YouSaid · the spoken record

Eliot Higgins

lines on the record: 63
first: 2021-02-05
most recent: 2021-02-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We have to have communities like the Bellicat community where we're looking, we're trying to build a whole volunteer hub. We want people working together on all sorts of different projects because I think that's almost the only, we have to be proactive against kind of protecting the truth when we have this kind of societies online based on total untruths who believe they're the truth. It's like a really weird time in history because we've never had a force that huge, I think, in the West before. And I don't think we really know how to handle it because we keep comparing it to kind of the rise of fascism, that kind of things, but it's not really the same because this online component, you know, it's like fascism 2.0. It's the problem. It's starting to rise. And I don't think we understand where it's coming from at a very fundamental level as society and certainly not when I speak to policymakers who think it's about Russia doing this to us when we're really doing it to ourselves.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Difficult because really you want to target the people making the fake news. And it's often focused on Russia saying Russia's lying to us, here's Sputnik, here's Russia today. A lot of this fake information is coming from these communities. And that's why we have to figure out how we address those communities first and stop them from forming. Do we need to start saying Facebook, you can't recommend groups to people anymore for all groups because we don't know where these communities could kind of crop up next because it took so long to really take QAnon seriously and it was only at this terrible moment that they were taking seriously and we kind of don't need if we keep going to that movement moment again and again what happens when they're successful? What happens when they do manage to get their hands on a representative and do manage to lynch them like they were planning to do? How does do we have to just keep repeating it? Because again, it just never seems to be taken seriously. And that's why I think”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“public serious debate about this because it doesn't seem like that serious debate is happening at the moment and it's just kind of going back to what it was before and we need to be a lot more aware I think of a society of these groups and what they're not just weird fringe fringe groups now they're edging into the mainstream and if we can have politicians in the US who believe in this stuff serving in the house then we've really gone too far. If that starts leaking into Europe and you know you think about Brexit and you think what can start leaking in from America and if QAnon is that we could be in trouble or a QAnon like movement around something”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just everything they want to know in the way they want to know it. So why is the earth flat? Oh, click on that video. Oh, that video looks click on it. 400 videos later and you're on the street corner of a sign saying, you know, the earth is flat and that, you know, everyone else who says different is a conspiracy risk. And that is the same as all these online communities. How on earth do you communicate with people like that? Because you're on the outside and they see you as worst, you know, an idiot or sorry evil bad guy who needs to die. At best an idiot, even if a family member. And you see this with QAnon and you see this with a whole range of movements. And the question is, how do we fight that? Do we start banning QAnon everywhere? Is that encroaching on their free speech, even though free speech is clearly very damaging? Or do we have to wait to have a debate every time a capital building in another country gets stormed? Does it have to get that bad? We need to have...”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really difficult because I think it's one of these communities that grows from maybe one of the kind of core kind of functions of the internet is getting people who think the same thing as you together and then serving you content that you both ship believe is correct and then building these communities around this and it's really hard to address that because you see it in all kinds of movements. You see it in the kind of chemical weapon troopers in Syria, MH17 truthers, you see it in flat earfers, you see it in people you think Bill Gates is putting microchips and vaccines they all kind of have that they all kind of formed I think out of the same thing which is a distro of authority and a feeling of isolation from other people in their community because they firmly believe in that and they move on to these online communities where they basically just get fed”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The old men and women of the internet may be the people who actually understand the internet in these processes because otherwise you're going to get the internet is made of tubes all over again but this time is your liberty and it's going to be completely it'll be terrible and we'll regret it and we won't know what the results are because it's like just you know there was a from betacle when he saw a chimpanzee with a machine gun That's what it would be like to the internet because they have no idea what's going on. So I am really worried about what they're going to do.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How the internet works at a very deep level, I think. And if you're a politician, it's very unlikely, apart from a few QA non politicians in the US, that you've spent your entire life on the internet and understand that kind of very deep level they need. So I don't trust the people who would make those decisions to make that decision for me. And because of that, I think there needs to be a much more involvement in the, I don't know.