Abstract

In this episode, Mr Eliot Higgins discusses the weapons used in the conflict in Syria and open-source investigation tools and techniques.

This podcast series is presented by Dr Alessandro Arduino, Principal Research Fellow and Dr Ameem Lutfi, Research Fellow, at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore.

Listen to the full podcast here:

Full Transcript:

[Alessandro Arduino]: Welcome to the 21st episode of the National University of Singapore Middle East Institute podcast series Boots of the Ground: Security and Transition from the Middle East and Beyond. In this series, we look at the future of warfare which will see uniformed soldiers — or boots on the ground — being replaced by private military companies, autonomous weapons systems and cyber weapons. My name is Alessandro Arduino and I will be the co-host for the series along with my colleague, Ameem Lutfi.

I’m very delighted to have with us today, in this episode, Mr Eliot Higgins.He is the founder of Bellingcat and the Brown Moses Blog. He focuses on the weapons used in the conflict in Syria and open-source investigation tools and techniques. Bellingcat is an independent international collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists using open-source and social media investigation to probe some of the world’s most pressing stories. A Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, Mr Higgins also sits on the technical advisory board in the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In 2018, he was a visiting research associate at King’s College London — so Eliot we share an affiliation — and at the University of California in Berkeley.  Thank you so much for joining us today.

[Eliot Higgins]: Thanks for having me.

[Alessandro Arduino]: In our previous podcast, we discussed the role of Russian Wagner private military contractors from Syria to Libya. We can say that one face of the coin of the Russian hybrid way of waging war is related to the deniability factor and of course, contractors offer plenty deniability. On the other side of the coin, we have information or better yet, disinformation campaigns. So, Eliot, can you describe to our audience how your work, starting with the Syrian conflict, has shaped the evolution of the Brown Moses Blog into the Bellingcat, or as you describe it, an intelligence agency for the people. The floor is yours.

[Eliot Higgins]: It really started as a hobby for me, back in 2011. I was sort who probably spent too much time on the internet and also had an interest in what was happening across the world. I had an interest in geopolitics and especially about what America was up to.  Then, with the events of the Arab Spring, that too drew my attention and I found myself involved with various online discussions about what was really happening and unusually, in 2011 with the conflicts in Libya, there was a lot of videos and photographs coming from the ground that didn’t come from regular sources — you would see journalists on the ground and they were ordinary people somewhat acting like media centers. There’s a lot of debate about what was genuine and what wasn’t because very quickly, as with all things on the internet, you had two sides formed and they were calling one another liars but no one’s ever really trying to verify it. I realised that you could use satellite imagery to compare points of interest in a video, to what was visible in a satellite image and then figure out exactly where it was taken — that was my first attempt at what’s now known as geolocation but I was just doing it basically to win arguments on the internet. Then, it came to Muammar Gaddafi being killed in October 2011 – it was the same time my first child was born and my entire life went out the window as I was more focused on that.  By early 2012, I was looking for something to do which I thought I could pick up and put down easily because I still had to look after my child. That’s when I realised that there was a lot of interesting news coming on Syria that I could look at and write about.

So, I just started a blog and it wasn’t really my intention for it to ever be anything more than my hobby that probably no one would bother to read.  I used the name I’d been using online for a long time which was Brown Moses — which is named after a Frank Zappa song — and then over time, there were other people who were also really interested in what these videos showed, for various reasons. Some would be journalists who were working on the conflict in Syria and looking for a story or people working in the human rights field but eventually, I started finding some quite big stories. I wasn’t able to speak out, I didn’t know Arabic; so I was just watching videos and looking at safety weapons and learned how to identify weapons. There was so much information online, about weaponry because you had lots of people who were obsessed with Soviet-era weaponry and had lots of detailed photographs that I could use to compare with the remains of the bombs that had just been dropped on a village in Syria, [for example].  I learned to identify a lot of different weapons being used by both sides in the conflict. In early 2013 there were weapons that I’d never seen before in the conflicts starting to appear in very large quantities and I started piecing things together and looking at the kind of military units, rebel groups that were getting these weapons and it became very clear they were part of a network of rebel groups that were connected to Gulf states and their Western allies. I took that to a journalist whom I knew in The New York Times and he followed up with various US officials. Turns out, they did admit that it was Saudi Arabia’s secret operation to arm rebels in Syria, going through Jordan. That was the first time they’d been sold evidence of the Syrian rebels being armed by actors outside of the country. While there had been a lot of claims, allegations and rumours about this happening, there’d never been actual solid evidence of this before.

