We are Bellingcat

We are Bellingcat

Author

Eliot Higgins

Year
2021
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Review

The highbrow version of the Netflix documentary ‘Don’t f*** with cats’ - the rise of the stay at home armchair investigative journalist.

This is the BellingCat origin story. It shows how the author and his growing collective exposed chemical weapons attacks in Syria, war crimes in Libya and Russia’s involvement in the downing of flight MH17.

We live in a world of data and it’s changing how journalists get to the truth. New tools and datasets (StreetView, reverse image search, Planet Labs satellites, SunCalc) enable individuals to geo-locate and temporal-locate videos and images posted to social. They document their forensic approach as they go, so it can be replicated by others.

When controversy erupts, an army of volunteers can be mobilised in an instant. They can get to the truth faster than law enforcement and the world’s best intelligence agencies.

BellingCat are open sourcing their playbook, hoping more people join the movement.

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Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

  • It used to be for spy agencies that 90% of valuable intelligence came from secret sources → now 90% comes from open sources.
  • The problem with secret intel is that you have to trust the government. The Iraq war showed that we need to be careful.
  • Much of what we believe - is just what somebody else told us.
  • Bellingcat is an intelligence agency for the people. Open community of amateurs on a collaborative hunt for evidence.
  • Open source investigation isn’t about your qualifications - it’s about your results
  • The response to information chaos is transparency.
  • Geo-location is the first technique of the digital detective.
  • ‘The BellingCat Method’
    • Work must stand in opposition to the worst of traditional journalism
    • Sourcing would remain as open to public scrutiny as possible
    • Political agenda’s have nothing to do with the work
    • Evidence based citations were to underpin all findings
The people formally known as the audience wish to inform the media people of our existence and of a shift in power Jay Rosen
  • In Syria Western journalists were targeted - making the open source method of journalism more important, you can do it from anywhere. There was also just too much information for traditional news organisations to fact check.
  • 108 people were executed, government blamed terrorists. Strong online pro-Assad media.
  • Author started documenting weapons. Tried to classify every weapon bigger than a machine gun.
    • He spotted a Russian made cluster bomb that hadn’t exploded on a video that had only 200 views - the world would have missed it.
    • Was able to prove the air-force were dropping barrel bombs. 11k people would be killed by the cheap barrel bombs.
    • Spotted a new type of rocket launcher destroying a tank in a Syrian video. The rebels couldn’t have got it from the government. Eventually proved the Saudis were doing it, with the knowledge of the US government, purchasing arms from the Croatian government, flying them to Jordan, and moving them across the border to the free Syrian army
    • In 2013 in Damascus a chemical weapons attack killed 1000 people and thousands more were injured.
      • Unexploded rockets with liquid containers narrowed the the number of agents.
        • Geolocated crash site together with the rocket angle showed it was likely launched from a Syrian military installation
        • A second type of munition was shown to be from Soviet artillery - capable of delivering 2.2kg of a nerve agent
        • The munitions were new - they hadn’t appeared in the conflict to date
    • Russia tried to spread so many lies and so much confusion that people would give up trying to work out the truth.
  • Not understanding Arabic helped him focus on what he could see.
  • Information Wars → states could inject propaganda right into foreign countries
    • Russia tired to show nothing was happening in Syria - by showing archival footage. He was able to debunk.
    • In just 1 hour Bellingcat were able to identify a huge number of falsifications. Typically they’re taking video footage form elsewhere and attaching their own story to it
  • His blog grew to 500k views a month, he knew what he was doing was important, but couldn’t continue to do it. Crowdfunding 6k gave him some more time.
  • The problem with Wiki-leaks:
    • The founder and organisation are political
    • The large secret information dumps are hard to validate and cross-reference
  • He kept expecting a major organisation to take over the field and professionalise it
    • Major institutions didn’t want to move first - they wanted an example to copy