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, you're basically asking big tech to say, you know, please throw away all your money so you can do what you're told. And because if they just, they have to figure out a way to exist where their entire revenue isn't based on turning, creating a digital profile of you so they can sell stuff to you by finding out every single key you press ever. And it's just this insane collection of data. And that's what they, you know, if they could do that, they would do that. They just want to make their money. But at the same time, how do you say, no, you can't have your money? Do we tax them? Do we say you can only have X percent of information about a person? And how do you measure that percentage? It just is so complex. And I don't think policymakers are in the position to have any opinion on this whatsoever. Or maybe a small handful, but it's such a complicated issue. You really need to understand.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Him to say, Oh, yeah, he was being followed because of his political. We were like, oh, thank God. And yeah, that was just an incredible moment. Also with the Scripple Dorian 2018, when on one day, I think we were on eight front pages of major UK newspapers. And that was like, oh my God, what have we done? Because that had never happened. Even with our work with MH17 in the Netherlands, I don't think we ever got something like that on all those front pages. And that really made us realize that the next couple of years would be quite different from the first four.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Nirvani underpants thing was pretty shocking, both in its delivery and its form. It was just so bizarre hearing that on the audio and keep in mind we recorded this on the day we were launching the first article. So we knew immediately that we had a confession of an FSB officer on tape even before we released the first article. And then we had a whole week waiting for Putin's press conference kind of rubbing our hands going, oh, this will be good and just waiting for him to deny it. And then does he not only deny it, he confirms that FSB offices were following Navarney, effectively confirming the main part of our story, which we knew we had the FSB confession tape on? So that was a big moment. That was a memorable moment, just knowing that Putin had almost walked into our trapdoor he had set for him. I mean, we couldn't believe it. He couldn't have said more if he said, yes, we poisoned him. That was like literally the only other thing he could say. And he was never going to say that. So again.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's like we've been working on stuff to do with conservation and we're approached by a foundation who said, you know, would you like to look into this person involved with, I think it was mahogany theft wood, stealing wood. And he was a fascinating case. And it revealed to us how much you could actually use open source information to investigate these things that are completely outside our normal kind of scope of conflict. We continue to do that and it brings us in contact with organizations working in Africa. So it gives us a chance to kind of expand and work in those areas as well. So if I we keep doing Russia, I will be genuinely disappointed. I mean, it's great stuff. And we're probably doing it for a while, but we want Russia to be kind of just 5% of Balencat, not 95% of it. So we definitely want to expand and move into other areas.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, about a year and a half ago I said I hope we don't have to keep doing Russia's stuff because I'm getting quite sick of it. I love going to new areas. You need new people to follow.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not that worried about it. I mean, maybe I'm completely wrong. And that there is a camera looking at me, but I'm quite boring as well. You know, outside of this, I'm going to put my kids to bed. I mean, there's not much going on in White House tonight. I'm not going to be plotting after this with the CIA. So, yeah, that's my opinion.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's more scarier than just surveillance in my mind because I don't feel like I don't think anyone is that interested in me apart from the Russians who obviously are very interested in me.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How much do you know about yourself as shared online? And that's where the real worry I have is for kind of this capitalist kind of, what's the word they call it? Surveillance capitalism.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of people will, I think. And that's kind of the, we kind of sold our soul to the digital devil in a sense. And there's no limits now. And I think it's damaging with all these conspiracy theories that are fueled by the way these social media companies work, how they profile us and how they recommend us stuff. I think, yeah, should they have that much power? Because that's scary. That worries me than some MI6 agent looking through my web camera, or what's he doing in his office? I'd rather not have my kind of mind kind of constantly kind of honed by these social media networks to make me a consumer. And then just completely undermine the fabric of society by getting people to watch flat earth videos all the time. Where do we draw the line? Where is that oak still okay to have that deal? Do we really as a society know the deal we have with the social media companies?”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's available to who really. I mean, we're worried about the intelligence safety agencies knowing everything about our lives, but so does Netflix.