That ended up being a really big story on the front page of The New York Times and it raised my profile quite a bit, allowing me to crowdfund enough money to start doing it as a full-time job rather than just a part-time hobby. Then, I did a lot of investigations into the chemical weapon attacks that were happening in Syria – in particular, the big sarin attack that happened on 21 August 2013 — that raised my profile even further and generated a lot more interest in open-source investigation, in general.  By 2014 I got to the point where I wanted to launch a new site that had guides and case studies to show people how to do this kind of work and also the various work the other people’s investigations, rather than being under the Brown Moses name.  I launched that in July 2014 and then three days later, Malaysian Airlines flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine and a kind of open-source community emerged very rapidly around that.  Bellingcat became the center for that and it became our next big investigation.

[Ameem Lutfi]:  Thank you again for joining us today. I would like to go a little deeper into what we’re talking about right now. For the casual listeners, they often confuse Bellingcat to be a variation of Wikileaks but in your book, We Are Bellingcat, you present several points of differentiation between the two. So, I’m wondering if you could give our listeners a quick summary or overview about what are the main points of difference between something like Wikileaks and Bellingcat.

[Eliot Higgins]: Well, for one, we generally use material that’s only publicly available – open-source material – unlike Wikileaks. Wikileaks relies on leaked information that’s not public; we use information that’s generally public. More recent investigations into Russian assassinations have used information that’s come from the Russian black market for data. That’s still pretty open to the public and it’s not hard to find that stuff, buy the same data and other people have done that based on our investigations. We’re also publishing investigations where we’ve done analysis of information that we’ve had, whilst Wikileaks is often just dumping huge amounts of information online and letting other people look through it. We also have a lot of ethical considerations in our work surrounding people’s privacy – in terms of what we share; protecting people who aren’t directly involved with cases whilst Wikileaks is a lot looser around that as they’ll publish information that often is of no interest to members of the public and contains personal information. So, we are more about investigating rather than just publishing whatever we’re given.

[Ameem Lutfi]: I want to just to go back to the discussion about the Middle East and as you mentioned, your work started with Syria.  Here at the Middle East Institute (NUS), we know very well that crises in the Middle East happen frequently and very fast so sometimes, traditional media can be a bit slow  in covering the event and have a proper person on the ground,  reaching the area.  Since I’ve been following you for a really long time, I was very fascinated by the tool kit that you use in your investigation and these include geolocation, reverse photo search, photo aging process and so on. Can you describe to us how this set of tools was a game changer in building the case, for example, on Syrian chemical attacks and especially looking at the Syrian social media component during the conflict?

[Eliot Higgins]:  I think that over the last 15 years or so, there’s been two main threads of development. One, the launch and popularisation of smartphones which led to a wider use of social media applications so people on the ground in a conflict zone could share a photograph or video of what’s happening in front of them in the moment. Previously, you’re more reliant on journalists going out there and documenting information and then being in the right place at the right time – it was always a long time after the event had actually occurred so that created a vast amount of information that was then discoverable. Then, on the other hand, we’ve seen the rise of things like Google Earth – the availability of satellite imagery that would have never been available to people 20 or 30 years ago. We’ve seen things like Google street view; we’ve seen tools like reverse image search and many other tools that have emerged over the last 15 years that give us a huge amount of access to what is almost raw intelligence data. For instance, satellite imagery content which detect fires using satellites so you can see where there have been large-scale fires which has been useful in looking at villages being burned in Myanmar, for example.

These two trends have allowed us to start investigating conflicts in a way that you’ve never really been able to do before. You would see, for example, a video of an airstrike somewhere in Syria but they could look at the satellite imagery and find the exact location and realise that one day before the airstrike happened, the building was there and the next day it disappeared because it’d been bombed. You could verify not only where it happened but also the approximate time it happened as well and when all these little factors come together and are combined, they allow you to do increasingly complicated investigations.