BellingCat

  • Named after a fable about mice who planned to put a bell on a cat so they could hear him coming.
  • Principles: Identify → Verify → Amplify
  • People were interested in Bellingcat explaining their methods, so they started to document them
  • The dual mission of Bellingcat
    1. Carrying out investigations
    2. Giving others the tools to carry out there own
      • Articles and how to guides (e.g how to geo-locate)
  • The Bellingcat process is founded on transparency→ state what they found out and from where → don’t claim to know more than what they can discover
  • MH17 investigation
  • Demonstrated that Russians had sent a Buk system from Moscow, they covered it’s exact movements in and out of Ukraine, the launch site, the missile trajectory and even the people who were involved.
  • Were also able to show Moscow tried to cover it up. The Kremlin has a long history of disinformation
    • The 4D approach
      • Dismiss - aggressively dismiss uncomfortable facts. Attack the sources themselves
      • Distort - exaggerate the truth, or invent claims
      • Distract - conspiracy theories, ‘what about-ism? → turning accusations back on the accuser’
      • Dismay -threaten those who dispute the Kremlins narrative.
    • Russian strategy is both cyber dominance and information dominance.
      • It’s Twitter accounts within a few days posted 111k posts
        • Claiming it was a military aircraft Initially
        • And then that it was the Ukrainians
  • The Powerful Network Effects of Open-Source Investigation
    • Each investigation will inspire more
    • Each investigation connected Bellingcat to more and more obsessives online.
  • Tools of the trade:
    • Meta data from pictures
    • Google Reverse image searching
    • Private satellite images (Digital Globe /
    • Google Street View
    • Online databases and manuals (weapons manuals etc)
  • They have to download images and videos quickly before they’re removed from social media sites.
  • The Social Media Dilemma: They don’t want to spread dangerous material BUT they also don’t want to curb free speech
  • They have to to take steps to protect victims. Sometimes withhold publication and allow police to investigate first
  • Bellingcat ethics: they only investigate people who may have committed a serious crime OR who hold a public positions of power - and are threatening criminal acts
  • The internet helped expose extremism at Charlottesville
    • Protestors tend to go to rallies with friends, so the person next to you can give you away.
‣
The gamification of mass violence
  • 8 chan is the most anonymous and dark of message boards. Some try to radicalise others
  • Shootings filmed and streamed live → get the high score, to the tune of music
  • Real life effort posting - encouraging others to commit violence IRL
  • Founder of 8 chan tried to take it offline - if reemerged as 8gun
‣
There are many risks to participating in this type of journalism
  • Death threats and bounties
  • Cyber attacks
  • Phone hacking
  • Panic Attacks
  • Post traumatic stress → Grim photos and videos from war / place crashes
  • If you have a personal connection to victims - then it’s going to hit you harder
  • Information and actions need to be archived in realtime as people are investigating
  • The online world is both enduring and ephemeral
  • Research standards need to be high for triple use
    • Investigative journalism
    • Academic study
    • Legal cases
  • Code of ethics protocol for open source investigations from the human rights centre:
    1. Safety → physical and psychological of whistleblowers
    2. Transparency → peer review, facts
    3. Respecting dignity of those involved
  • AI is going to change the tools but the tactics will remain the same. There will be more deep fakes and more ways to detect them. What’s important when thinking about the future:
    1. You need to know what kind of trickery is possible
    2. Consider the consequences of it (historical records can even be tampered with)
    3. Understand where the technology going
    4. Synthetic media will spread through social - so understanding how they work is key
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Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

These notes are particularly messy. Apologies.