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he is a hero because what he revealed he was put in a bad situation and that required going to Russia but given his options as a human being I mean I think most people in his situations would consider the Russia option as brave as they think they are not to kind of you know not be in jail forever so yeah I have sympathy with him and I kind of don't know I have nothing against him I would say but you know I'm not one of these people who put someone on an idol and starts cheering for them because you know you find that leads to cults of personalities which I always find rather a putting”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Russia is unique in the sense that they have all that leaked information that just doesn't exist anywhere else we've looked and in one sense if it did I think we'd all be in trouble to be honest with you because that is a lot of information to be leaked all over the world but yeah it's really not anything we've seen anywhere else I mean there's other information in other parts of the world different types of information that are useful in different ways where there's more open societies but Russia is just open and they don't mean to be so yeah there's absolutely it just seems completely unique in the world and it's just bizarre that this huge powerful nation is just so weak really down to the you know the core of its being that it's just leaking this information everywhere”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are as careful as we can not to expose people unnecessarily. I think that's really, we try to be really careful. I mean, even in the kind of work we're doing on January 6th at the moment, we've been very careful with who we're working with, making sure they're not overexposed in any way that could harm them. So that's kind of a real focus of what we're doing at the moment.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to say no, but I do know in the minds of some people on the internet intelligence agencies can be quite a broad definition. So to be clear, we have worked with the Joint Investigation Team in relation to MH17 because we were finding evidence on the internet that by revealing could make it disappear and we want to let them know that we were doing this. So that's the kind of interaction we would have with an intelligence agency in the most broadest sense of the term. If we find information on a terrorist bomber, we will contact the police. If we think we can stop a crime like revealing the identity of FSB poisoners to the world, we will take steps to do that. But we, you know.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might not always come across in our work because we don't want to bore you to death with every single little detail of what we do. But if we're using a source, we're always trying to find two or three other independent ways of verifying that one piece of information. And sometimes when you're dealing with Russian spies, it's very hard to find. But I came praising Christo, but he is just so methodical about finding every single possible hole in their armor, every way they could have made a mistake. And he just finds it time and time after again, it's always some silly little thing they've done that shows upon some database that probably one person in the world has looked at since 2015. It's just these really, but it shows that if you really dig, you can verify this stuff to such level. And that's why I don't worry about the information being changed that much because we spot it, we see it, and we verify everything we do to a very high standard because of that.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, this is something we worry about in particular on the GRU investigations and the FSB investigations because we're looking for information that is assuming government servers and can be changed. And we know it's been changed. So we're always looking out for things that are suspicious. We always try and find another source that's completely independent, like maybe an offline database from several years earlier, we can cross-reference against the information to see if anything's been altered or something has been removed. And it does happen. We had even photographs altered when we were looking into identity documents. They had swapped around the photographs of FSB officers with other people. For some reason, and we've never figured out why this is, we figured it out because the photograph they swapped it to for the man we were looking for was a woman's photograph.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's one time I kind of contacted the police about my safety because I thought, oh God, if this is what that is, because we really weren't sure. And then over time, it seemed clearer and clearer, you know, it's what happened, something different. And that was hard to accept as well. And I think it really upset a lot of people, you know, myself, other people at Bellingcat as well. And it's just been very hard to know that there's still people who, when he died, were having a laugh about it on the internet because they fought the white helmets were part of some conspiracy. And I think that's the kind of thing we need to fight against as a community because I don't want to live in a world that's populated by people like that. And I'd rather change people's mind that, you know, go to war with them. So I just hope that we haven't gone so far that we have to be doomed to listen to those kind of people tell us that our friends' deaths were.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I should start by saying that James and his wife and were both friends of mine, and we had spent some time together, not a huge amount because he was in Istanbul and I was in Leicester, but we would meet at events sometimes or we would be in town at the same time and meet up and have a drink or have a chat. I knew that it was weighing on him a lot the treatment he was getting kind of online from the Russia what that was kind of building up to the anti-white helmets community but he never came across the sort of person who kind of would do that to himself. So when we first heard about that it was frightening for us because we kind of see him as kind of the same level as Bellingcat. He's not like someone who's kind of really untouchable in the way some people are. And we thought if that could, if James was murdered, God forbid, then that we were worried.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always stumbling across new plots. So maybe one day we'll be like doing an article and say we found a link between that and the scribble poisoning. Who knows?”