When I first started out, I was literally just doing a post saying here’s a video of a bomb, it is based off very simple straightforward stuff but over time, that allowed me to learn to use a whole variety of different tools. It’s kind of like being a carpenter –  you have a toolbox and you wouldn’t say there’s one particular favourite tool so you don’t have a favourite hammer but when you look at a problem,  if you need to put up a set of shelves then you know you  need these tools  but if you need to build a house, you also know what  tools you need but there might be some things you will have to do slightly differently.  In a way, when you look at an investigation, you’re looking at an incident and the flowchart of what you’ve got to do appears in your mind. You know that you can use these tools first and if they don’t work, then there’s another set you could use to get similar information and take another route to where you’re trying to get to.  It really comes just through the experience of doing it and whenever I talk to people about how you get involved for open-source investigation, it’s simply a matter of just picking a video, geolocating it and doing that again and again and eventually, you’ll be able to learn how to do complicated things and more complicated investigations yourself. However, you’ve got to start by putting up your shelves first rather than building a house.

[Ameem Lutfi]: If you could stay with your work on Syria (I know you were ahead of not just other mainstream media news channels but also some of the very large intelligence agencies that governments have) some of the information about the use of chemical weapons — I don’t know if other intelligences knew of it but they definitely did not act on it until it was breaking news. What was it that allowed you to be ahead of the curve or these large organisations even?  Secondly, does this information come with some sense of moral or political responsibility or burden, knowing that other governments could use this information and tailor it to their own purposes or put them to their own ends?

[Eliot Higgins]: To answer your second question, for me, in a sense, why someone is on the ground filming something in a conflict zone is because they’re looking for some form of accountability — they might not know what that accountability is, what form it comes in but that can be through more traditional channels like the international criminal court, more around advocacy,  raising awareness or countering the disinformation that emerges around these attacks which is unfortunately something that’s happening increasingly frequently. For me, it was really that that makes it so possible. What changed so much for me is that a community kind of emerged around these things and it wasn’t just about me figuring these out all by myself – there was a community of people who were interested in the same thing and they shared what they knew with other people.  Very early on, I would encounter people who’d come to me about the video I found of some kind of ammunitions that’s discarded somewhere and there’d be someone who was very interested in that coming from an arms control perspective but they’d also have a journalist approach me asking to share more about it. That’s when I step in and link the two of them up so that they can talk. Making those connections with the community is something that I think is quite unique to Bellingcat and that’s actually what I think in OS-INT (open-source intelligence) gives us an advantage over more traditional communities – be it the intelligence communities or the media ones. It’s that idea of collaborating across fields, sharing information and not keeping it to yourself and making it your own private little thing to share with a small group of people. What we’re trying to do is get the information out to as many people as possible not just to raise awareness but also to give other people who have the skills and knowledge of that information, a chance to see it. Very early on in the conflicts in Syria, I had figured out that rather than videos being shared on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in a random fashion, it was actually done in quite a systematic way because you’d have local media centres that were set up and they’d become almost the nexus point for all that information being shared online from across a small region, be it a town or a set of villages etc. Once that was identified, I ended up with a list of about 1,000 YouTube channels and I would subscribe to them all and see what’s posted every day.  It was a constant stream of videos — at the peak of the conflict it could be several hundred videos a day; now it’s more like a dozen but at the peak you could find a lot of information there even in individual videos. You would see a new bomb being used or a clear footage of a bomb dropping from a hospital, for instance.

So that was enough to write about in the early days but as I became more sophisticated and connected to this network of people, it was possible to do more in-depth investigations and start taking it to the level where there would be value in those investigations to international bodies who work on accountability.  Now, we’re in a position where we’re developing a whole  process for archiving an investigation that is focused on using open-source material to investigate conflict incidents with the intention of that  being used by bodies such as the International Criminal Court where they need to be able to rely on that evidence to a certain extent and know that our process of investigation is something that we can explain in the court and is solid.  If we can achieve that level of quality, then organisations like parts of the United Nations who now often approach us know they can rely on our investigative work because we have a standard that we’ve set and it’s a high one that can be submitted to a course so they can trust what we’re sharing.

[Alessandro Arduino]: As you mentioned, standard – especially from the legal point of view – is extremely important as it’s related to facts, accountability and transparency.  The more we talk about accountability, the more we see that in an era of disinformation – countering disinformation is a key component not only for the national state (as we realised early on) but even for non-state actors like ISIS, for example, understood early on the power of YouTube and online propaganda.  Looking at the evolution of your blog – Brown Moses to Bellingcat after you published your work on Syria — and Iranian television called you just a UK-based armchair observer and not long ago, if I recall correctly, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov mentioned that Bellingcat is closely connected with the intelligence service. I do believe this was in reference to your investigation on the Skripal assassination conducted with the nerve agent Novichok. So, my question is:  besides going worldwide to make friends, are you in a way contributing to perhaps, Bellingcat being infiltrated and becoming part of a false flag operation? I really enjoyed reading your book and in there, you mentioned that while the Russian media makes jokes, the military wing of the Kremlin is deadly serious.  As we do most of our research on private military companies and private security, I can guarantee that several leading researchers from Russia and journalists, in the last two to three years, died due to a so-called robbery that went wrong or a so-called suicide.

