HIGHLIGHTS: Eliot Higgins

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:01)
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 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** (0:54)
Thanks for having me on.

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:55)
So just to start, what is Bellingcat?

**Eliot Higgins** (0:58)
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. So let's just start with the beginning.

**Nicolai Tangen** (1:44)
2012, you're sitting at your kitchen table and you're looking at YouTube clips from the Syrian war. What did you see?

**Eliot Higgins** (1:51)
Yeah, so I would really like to say I had the kind of noble intention.

**Nicolai Tangen** (1:55)
First of all, why were you looking at YouTube clips from the Syrian war?

**Eliot Higgins** (1:58)
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 their 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. And 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 posting about it on Twitter and then doing a blog. So I had more places to write with no intention of anyone ever taking me that seriously. But eventually, they did.

**Nicolai Tangen** (2:50)
But what did you see?

**Eliot Higgins** (2:51)
So in Syria, I didn't speak any Arabic. So I was really looking at the content of the videos. And a lot of it showed unexploded munitions, eventually the aftermath of chemical weapon attacks. And I systematically tracked all the videos coming out of Syria because they basically used YouTube as their main distribution platform.
And those channels are usually run by media centers or arms groups. So you could actually have a catalog of all these channels and check them every single day. And no one else had figured out you could do that. So every day I would just go through hundreds of videos from Syria looking for stuff that was new or unusual, really focusing on ideaing weapons in particular.

**Nicolai Tangen** (3:32)
The difference between now and 2012 in terms of what's available online, in terms of material, what's the magnitude of change?

**Eliot Higgins** (3:41)
Well, I think one real change is the access we now have to satellite imagery. So back in 2012, we were very reliant on things like Google Earth and Google Maps. Now for a monthly fee, we use Planet Labs where we can not only get daily imagery of various sites, but we can actually task satellites to specific locations. So it's all very James Bond, but if there's this area we're interested in, we can put in a tasking request and get satellite imagery of that in the next few days, which for our kind of work when you're trying to vary stuff as quickly as possible is incredibly useful.