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm afraid we've not really been looking into that. The Navalny case is such a big case and Cristo is really our, I'm not going to say he's our only person because that might mean trouble for him. He's one of many people who we work with who is able to do the investigation, but they're all stretched to their limit at the moment. And we can't really, I would love to look into it. But sometimes you just stumble across stuff. And Christo does this all the time. He's just looking into someone and then he stumbles on to a completely different kind of GRU plot, happening somewhere else in the world. And it might not even be like another assassination. It could be like some fraud or something. But he just, but that's what's so exciting.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have like a meeting somehow, they're mice, they have a meeting, and they decide among themselves that they should put a bell on the cat's neck, but then they realize they don't have a plan to do that. So what we're doing is teaching people how to bell the cat. So when people say, oh, you're the cats from belling cats, now I'm like, no, we're the mice, I suppose. We're not the cats. The cats are bad.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm terrible at coming up with names. I'm really uncreative, unfortunately. And when I wanted to start a new website going on from the Brown Moses blog, I wanted a completely different name, not one that was associated with my online name because I wanted it to have because I was always getting people asking to write for my blog, my early Brown Moses blog, and they would never get the credit because it would always be referred back to me as the author because it was a really bad web layout basically and it was hard to see who was doing the articles. I thought that was unfair. So I wanted a site that didn't have my name associated with it and would be a place where people could come to me and submit articles and we'd have resources and we'd build that kind of community. But I was coming up with names like the open source and just really boring stupid names. So I called up a friend of mine and he suggested belling the cat which is based off a fable where there's a group of mice who are frightened of a large ferocious cat and they said”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a dedicated team because you can't do this part time because I think open source investigators are quite obsessive. So probably wouldn't even function part-time because they would always have to be doing the investigation. And I think that's what News organizations have to realize they have to find the right kind of people and they can do really amazing work.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the most successful people in using open source investigation have been the New York Times team and the BBSCAFGRI team. And they've done some really amazing award-winning work using open source investigations. And we all come from actually the same small community. Bell and Katz Christian Triver, he joined the New York Times team, two of our volunteers joined the BBC team. So we kind of transferred our skills to that group. But they've already made up of some of the, especially the New York Times team was made up of some of the best of the original open source investigators from 2011. They put together a really fantastic team and they were awarded, they want to put this price for their work and they produce fantastic journalism. And I think that's probably more than Bellingcat has shown of other news organizations what you can do with this stuff. But that's really kind of great to see that things are expanding and changing in that way. And I think you need to commit as a news organization to”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Starbird, which I think really leads the way in this area, which I think people should really look up because I think it's really essential to understanding basically what the internet is nowadays and why it's terrible in many senses, but how it actually interacts with the work of Bellingcamp, for example”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Communities that we're all worried about today, like the QAN movement. And that's why I think I see a lot of parallels between different online communities and how they're developed and where the kind of problems of consumpiracy theory communities really comes from. Because it's the same with Syria. You get people who become this just radicalized by being anti-white helmets. It's weird thing to be radicalized by, but they won't broach they won't let anyone disagree with them. And if you're in that group and you disagree, you're out. And it just becomes more and more extreme. And the internet is the perfect tool for doing that to people, especially poor people who are locked in their houses because of coronavirus. So I think that's where a lot of the opposition to Bellencat is coming from as well. And it's kind of interesting to be part of that because I've been targeted by that for so long. You just, you're like, wow, this is just an amazing thing to observe as someone who works in disinformation. And there's a work of people like Kate.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then it was like, okay, any more questions? But it's just these, it just was, every event was like that. And it's okay. It's not like anything bad happens. But as things got crazier with the Scripple story, obviously I was getting more and more worried about Russia's attention. And I mean, it's one thing to release one story about that, but we were releasing them like every two weeks, some new revelation about that. And we were getting the Russian ambassador to the UK saying that Bellingcat is the CIA. working for the British intelligence services and that we're part of the British Deep Establishment are his exact words. I don't want to misquote him because that will be a Russia today article. It gets scary because you don't know what these mindsets of these people are like. You don't know if someone's going to think, well, he's a British spy, I'm going to stab him and save Syria or something like that. Because you do have these people who are quite extreme personalities who become part of these online.