[Eliot Higgins]: Yes, the physical security risks are something that’s become an increasing concern particularly since we started doing the investigations on Russian assassinations which obviously got the attention of the intelligence services. That started in 2018 with our Skripal investigation and then from there, we discovered more suspects and their involvement in another poisoning in Bulgaria, their connections with a scientist who worked for a research laboratory that we then identified almost certainly, as the source of the Novichok. These assassinations led us to identify the FSB team connected to the Navalny poisoning and their involvement in a number of other assassination attempts so this has really been one big long investigation and throughout it, you can tell that Russia’s attitude towards us has changed a lot. In 2018, we were still somewhat like an unemployed underwear salesman in Leicester who didn’t know about anything and now, we’ve been promoted to working directly with the British government and being funded by the intelligence services also. So, certainly, that has caused the perception to change from the side of the Russians.  For myself, at the moment, I have British county terrorism police who are in contact with me to make sure I’m safe and they give me advice on how I can look after myself and protect myself a bit more from any potential wrongdoers. In a way, the Covid-19 situation has helped because I’ve not had to travel that much and it’s kept me away from hotel rooms where poison can be applied to my underpants and such.

So, generally, it’s not been so bad because I’ve been at home most of the time but I am a lot more aware now, of my safety in hotel rooms on those rare occasions I do travel. I have placed hidden cameras in my hotel room so if someone comes into my room, images of them are captured. So far it’s mostly been the cleaners in the room but still have to be very careful — for example, I won’t eat food that’s prepared in the hotel because I don’t know who’s working there. I won’t know if suddenly a staff called in sick and now they’ve got a temporary employee who speaks Russian – you’ve got to be cautious. So I’ve started being a lot more careful around those kind of things and of course, there’s still the risk from the state actors but also the fact that we deal in subjects where there are a lot of conspiracy theories, those can occasionally attract people who aren’t the most mentally stable. If the person who’s walking up to you at a public event is going to be someone who’s decided you’re the kind of lizard person who needs to be exposed and the best way to do that is stabbing you so everyone can see your green blood, you’ve got to be really careful and cautious.  This affects some of us more than others but also because we’re a grown organisation and we’re being joined by people who haven’t been in that kind of environment, we have to be very aware of the risks of trauma through exposure to this very odd situation.  I’m used to it now but if you’re new to such things, it can become very overwhelming very quickly, especially if you become the target of the Russian media and you start being mentioned by a person — that can be a very unpleasant situation to be in. The work that you do is very dangerous but it’s incredibly important.

[Ameem Lutfi]: We’ve been running this podcast for about over a year now and one of the recurring themes that we’ve been talking about is that the US seems to be still stuck in fighting the upcoming wars using means that bought them success in the last war – in a way, it’s still stuck in the Cold War mentality.  In one of our events earlier in October, General (ret.) David H. Petraeus said that Russia and China might be taking the step ahead in using information dominance and cyber means to take an edge ahead of the US while the US is still stuck in F-35s and missiles.  Do you think that in the coming years, we will see NATO taking on some of these means more seriously or at least more consciously? Things like hiring their own team of OS-INT (open-source intelligence) ninjas or building their own organisations like the digital forensic lab which you’ve helped build through the Atlantic Council.

[Eliot Higgins]: I think there needs to be more appreciation from the more traditional structures that you’re seeing. Non-traditional structures are starting to form thanks to the internet and Bellingcat is part of that – we’re part of a network of organisations that work on different aspects of open-source investigation and in different fields, be it media, justice or accountability.  I think there’s value to what these organisations are producing for those higher-level actors but they need their own internal capability to actually understand what they’re looking at because it’s very easy to just look at the kind of evidence we’ve been presented and then say that we know that must be true. You still need people who can actually understand that and spot bad open-source investigations along with the good ones.

