Eliot Higgins: How Bellingcat Hunts Down the Truth

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:01)
Hi, everyone, I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund. And today we have a very special episode. We are recording in front of a live audience of nearly 200 people. These are my colleagues at the Sovereign Wealth Fund. And we are joined by the very impressive Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, the world's leading open source investigative collective.
Now, Eliot is not a spy, not a trained journalist. He's actually a college dropout who taught himself to investigate war crimes from his kitchen table in Leicester. 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, Eliot. Warm welcome.

**Eliot Higgins** (0:45)
Thanks for having me on.

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:46)
So just to start, what is Bellingcat?

**Eliot Higgins** (0:49)
So Bellingcat does something called open source investigation. So that's using publicly available material to investigate a range of different topics. And really over the last 15 years, what is publicly available material has just mushroomed to just a huge extent. It's stuff like social media posts, satellite imagery available through things like Google Maps or other services, all kinds of things like marine traffic data or air flight data that's also publicly available. So we take all that data and then we investigate different things. And that's included chemical weapons attacks in Syria, the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, more recently a lot to do with America's bombing of Iran, ICE and DHS raids in the US as well.

**Nicolai Tangen** (1:33)
How do you decide what to focus in on?

**Eliot Higgins** (1:35)
Well, early on, 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 MH17, then Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
And so really, that kind of was just a bunch of volunteers doing things that were interesting to them. But now we have teams who work on financial investigations, what we call online ideologies, which is quite broad and conflict.

**Nicolai Tangen** (2:11)
So how many different hotspots are you looking at at each point in time?

**Eliot Higgins** (2:17)
It varies, but 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 multi-month process. Sometimes it's reacting really quickly to events that are happening on the ground in different contexts.

**Nicolai Tangen** (2:38)
Now you live here in Leicester. You got an organization in Holland, but you have a big network. Just how does it work?

**Eliot Higgins** (2:44)
So we have the Central Bellingcat 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 people.
There's also a Discord server where we have lots of people. It's kind of our community server that has about 43,000 people on it. And what's great about that is they kind of really have the values of Bellingcat, that it's really about the research first before they form an opinion about something, and that's something that's quite rare in the online spaces, but also they find stuff that we're not looking at, and then that becomes kind of part of our process as well.

**Nicolai Tangen** (3:22)
So what are the values? What would make me become one of your kind of, what should we say, reporters or helpers or investigators?

**Eliot Higgins** (3:29)
You never prejudge a situation. Just because you feel something should be the truth doesn't mean it actually is the truth. So I think that's very important over contentious issues as well, where there tends to be two sides who just want to pick fights with each other on the internet. We're not interested in that. We want to look at the evidence first and draw our conclusions based off that evidence.
But also it's about inclusion as well. It's saying it's not just about what we do at Bellingcat, but teaching other people these skills so they can do their own investigations and form their own communities. So community building with those values is something that's really a core part of what we do at Bellingcat.

**Nicolai Tangen** (4:05)
Now we have just so much to learn from the methodology here. So let's just always think, you know, how can we use this? But let's just start with the beginning. In 2012, you are sitting at your kitchen table and you're looking at YouTube clips from the Syrian war.