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the events themselves were usually fine. I had one guy once who asked a question. It was this event on Window into Russia talking about Russia from Bellingcat's work and we had a Russian journalist there as well. Very nice event. Big audience. First question is a guy saying, oh, one of your staff members was mean to me on Twitter. And everyone just is like, you could hear this sigh. And I said, this is his handle. I was like, I didn't recognize it. It wasn't one of my staff members. I just said, I'm sorry, I don't know who that is. And then he went, but he says he works for Bellingcat. And I said, I'm sorry, I don't think he does. I'm sorry. And everyone just kind of sat there silently and he sat down.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the Netherlands I started doing quite a lot of events I think in just before the lockdown and like every event there was like something that was going wrong or something weird was happening so it was small stuff but you would have there's this video blogger called Graham Phillips who is just he really hates me and at that point he was fairly obsessive with me and he was angry about MH17 because he was a video blogger who was in eastern Ukraine and he started signing up to all my events like going on the guest list and because he's very confrontational and he's kind of like do you know Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man If you've ever seen the boy and hard, watch it. It's him, but on Syria, not bears. So he was quite upset with me and it was getting a bit weird. I had Dutch police standing at the door.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, if I'm honest, I don't hate coronavirus. Well, I hate it a bit less because I don't have to worry about those people at the moment. I'm safe at home and not going to those events. What's the problem that it becomes? Well, I”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean to an extent, but I just hope that kind of our work and our high profile work kind of just protects us a bit from these kind of dangers because that's all we've got. I'm not going to fight off a team of GRU officers with karate or anything like that. That's just not within my skill set as a researcher. So I just have to kind of accept that this is the risks we take and it's worthwhile doing this. I believe in the work Bellingcat is doing. I know it does expose us to some danger, but not the same danger that Navalny faces. He's been poisoned with a secret nerve agent, which is just a completely bizarre thing to say. But it's happening in Russia today. It will probably happen again if the international community doesn't react and try and actually address this issue. So personally, I'm aware of that, that it would be nice if the international community could say Russia, please don't poison people, but they aren't.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so'cause there's enough this I think the thing is we're in kind of like a real golden age for what's available at the moment And we might be like you 120% of what's possible. And if there's a retraction down to 100% just because we had this moment of excitement at the start of this kind of field of investigation and this complete Wild West attitude to the online world where so much personal information is being shared and shared with companies and shared with everyone else in the world, we just really have to realize kind of the world we're in is very different from when we are 10 years ago. And we've got to take advantage of that as a society. Otherwise, we're going to be left to cure non-conspiracy theorists attacking the Capitol building on January 6th time and time again because we'll be going, why are these people so crazy? What's happening? And it's because these massive changes that have happened because of basically smartphones because it's made us all so much more connected and just at a time where there's a lot of turmoil.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think there are real effects of this, but on the other hand, in a way, we're glad that, you know, For example, Facebook graph search. Probably some people are groaning hearing that. But Facebook graph search was an amazing research tool for open source investigators. You could find people for their likes and dislikes and really find profiles of people. It was great for finding really obscure groups and really obscure individuals. And we could find terrorists. We could find all kinds of people doing that. Unfortunately, Cambridge Analytica came along and used it to influence Brexit. And that tool was then removed. And it was a real loss to the open source community, but a clear positive outcome for society as a whole. So sometimes it's okay to lose some of these tools because we're dealing with these kind of almost, well, two invasive tools, I think you would maybe agree in many circumstances.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, I mean, absolutely. When we first looked into the scripple poisoning and we revealed that we had these identity documents, these restoration forms for the domestic passports, after we published that, we started looking to some more GOU officers and weirdly all their photographs had been removed from those documents. And that didn't happen to anyone else's documents outside of the GRU list we had, so they were clearly going back and removing the information. We've also had laws passed in Russia about soldiers no longer being allowed to share photographs for their service online because clearly, I mean, you can see the direct line between what we did for that with MH17 and Russia's involvement in Ukraine and the wider open source community.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we've got really good evidence of this. And you could come to Christo's house and look through the evidence page by page and see where it's all coming from. We've got just all the details because Russia is a really corrupt police state and it enables its own undermining through this.