible time of exploration.

Because with bigger telescopes, with more time looking, we can find smaller worlds. We can find worlds that take more time to whi around their star. But we have actually changed our whole understanding of the cosmos in this respect that there are so many other stars out there. So we don't have to ships to get there yet.

We can catch the light and read it. There's hope and there's wonder, and there's our human curiosity that gets us to investigate our search for [01:14:00] life. Comes down to the question, can we find it? And that I think is what it takes to figure out how we fit in this beautiful cosmos. And science is so much fun, and I think this is what we sometimes don't get to convey.

This research is not just about are we alone in the universe? It's also about. Understanding our planet, getting a glimpse in our potential future when we look at older Earth and using all that knowledge to safeguard our pale bud Dog.

Jordan Harbinger: If you've ever looked up at the night sky and wondered who might be looking back, check out episode 10 56 with Lisa Culter.

All Things Elliot, Higgins and Bellingcat will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers deals, discount codes, ways to support the show all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter Wee bit wiser. The idea behind this, it's a two minute read every Wednesday.

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