Revolution on a laptop

  • It used to be for spy agencies that 90% of valuable intelligence came from secret sources → now 90% comes from open sources.
  • The problem with secret intel is that you have to trust the government. The Iraq war showed that we need to be careful.
  • Much of what we believe - is just what somebody else told us.
  • Bellingcat is an intelligence agency for the people.
  • The Arab spring was shared live on social media. BUT the problem is - how do you what people are posting is true?
  • The response to information chaos is transparency.
  • Author from a Youtube clip and Google Maps was able to determine the front line of a conflict in Libya.
  • Author has tweeted 250,000 times.
  • Geo-location is the first technique of the digital detective.
  • Author went after the voice-mail hacking journalists at News of the World. Went through a leak of 14k emails.
  • Open source investigation isn’t about your qualifications - it’s about your results
  • ‘The BellingCat Method’
    • Work must stand in opposition to the worse of traditional journalism
    • Sourcing would remain as open to public scrutiny as possible
    • Political agenda’s have nothing to do with the work
    • Evidence based citations were to underpin all findings
  • Open community of amateurs on a collaborative hunt for evidence
  • Rosen: Citizen journalism would gain influence as other institutions lose control
    • The people formally known as the audience wish to inform the media people of our existence and of a shift in power Jay Rosen
  • Syria - Western journalists targeted
  • Traditional newspapers were declining / too much information to fact check
  • Researching online was safer, many journalists were being captured
  • 108 people executed, government blamed terrorists. Strong online pro-Assad media too
  • Helped that he didn’t have a horse in the race.
  • Started documenting weapons and improvisations
  • Strangely - not understanding Arabic helped him, he wasn’t distracted by the words, but wss instead looking at what he could see
  • Spotted a cluster bomb that hadn’t exploded → Russian made. On a video that had only 200 views - the world would have missed it
  • He’d found a way to view all the videos coming out of the few news rooms people could use to get the world out
  • Information Wars and Barrel Bombs
  • Syria - how were the rebels doing it. Tried to classify every weapon bigger than a machine gun
  • Rebels were mounting bigger weapons on pick up trucks, large enough to shoot down helicopters of the regime, improvised weapons (IEDs and flame throwers)
  • International community didn’t know who to support
  • Received a lot of abuse from social on both sides of the debate
  • Russia tired to show nothing was happening in Syria - by showing video footage that Bellingcat could prove was in Damascus.
  • Information Wars → states could inject propaganda right into foreign countries
  • Russia are using RT news as an information weapon
    • In just 1 hour Bellingcat were able to identify a huge number of falsifications. Typically they’re taking video footage form elsewhere and attaching their own story to it
  • Footage emerged of locals surrounding a Barrel Bomb - that they claimed was dropped by an airforce Helicopter
    • RT brought on Generals to counter the claims
    • Video from inside a helicopter of an airman lighting the fuse of a barrel bomb and pushed it out
    • Used the top down view to identify the town in Syria
    • 11k people would be killed by the cheap barrel bombs
  • Many of his detractors would call the author ‘a so called expert’ → he never called himself that, but actually he knew more that most of the policy makers about the Syrian conflict
  • Front Page of the New York Times
  • Author spotted a new type of rocket launcher destroying a tank in a Syrian video. The rebels couldn’t have got it from the government.
    • It was from Serbia, Macedonia or Croatia → Yukoslavia
    • Insurgents had received a big shipment from the border in Jordan
    • Weapons had been distributed illegally - international arms smuggling
      • Was able to do that from social media posts and recording weapons on a spreadsheet
      • Spotted other ex-yukoslavia weapons, further into Syria
    • The Saudis were doing it, with the knowledge of the US government, purchasing arms from the Croatian government, flying them to Jordan, and moving them across the border to the free Syrian army
    • Front Page - Saudi arming anti-government fighters in Syria. Documented by one blogger Eliot Higgins who writes under brown Moses
    • Surplus from Bulkland wars
  • Gone from total obscurity to 500k views a month on his blog In 12 months. Guardian did a profile, they assumed he was from the arms trade. They called him unqualified. News requests poured in - starting to visiting at home.
  • Wrote that he’d have to stop and get a job - a small but steady stream of donations came in.
    • He raised £6k - which gave him a few months of breathing room
  • A chemical weapons breakthrough
  • 2013 - Damascus - Chemical Weapons attack, 1000 people dead and thousands more with symptoms
  • Online there were associations against both sides - Syria had chemical weapons they admitted it, the US had previously said that use of those weapons would force them to intervene.
  • To confirm it was the Assad regime you’d need chemical weapons experts on the ground - gathering samples.
  • Assad denied responsibility. The UK MPs voted against military action, showing they knew little about the conflict
  • The White House released a 4 page document, blaming Assad, it was flimsy and ignored 200 online videos from social.
  • Videos of unusual unexploded rockets emerged, tubular rockets. They had liquid containers, not useful for gas or solids. Narrowing the number of agents.
    • Geolocated a rocket crash site, could even see the direction it had come from
    • Traced back the trajectory to a Syrian military installation
  • Experts were determining if chemical weapons had been used, but not by who.
  • A second type of munition was shown to be from Soviet artillery. 2.2kg of a nerve agent instead
  • The munitions were new - they hadn’t appeared in the conflict to date
    • They didn’t have rockets
  • Assad forces had the munitions, the launch sites, had something to gain, were on the record for planning attacks at that location at that time
  • Russia tried to spread so many lies and so much confusion that people would give up trying to work out the truth.
    • Rebels fired them. Rebels faked them.
  • Journalists can no longer ignore online videos—
  • How far can we take this?
  • Social media videos from war zones contain evidence.
  • Boston Bombing was wrongly pinned on black men with backpacks by citizen investigators.
  • Wiki leaks is too secret and political. Large information dumps are hard to verify. Wiki leaks is just a potential source that still needs to be cross-referenced
  • A community of people was growing, cooperation and friendship, that did similar things to a similar standard
  • This was becoming a discipline with teachable skills - What would happen if lots of people joined the hunt for online evidence?
  • Author was getting the attention, but there were others doing great work who didn’t have a platform
  • He kept expecting a major organisation to take over the field and professionalise it
  • Major institutions didn’t want to move first - they wanted an example to copy
  • Kickstarter - Anyone can join - we care only what you can find, substantiate.
    • Identify → Verify → Amplify
  • Detail orientated obsessives.
  • The name Bellingcat - a fable about mice who were going to put a bell on a cat - so they could hear him coming