I think when you’re dealing with actors, especially like Russia, that is willing to lie in the most blatant ways possible and in almost contradictory ways, you’ve got to be able to counter that very often. I’ve heard stories from people at the United Nations where they might be working on a particular conflict and having a meeting with Russia that’s on the other side of the conflict and Russia will come with a huge folder filled with articles printed off the internet about the white helmets or chemical weapons attacks from all kinds of different sources and conspiracy theorists and just dump them on the desk and say that that’s their evidence.  They treat that to be equal to any other evidence produced from expert organisations like the OPCW (Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) or in-depth investigations that we produce. They like to make it seem as though both are the same level of quality of evidence and we’ve got to take that seriously. What you see is a growing number of counterfactual communities that have formed — and I describe them in the book — around certain topics that are increasingly being weaponised by actors like Russia. So you’ve seen the work of the Working Group on Syrian Propaganda and Media in relation to things like the democracy attack where they’ve basically pushed conspiracy theories but because there’re professors who are part of that group, they have a bit more credibility than those who push that stuff – they have their message amplified by the Russian state, the Russian media and they’re used by the Russians as a way to counter  other claims about the attacks. We’ve seen that in the case of Bonanza Media which is a Dutch-based organisation that was founded by a MH17 truther and For Russia Today journalists.  We found evidence that they were frequently in direct communication with The Hague senior officer in the GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation) and seemingly sending articles ahead of time before they were published to this GRU office and arranging travel into eastern Ukraine. That’s another case of this being weaponised and they were provided with leaked information that came from the joint investigation team in an attempt to undermine the investigation. So, we need to recognise that Russia is willing to lie just as easily as it breathes and it’s willing to weaponise disinformation online and treat it seriously because when you actually look at Russia’s statements in a lot of these incidents like chemical weapons attacks or MH17, they just steal many of their ideas from people on the internet. They don’t really have their own original thinking around these kinds of things. They just see what’s on the internet and what they can put out there and this happens even at a very senior level — I’ve seen Sergey Lavrov repeatedly make claims at interviews and press conferences that are based off internet conspiracy theories. I think that needs to be recognised more and called out a lot more often, saying that Russia and its intelligence services don’t really provide information about these things. It’s kind of an absurd situation and I think it’s one that we need to recognise more. I also don’t think the West should try and duplicate that – we need to fight this on our own terms and not on the Russian terms because otherwise, you will have two groups of people lying to each other and the truth becomes irrelevant.

[Alessandro Arduino]: Now, you  mentioned information weaponisation and in this  BOTG series, we discussed not only the privatisation of the state monopoly violence but now we are increasingly  focusing on the role of information weaponisation, cyber mercenaries. Unfortunately, we believe that in the not too far off future, there will probably be a rise of private military companies that use drones and lethal automated weapons systems on a pay-per-use service — you get a menu, you get your attack drone, you choose how many missiles on the payload you are willing to pay for and you ask them to privatise your mission. Looking at this, do you foresee a rise of private companies that offer crowd services very similar to Bellingcat but for a price?

[Eliot Higgins]: This is something we’ve been  debating internally because we get a lot of organisations that don’t have their own open-source capability reaching out to us  but they recognise there’s a lot of open- source information coming in and these groups are  various NGOs, parts of the United Nations, all kinds of actors who are working on human rights issues and the problem for us is that we have about 25 full-time and part-time staff members so we have to pick and choose what we work on. Yet, we recognise that there’s a vast amount of interest in using open-source investigation to investigate these incidents and it’s not something that we can do sustainably, for free so what we’ve been debating about internally is that maybe we need to look at  having a separate partly for-profit type of organisation that then can fund the work of the core Bellingcat organisation but it’s  getting to a point where that can be  quite difficult to achieve. The other issue is because open-source investigation, as a field, has kind of developed around the Arab Spring and the conflicts in Ukraine and Russia. You have lots of Arabic and Russian speakers but you don’t really have people who speak Chinese or languages in other countries where they’ve not had big open source investigations done and that community hasn’t emerged. So that actually adds a really big restriction because it’s hard to offer a service for investigation where you can only really say you’ve got a handful of experts in a certain area. So, part of what we’re trying to do at the moment is to help train people from a wide variety of backgrounds to have a relatively wide set of language skills and interests in open-source investigations so they can use it in their own work and hopefully, use that as a way to start building a community.  Alongside that, because open-source investigation has really grown around big stories like MH17,  the Skripals poisoning or the conflicts in Syria, we’re now trying to work more with local organisations  that have networks of journalists and activists and work with them to train them to do open source investigation as part of work they’re already doing. So, rather than relying on just big unpredictable stories emerging that trigger this kind of growth, open-source investigation

can be nurtured at a more grassroots level and allow it to emerge through pre-existing networks that we hope will in turn attract non-professional networks that have been drivers of open-source investigation growth before.