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And these were not big threats to Putin like Navani is. So you start wondering how they are they targeting. And we've already discovered, and we'll release this in the next couple of weeks, more targets who are even in the entertainment business. So yeah, it's like all levels of Russian society seem to have been targeted by this team. And it sounds like I'm maybe a rambling lunatic.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was just this insane story, especially when you consider the scripple suspects said they were sports nutrition salesmen and you kind of wonder if that was an in-joke they were kind of playing in the interview that's that's where they got their poison from the sports nutrition factory so we then discovered that around the time Navani was poisoned the guys who were working at the factories started calling up an FSB team and we looked into the FSB team because we can buy their phone records detailed phone records from just these sources in Russia so you know Russia is the most open society in the world they just don't want to be so you've got you've just got to imagine there's all this information and poor Crystal it's like every day he gets a kind of new set of information and a new set of leads and even now with the Nivani poisoning last week he identified three more people who were assassined two activists from the Caucasus region and one of the official opposition”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that kind of continued on what we were doing before by getting this information. And this chemistry lab was meant to make sports nutrition drinks. And they did not make sports nutrition drinks because all the kind of main sizes there were former members of the Russian Novichok program. And it was like”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were interviewing two GRU officers and we had the actual proof that this was the case. So, I mean, that was all down to Cristo and he's an outstanding investigator and we really owe a lot to him and his work.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you can literally go on Google if you know the correct keywords you'll find some Russian internet forum where someone says I can get you give me a passport number pay 200 rubles I'll get you something like their flight details it's used by you know crooks for various stuff it's used by you know husbands and wives to make sure their partners are where they're meant to be according to their phone records so this is what we took advantage of this christian knew about this i had no idea this existed but christo thought maybe this is the way to do it he got the passport registration document for his domestic passport of this one guy with a match and his photograph on that was exactly the same person who was in the russia today interview and i think that was on the same day we found that out so we already knew these guys were russian spies and then we found out russia today was going to interview them so we were watching this with the knowledge that russia is there”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cope to find online, it's fairly difficult, but it's not impossible. We're not talking going on the dark web and hunting about anything because, you know, spy-like is that it's out there, but they have lots of information like passport registration numbers or house registrations. And what this allowed Crysto to do is find identities that share the same first name, birth date, and place of birth as one of the suspects. And when you had that list, which was only about 11 people in a population of hundreds of thousands, he then was able to search on social media for those people and discovered that most of those people existed. But one of them didn't. And when he found the one who didn't, he was able, and this is something that we've done at Bellencat only in this case because it is literally a nerve agent assassination program. So it does, you know, it might cross the line, but I think it's for a good reason. We paid for information from information broker in Russia because Russia is a very leaky.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think all the credit really needs to go to the work of Kristo Grozev, who is actually a volunteer at Ballencat and does this as a hoppy, exposing all these Russian spies. He's a really brilliant investigator. He was the one who kind of started figuring out the first pieces of the puzzle back when we were looking at the Scripple case because he had looked into a attempted coup in Montenegro and he was kind of interested in Russian foreign spy activity. What was interesting about that is one of these suspects was a GRU officer who was arrested with his fake ID and real ID. And this was kind of Christo's first in to these people's identities because those identities had similarities. They had the same first name, the same date of birth and the same place of birth. So when the names and place of births and the other details of the skiffle suspects came out, he started comparing them to these leaked databases from Russia because there's all this leaked information from Russia that you can”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're new to it, it looks terrifying, it's like, okay, I've got Google Street View over there, Google Earth here, I've got to keep this window open, oh, I've closed it. You've got so many things going in your head, but we try to kind of ease people in, and then we'll at the kind of last two days we have the best part of the workshops when we're doing them in person, which sadly isn't possible at the moment, where we have two days where we actually do investigations with them. We give them the tools and we join them on investigations they want to do themselves. And that can have really interesting results. It doesn't always work, as you can imagine, but sometimes there's really interesting stuff that comes up and sometimes just the process itself of doing the investigation is a really educational experience and something that's very hard to get once you leave a training and you kind of don't have the opportunity to apply it in your own work with a group like that again so we really want to spread those skills and kind of get as many people using them as possible”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source