2 Becoming Bellingcat

  • Bellingcat → A team of detectives
    • Founded a few days before MH17
    • a hub for investigators
  • MH17 - Flight - Shot down in Eastern Ukraine
  • Donbas → Rebels claimed they’d downed a Ukrainian cargo plane
    • They had shot down two or three before than
  • Then the post was removed
  • They then claimed they didn’t have the weapons to shoot down a plane at that altitude
  • Then a clip of the weapon - Looks like a tank, with missiles and radar - capable of downing the plane
    • But could it be proven that it was in the area at the time?
  • Quickly downloaded the video → Often the first step → as videos get taken down often → minutes later it was deleted
    • It took his group 7 minutes to identify the road
    • Used Google Earth - matching hills and mountains
    • Could tell it was heading south

Bellingcat Dual mission

  1. Carrying out investigations
  2. Giving others the tools to carry out there own
    • Articles and how to guides
    • Guides to geo-locating
  • Journalists were on the scene - could see human remains in the cockpit - still not investigators
  • Russian news stated it was a Buk system, but from Ukrainian territory. Russians then claimed it was a false flag operation, airliner taken off with dead bodies inside, to frame the insurgents
    • RT spokesperson resigned in protest - saying we’re lying
  • Rebels were moving around the Buk system - as if to show off what they have.
  • Ukrainians were good at taking photos of hardware and sharing them on social - to help their government.
    • Geo-located using a store
    • Can do a sun calculation to determine the time of day.
  • Have an internal slack where they share what they’re working on. Work on it together, and then determine the best time to publish - allows them to go deeper before publishing
  • But there was also a big social scene - here’s what a typical one looks like
    • Outer Ring: few thousand people → following the case → not investigating
    • Inner Ring: a few hundred people → occasionally joined in on twitter threads
    • US: a few dozen → restlessly scanning for facts.
  • Photo 1 → On a carrier
  • Photo 2 → using it’s own tracks (had an address)
    • Within 2 hours of the downing
  • Film 3 → On a truck heading towards Russia shortly after
    • With one missile gone