[Alessandro Arduino]: Now, I’ll just make a comment on what you have said. While reading your book, I was wondering about the China angle of things and you just answered this question. As a Sinologist by training and I’ve been in China for 23 years, I can agree that language is a barrier and that machine translation works very badly compared to other European languages while at the same time, we are already witnessing something that probably in the future, will constrain even more OS-INT investigations. It’s some kind of a digital decoupling; having different systems that speak different languages in which people can access only one or the other. We should not forget that for several countries, starting with the People’s Republic of China, the internet and the cyber space are part of the nation state and it’s not some separate free entity. In the end, it is an important part of national security. Ameem, back to you.

[Ameem Lutfi]:  Yes, that’s an important point but I want to come to a place sort of close to China but one that we’re in now — Singapore. Singapore for the past few years has been very concerned about disinformation campaigns both from internal and external actors and I’m wondering if you have any suggestions or tips for a country like Singapore – a small, resource-rich country – on how to prepare its own population for spotting these different information campaigns and how can it raise awareness amongst the general citizenry about false news.

[Eliot Higgins]: Well, I think one thing that’s been effective in other countries like Finland, for example, is that they teach children about this information at school and show them how to identify and understand it. Older people could miss the fact that we now have a generation going through school who are full digital natives; they do not really see a separation between the digital and real world   in a way I think people maybe our age, are more inclined to see. It’s something that’s fully integrated — they say half of the 10-year-olds in UK have a smartphone, which to me is a terrifying statistic considering the type of information they’re being served and especially now, we know how social media companies are prioritising content that’s controversial rather than content that’s truthful. We’ve recently seen Facebook saying that if you react with an angry face on the post, that’s more heavily weighted in the algorithm than a smiley face so it drives content that makes people angry and puts people in different camps against each other. So, I think there needs to be more awareness around that. I think if you do work with younger people to teach them about these kinds of things, you can also teach them how to have a more positive impact through the kind of investigative work that Bellingcat does.  Looking at issues locally, maybe, where there can be open-source investigation done, there can be stuff that’s done as a community. That’s actually already being done to a certain extent – in the UK, a group called ‘Student View’ go into schools in deprived areas and teaches 16 to 18-year-old students to do straightforward investigation techniques and team them up with local media to work on local issues. So there’s one group of students in Bradford, for example, who saw there were a lot of high-speed police chases on the streets in the places they lived and they were told that they could do a freedom of information request to get the information on how many there were — something they had no idea they could even do — and the fact they were 16-year-olds and able to ask the police for information was actually very empowering for them because they thought they could not do that. They learned that that area had one of the highest rates for high-speed police chases in the UK and it created a conversation.
It made the police respond, it actually had an impact; it created accountability and it made those young people realise that it isn’t just about waiting for a journalist or someone to investigate something, they can be part of it too. I think if we can encourage that, rather than just focusing on telling them to watch out for disinformation, you actually create a much richer and more engaged online culture that is inclined to finding out solutions to problems rather than arguing with other people on the internet to themselves yourself feel good, thinking that they’re actually achieving something when they’re not.

[Ameem Lutfi]: You mentioned about the risks and  perils in your work, such as having some doubts in drinking a tea that glows green in the evening when you are in your hotel; but previously, we have been discussing about PTSD for drone pilots being miles away from a conflict zone, for contractors in non-combat roles,  having a Filipino cook flipping burgers but in an area that has been shelled by mortar  in the green zone in Baghdad. So, looking at PTSD — you and your colleagues spend a lot of time looking at videos that are not filtered; there are video of massacres that included civilians and what you mentioned in your book, also very gruesome image such as beheadings carried out by ISIS — undoubtedly takes a toll on your daily life. Did you notice some PTSD issues among your fellow volunteers in Bellingcat or did you even encounter this problem yourself?