Deceit vs Evidence

  • Russian Generals held a TV show where they made 4 claims
    • Rebels had changed the flight path to go over the war zone
    • Russian radar showed a Ukrainian aircraft near MH17
    • Buk missile system left a Ukrainian base shortly before MH17 downed
    • The film of the Buk going towards Russia was actually in Ukraine and not going to Russia
  • Russia were not building a case, but creating doubt, there story didn’t add up.
  • Russia falsified an address on a billboard - to change the location
  • The Kremlin has a long history of disinformation
  • The 4D approach
    • Dismiss - aggressively dismiss uncomfortable facts. Attack the sources themselves
    • Distort - exaggerate the truth, or invent claims
    • Distract - conspiracy theories, ‘what about-ism? → turning accusations back on the accuser’
    • Dismay -threaten those who dispute the Kremlins narrative.
  • The US were really bad at using information from open sources. They ignore it, which made it seem like there was no evidence.
  • Russia strategy is both cyber dominance and information dominance.
  • Within an hour of MH17 going down, the internet research agency, a troll factory based in St Petersburg, desk workers paid to spew out disinformation online
    • It’s Twitter accounts within a few days posted 111k posts
      • Claiming it was a military aircraft Initially
      • And then that it was the Ukrainians
    • They would write blog posts and then reference them on twitter
    • Often identical posts starting on Russian accounts. Then on Western socials
  • The Bellingcat method doesn’t care who is the source - but can they reproduce or verify it
    • The scientific method, applied to journalism
  • They could place the movements and location of the Buk by the hour, through photos and videos - showed the missing missile
    • Also a photo of a missile trail in the air
  • Emails or DMs were how people reach out to Bellingcat - often if they have the scoop, Bellingcat will ask if they want to write it
  • Investigation of the plane and the damage confirmed a surface to air missile, but how did the rebels in Donbas get one?

The Student Who Pointed at Moscow

  • Russian special forces were operating inside Ukraine undercover in civilian cars, one of them was posting on social. There were many social media happy Russian soldiers
    • Russia had previously denied it was doing this - hadn’t hit the news
  • Found images of the Buk in Russia before it arrived in Ukraine - had distinct markings and damage (despite identification numbers being painted over)
  • Also spotted a dash cam video of the entire convoy. Number plates all came from Moscow, Kirsk.
  • Their investigation was ahead of the governments and major news organisations with bigger budgets
  • Citizen reports → dangerous to those who falsify evidence
  • Tactic - proceed as far as possible with open sources - might need a local journalist to do the last bit
    • 95% open source, 5% traditional reporting
  • International investigators ended up interviewing the author as a witness - could you start explaining about how you found out.
  • It became clear that they were the only ones doing this sort of investigation. .
  • Contributing to directly to an investigation

Fingerprints of the murder weapon

  • Side Skirts of Buks end up having a unique fingerprint.
  • Russia - tried to show that air to air missile damage matched MH17 - but it actually showed the opposite
  • Brought out an entire book / PDF report to explain the difference - released onto twitter
  • Showing the Russians drove the launcher to Ukraine
  • Found a field with burn marks, photo of launch smoke, chatter online, US missile analysis. All pointed to the same place.
  • At the same time Russia’s fake news was fully debunked. There photos were from a different year and then they’d removed one of the missile defence systems to show it missing
  • Paid for satellite photo that showed the location of the Ukrainian launchers - no where near the site and still back at base (Cost £1000 for the image - from the day in question - from Planet Labs)
  • Who had authorised the use of the Buk was the last question. This took an entire year.
    • They didn’t think that the Russians would hand over the Buk without either some training or leaving behind a crew
    • There’s a Russian database where you can search by base - and social media photos
    • Soldiers on the trip down posted photos
    • Wives and mothers complained about not being able to contact soldiers
    • There were so many posts - so much information - that the volume was hard
  • Social Media surfing is a sub-genre in it’s own right
  • A Buk requires a 4 man crew → commander → Cornel → Putin
    • Putin must have confirmed the movement of the equipment out of the country