[Eliot Higgins]: It’s something we’re very aware of because I did start this work on the conflicts in Liberia and then Syria and certainly, the content coming from Syria, some of them were really terrible imagery. I think I’ve always been quite lucky because it hasn’t had a really big impact on me. I think in one sense because that wasn’t happening in parallel to my kind of success; I think that may have kind of lessened the blow that you receive from that kind of stuff; but it’s something we’re very aware of. We have external consultants who come in and talk to our staff about this and we have compulsory sessions with psychologists twice a year for everyone just so they have a chance to talk about anything that might come up. We are also very aware that when there’s a new conflict and we have some people who generally don’t work on conflict, they have language skills that are relevant to new conflicts — like we have an Armenian researcher who, with the Armenian and Azerbaijani conflict, started looking at content from there. I told her that she shouldn’t just expose herself to that unless she really has to because the content I was seeing from there was definitely in the higher tiers of what I would consider traumatic content and it’s very easy to feel like you have to look at something because you feel you have to witness it so that it’s acknowledged as something that’s actually happening. You can fall into the trap of doing that too much and then it becomes too ingrained into your thinking and that can be quite dangerous.

So I think because we’ve had that experience with that kind of material and also we have a very open community that discusses that openly it’s important to do that. I think it’s easier to have those discussions but there’s other kinds of trauma as well. I mean, there’s vicarious trauma you can get by seeing that kind of content; there’s also moral injury that can occur and that can be quite serious; and when you’re dealing with conspiracy theorists who continuously deny war crimes that you’ve investigated and can see have happened, they aggressively attack you online and write articles about you. It’s very easy to start taking that quite personally and very deeply. It’s a personal thing but you can start defining your outlook on the topic and you have to avoid getting drawn into that because I think for me, one reason you have these kinds of counterfactual communities form is because they’ve gone through some form of traumatic moral injury relating to some topic they’re interested in — often it’s the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the lies told by the UK and US government around that — and  then that somewhat defines someone’s  entire worldview.

So moral injury actually can be a real big risk when it comes to seeking the truth – as we’re trying to do – because rather than seeking the truth, you’re actually then trying to say that side’s bad and we’ve got to do everything we can to attack that side and if there’s anything that that side says is true, it can’t actually be true because they’re the bad guys and everyone who agrees with them are the bad guys also. That’s exactly what’s happening on the other side of the aisle with the people who are talking about conspiracy theories and if we just become an organisation like that because we don’t address moral injury as much as the vicarious trauma, that’s almost as damaging as what could happen psychologically to someone who’s seen a huge amount of violent content.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Now, this is an absolutely fascinating discussion but I want to now move on to a recent report that was published by Bellingcat.  To our listeners who haven’t read it yet, I highly encourage you to do so but to summarise it, basically the report was on an incident called the Wagner-gate – a group of Russian mercenaries who were arrested in Belarus on the allegation of election interference in Belarus itself. Russia initially maintained that these soldiers arrested were part of a conspiracy or an American plot to create rifts between Russia and Belarus but in a surprising discovery that Bellingcat reported, they were actually part of a botched Ukrainian intelligence operation to lure mercenaries with experience in the Crimean war, through a fake private military company.

For me, what was really fascinating about this report — and I say this as somebody who works on privatisation in the military — was that it gave us a very rare insight into the process of how private military recruitment in Russia works. For the first time, I realised that between the initial contracting period and the deployment period, aspiring soldiers often have to wait several weeks or months in a city and even look for temporary employment. We got to see the central role that curators play and the sense of confusion that’s inherent in such a recruitment process by companies, that even the Russian intelligence agencies had a hard time telling the fake companies apart from the real ones.

So I’m wondering what were some of the main takeaways from this report for you, about the shady world of private military contracting in Russia or even globally?