Sleuthing around the globe

  • Every investigation connected Bellingcat to more and more obsessives online
  • Digital Sleuthing
  • Meta Data taken on pictures - time, date and location in the file
  • Digital Globe - Private image
  • Reverse image searching → handy for debunking people posting old photos, handy for identifying bot/fake social media accounts
  • ISIS beheading.
  • Publication can often lead to information being removed from social sites.
    • Had to take steps to protect victims
    • Sometimes withhold publication and allow police to investigate first
  • People were interested in Bellingcat explaining their methods, so they started to document them

3 Firewall of Facts

  • Russia accused Bellingcat of falsifying information

The Counterfactual Community

  • Believe → Insist → Ignore
  • Belief system is against and suspicious of the West
  • RT’s slogan is question more
  • Use a tactic - the same content being recycled and reposted from other sources, making it look more legit
  • A small number of website are driving the majority of the stories
  • Funding strategy is to get funding in many different ways - to diversify. Make funding transparent.
  • Because Bellingcat is trusted by western media → the conspiracy theorists believe that Bellingcat must be ‘in on it’ / part of the problem
  • The Bellingcat process is based on transparency → founded on transparency→ state what they found out and from where → don’t claim to know more than what they can discover

Building the firewall

  • Social Meida Dilema → Don’t want to spread dangerous material → they don’t want to curb free speech
    • Conflict - algorithms push stuff that creates engagement
  • Syria 336 chemical weapons attacks before the end of the war
    • US eventually used cruise missiles

Online Hate Spills Offline

  • Charlottesville → lots of social image → exposing a white man attacking a black man. It took just an hour to identify him.
  • Bellingcat wouldn’t expose normal protestor identities - they do believe they’d be able to identify anyone that day
  • Ethics Question: Does our investigation concern people who may have committed a serious crime? OR Who hold public positions of power? And are threatening criminal acts?
  • Protestors tend to go to rallies with friends, so the person next to you can give you away.
  • The internet helped expose extremism at Charlottesville

Disarming the traps

  • 8 chan is the most anonymous and dark of message boards
  • Some try to radicalise others
  • Gamification of mass violence
  • Shootings filmed and streamed live → get the high score, to the tune of music
  • Real life effort posting - encouraging others to commit violence IRL
  • Siege posting → terrorism, civil war. Some hoping terrorism would spark gun control conversations which would spark civil war
  • Founder of 8 chan tried to take it offline - if reemerged as 8gun

Involving the public

  • ISIS supporters posted photos from around the world (in a messaging room)
  • Some were shared online → Amateurs were able to geo-locate them within hours
  • ISIS supporters tried to warn others not to post there’s - as this was happening
    • France, Germany, London
  • Euro pol started sharing backgrounds of child abuse images - hoping people would be able to locate them
    • Trace an object (building, advertising)
    • Europol posted 119 objects, 79 were identified, had 100k responses
    • 10 children and two offfenders were found
  • Finland and Sweden have developed courses and materials for citizens to raise awareness.
  • Many fact checking projects are now live
  • Bellingchat Podcast.

4. Mice Catch Cat

  • Salisbury poisoning
    • Novochock -
    • Identified the officers behind it
    • Using fathers names as call sign was common
    • Phone numbers can be searched from an app, and you can see what other people called them - Amazingly - they found him - he was on the a member of the GRU
    • Passenger manifest - paid 200 euros
      • Could see names and identification numbers
      • Claimed birth date
    • Found the fabricated identities
    • RT interview with them - claiming a long planned trip to Salisbury - despite booking tickets just hours before flying → spurred them on
    • Wall of Hero’s - Hero of Russia
    • When they found one, they’d kept the first name and birthday the same
    • So they tried that for the other one, followed a trail of breadcrumbs to a car registered at GRU HQ in that name
    • Russia’s intelligence agency had been calling round their class mates telling them not to reveal their identity
    • Identified the two man hit squad.
  • Found a vehicle registered to one of the spies. Found 305 people who had also registered cars to that address - including names, ages, phone numbers and passport numbers
    • Become one of the biggest breaches of covert espionage IDs in history

The Third Man

  • A Russian flew on the same day, with a passport number close to that of the other two. Harder to identify
    • Kremlin was deleting files quickly
    • Passport issued from office of VIPs and spies
    • Looking for an image - scanned passport
  • They try variations of first names, surnames, dates of birth and regions
    • Challenge between too many results, and too few.
  • Major General → leaked phone → GRU offices → call from the wife (get contact app)
    • Communicating with the attackers and Moscow (phone records)
  • GRU officers were behind a bunch of internationa Scandals
  • Bellingcat was able to find people at all the major Russian phone providers who would leak data for money
    • Stopped after 30 officers
    • Location, data, numbers called, name, address, date of birth
  • Unit 29155 → 300 GRU officers

The Risks

  • Death threats and bounties
  • Cyber attacks
  • Phone hacking
  • Panic Attacks
  • Post traumatic stress → Grim photos and videos from war / place crashes
  • If you have a personal connection to victims - then it’s going to hit you harder

Next Steps

  • Libya - Benghazi
    • Firing squads → Trialed for multiple murders, evidence from social media
      • Geo-location
      • Found dark spots and blood stains
  • Responsibilities were growing
    • Trials could happen 10-15 years later
    • Will the videos still be available?
    • Had to take archiving seriously
      • Do it to a high standard
        • Evidence of custody needs to be documented to a high standard
        • Also have to make judges aware
  • The online world is both enduring and ephemeral
  • Facebook - stopped graph search.
  • Russia cracking down on social media use by officials

Human Rights Centre → Protocol for open source investigations. Code of ethics has 3 main principles…

  1. Safety → physical and psychological of whistleblowers
  2. Transparency → peer review, facts
  3. Respecting dignity of those involved

A Blueprint for Future Wars

  • Yemen. Civil war many are getting killed
  • Bellingcat testing their cutting edge techniques
  • Where, When, How, Who, What, Why?
  • Data collection software, that documents exactly what the investigator is doing - so people can use that data later in court
  • Had a Yemen hackathon → getting everyone together to do investigations at the same time
  • Research standards need to be high for triple use
    • Investigative journalism
    • Academic study
    • Legal cases
  • Shared with the Yemeni archive
  • Verified open source material
  • Sets the standard

Bellingcat can’t investigate everything. Needs to choose where it can have the most impact.

Flexible system applicable everywhere.

Perils and opportunities of AI

  • Deep Fakes, doctored images.
  • Easy to do, distribution is effortless and global
    1. Know what kind of trickery is possible
    2. Consider the consequences of it (historical records)
    3. Where is the technology going? (Coming to products, amount of data needed is getting smaller)
    4. Synthetic media will spread through the same routes that we’re battling already
  • AI could help investigators - on databases or socials
  • Reverse image search of videos would be great

Where we go from here?

  • The future is collaboration
  • NYT has got a team now, as had the BBC
  • WSJ has a deep fake detection unit now
  • Training of others
  • Online verification should be a basic skill
  • Bellingcat Toolkit for Verification
  • Each investigation will inspire more
  • Open-source investigation → no diversity, mainly men
  • 2 Goals
    • Find evidence
    • Spread this field
  • Don’t mind if others get the limelight