[Eliot Higgins]: It was definitely the sense that it is something that’s a lot more disorganised than I imagined it would be. There’s certainly a way it operates but you have these mercenaries who are just stuck waiting for things to happen for weeks and months at end; they don’t get paid a vast amount of money — I think sometimes there’s this assumption that mercenaries get tons of money for that work but they don’t get paid an awful lot of money for what they’re doing. They’re taking a great deal of risks and when we spoke to those mercenaries who spoke to us directly about this, there was certainly a sense of unhappiness with where they were in life and whether they had to do this and it wasn’t like they’d chosen to be a mercenary in their life. There was no way for them to make any of kind of real money and it wasn’t even huge amounts of money, it was not a great wage but it’s all they could do to make money. They certainly held the people who were hiring them in a certain degree of contempt and these aren’t loyal mercenaries who’ll die for their employer, they’re just people trying to make a bit of money and hope they don’t die guarding an oil field somewhere in Venezuela. I think that’s also quite interesting when you look at what happened in Syria a while ago where a large number of mercenaries were slaughtered by the US after they tried to attack a position and you have to wonder about the motivations behind the people and how that even occurred. It becomes interesting as well, when you hear about the insurance policies that are taken out on these mercenaries both by themselves and the companies who employ them.  If a mercenary dies, the company gets a big payout so when a couple hundred mercenaries get stored all at once, that’s a huge payout for the companies that send them out there. So those contexts around that kind of stuff is really interesting but I thought the whole process was fascinating, just the like you said — you don’t usually have that level of transparency about the employment process for mercenaries and the fact that they were saying that some of them were checking with the FSB if this was a legitimate operation and they found out that it is.  Since there’s so much of this going on, it’s so disorganised that it looked legitimate enough but they didn’t really dig into it — I mean, if you dug into that company, you have seen a lot of suspicious stuff and they clearly did a very surface level kind of look into it so it’s clear it wasn’t even that unusual but this was happening. It was just like the usual way of businesses operating and therefore the FSB didn’t think it was worth digging into too much. And there are other things going on that were, it seems, confused with the actual fake operation; there were real things going on.

It’s the messiness and how it was disorganised — it surprised me more than anything but thinking back on our past research on Russian assassinations and how they mess those up in a way, it shouldn’t really be surprising.

[Alessandro Arduino]: I think we can go on talking about this for hours, if not days but unfortunately, our time is almost coming to an end.  I’m asking you what I usually ask to all our guests – we call it the billion dollar question and it’s basically this:  we look at the future of warfare in the coming 30 years but with you now, I want to reshape this question.  In your opinion, what will be the future of OS-INT in the coming 30 years? We will witness an increase of data from sensors, better and cheaper processing power and different kind of toolsets with an internet that, as I mentioned earlier, that is becoming a central part of national state security. Are we going to witness a kind of digital decoupling between China and the US and the West and increased capabilities for AI to create deepfakes and more efficient disinformation campaign?

[Eliot Higgins]:  On the open-source side of things, we believe there will be more organisations up here that are like the frontline kind of organisations who gather the material that’s been put online and do an analysis of it. This then creates certain pressures – if you’re seeing this information because social media companies tend to remove violent content quite quickly, you need to be able to capture that and archive it. If your intention is to create accountability around what you’re seeing, you need to do that in a systematic fashion and in a way that actually makes it useful for justice and accountability processes. In the future, you need a methodology that is also something that is repeatable and can be documented and that’s what we’re trying to develop at Bellingcat. We’ve been doing this for our Yemen project – we’ve developed a process for archiving investigation, tested it in a mock trial and we’ve looked at how open-source evidence can be used in a court. Then, the question is:  how we can turn that into a package that we can then deploy to other organisations who are working in this field and when they create these archives of information and these investigations, how do you make those discoverable by the end-users and stakeholders who are going to use this for their own purposes? Be it the ICC or mechanisms set up by the United Nations, as we’re seeing in Syria and elsewhere at the moment.

So, we need to create somewhat of a centralised index system that allows us to index decentralised archives; bits of the technology and knowledge already exist but it’s just turning it into one component rather than having a bunch of information that’s unconnected at the moment.  A big part of our work is related to doing that and our hope is that in 30 years’ time, we’ll have lots of organisations like Bellingcat using that kind of Bellingcat methodology for archiving investigations that will be recognised by large organisations who then use that for advocacy or accountability purposes etc.  because they understand that the transparency of the process is based off rules that we’ve established through working with lawyers and courts to actually say that this is concrete information that can be used.

My hope is for us to pull that off  rather than what we see at the moment where it takes an awful lot of time for this kind of information to be processed — sometimes years.
It’s being done more now and I’m hoping that we can reach  a point where before conflicts occur, we  already have got organisations who know how to immediately, from day one of the conflict, archive and investigate it and make it useful information that  is accessible to anyone who might need to use it themselves.  I hope that in the future, when there’re conflicts that escalate,  claims coming from either side and the international community is  wondering who told the truth and what to do about it, there is at least one way to get good information from the conflict about exactly what’s happening and the people involved in the conflicts are aware that something like that is happening  so when they’re planning their next massacre, it might dissuade them from doing that.  I think if we can build something around that, it will help a great deal for both accountability and preventing atrocity.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Thank you so much for joining us today. This has been an absolutely fascinating discussion so thank you again for giving us your time and providing an in-depth look into the world of open-source investigation. Thank you to all our listeners, too, for joining us. Until next time.