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

“Well, I mean, it's really teaching people the tools in the toolbox and how to use them. And in a training session, we'd be starting off with something quite simple at geolocation and using Google satellite imagery. And we've got straightforward examples. We go through them one by one. We introduce new tools one by one. And as we're kind of showing them what to do, we're showing them how to combine different skills together as well. Because that's what we do. We look at a problem and we know from our experience from doing all these investigations, the different possible tools that could be used for it and the kind of secrets to use them in to get to the quickest result.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“then I think we'd kind of all be better off because we'd have a better idea of what was going on, hopefully. And all these videos and photographs that I see that I can't investigate and I know there could be something there, other people can do themselves. They don't have to just rely on kind of one point of weakness, which is Bellingcat having to do everything. And I think that's what really drives us to train as many people as possible, get involved, do collaborative work. And I think that's really the core of what Bellingcat is now.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, over the last couple of years, we have professionalized a lot and grown quite a bit, so we now have charity status in the Netherlands. So that means that we have kind of audit requirements and we have to have transparency, a supervisory board, and a structure that makes us transparent. And it means that I can't just go off and do whatever I want. I have a supervisory board, and there is a reason to that because I don't want to end up like an organization, like too top heavy, where there's someone at the top of the organization whose photograph ends up on other people's Twitter profiles. You know, that kind of person. I don't want any kind of it to be centralized around me because I don't want all of this to be centralized around Bellingcat because Bellingcat is really just a node in a network and we want to develop that network because it means that if there's more people like Bellingcat, more organizations like that, not under own control, doing their own thing, but doing it with these same kind of skills and resources.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That and we built this kind of core of a team of just people who. Just wrote articles basically. We looked at YouTube videos, we looked at photographs and just searched for every single post we could find. And then we had the root. It was traveling to the launch site, which was documented with multiple sources. And then we realized you could actually connect it to Russia. And you could do that by examining those missile launches very, very carefully indeed.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we started kind of finding the kind of skeleton of what we were looking for and then started discovering more information that kind of built around those key moments. And we did that as a community of amateurs who just wanted to understand what had happened. And very early on, I recognized that certain people were kind of better at this than other people. I mean, some people were drawn conclusions that were wrong all the time. Some were doing really stuff. One of them was Eric Toller. He had followed my work for a while and he didn't really kind of, he hadn't really communicated with me before, but he showed me one of the, she showed him one of the photographs of this missile launcher on the trailer. And he said, I know where this is, and this is how I feed it out. And I asked, can I write this up in a post for Bellencat? And he said yes. And we had a conversation. And that was kind of the first moment, I guess, of the forming of what became the Bellacat investigation team because then he started doing that more and more. A couple of other people started doing that.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love doing those kind of things, and Ballingcat launched three days earlier. So we already had a kind of focus on open source investigation because I'd been trying to kind of talk about it as much as possible at that point. And then just this thing happened, which was just, it was this awful event, but unlike Syria, it wasn't somewhere where there was kind of restricted internet access, where you had, you know, five or six videos of an incident. You had the entire internet of that area, like a huge detection system. And it was kind of just figuring out how to, in a way, read that detection system, know where to look to figure something out, you know, how did you locate something, how to then kind of use the shadows to tell the time of day, which allowed us then to construct the first route out of five or six videos and photographs. And we could follow that route for eastern Ukraine, which was then supplemented by other posts we found people discussing it, you know, with timestamps that matched with the whole route.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Immediately after that incident occurred, there was just a whole community of people who kind of organically emerged from nowhere, some made up of just Ukrainians who were interested in what happened, Russian people, they had their own kind of language communities, but they connected with people in the West as well who were interested. And it was such a huge moment. It drew all these different people together and they started just hunting for every scrap of information they could find on what happened. They were like this beautiful kind of organic search engine that were looking for just one thing and I kind of saw that happening very early on and one of these videos emerged. It shows what looks like a book missile launch, which was something at that point I barely knew about. It was just like kind of green box on treads going somewhere. And I saw that video and I just shared it and said, you know, a gold star to the first person who can geolocate this because I already had a kind of community around me that kind of”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Use it and have a better reasoning than using it than winning arguments on the internet. So I think that was kind of like just seeing that so close together. I think that really kind of inspired my trajectory from what I wanted to do with Ballencat in the future.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're all around, but they, for some reason, they asked me to run one of the training threads where there was me, Paul Rabbi from the OCCRP and a few other people who were like leaders of the group. And we had to teach them our particular investigative skills. And it was really amazing for me to see these people who are really poor Radu is a really brilliant investigator and brave. And that was like, wow. And alongside that, I did my presentation and thinking this is going to be rubbish and they're going to hate it because it's just some pictures on YouTube with these all like really amazing people. And they just responded so positively to it. And by the end of the camp, they were already setting up a group to identify right IDs that were in open source imagery from riots just from that kind of interaction and just kind of getting involved straight away. And that made me realize that actually this work can really be spread and used by other people for other things and that it can be taken seriously by people who actually kind of will.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it felt like you kind of look insane when that starts happening to you and you're just ordinary people you know you say by the way I just have to call the BBC and talk about ISIS I'll be just off in a second so yeah there was that effect and then I went to this tactical tech an organization in Berlin who trains activists took me to invited me to this camp in Italy in the mountains near I think Lake Casa maybe that might be my memory for names is terrible because so it could not even be Casa it could be anything so they invited me there was loads of activists and they were just amazing people they were like people who really stood up to these terrible regimes they lived in and I was just thought well I'm just at home on my laptop I felt really like I don't compare to these people at all I'm just looking at YouTube videos and drawn colored boxes around pictures and stuff like that and it was it was really like humbling I think in one sense because it was like you were”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was like, I remember being at work because I had a completely different career before this working in business administration, being in the office and like talking, because we've been dyed sized so much, I've been downsized into a tiny office in an apartment of brand new flats that was really leaky. It was like really badly built. There was literally water running down the entranceways. It was awful. And it was me and this other woman. And I remember just saying to her, I'm going to be on the BBC now talking about IEDs in Syria. Can I just use them on the MT apartments to have this call? It was just...”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then a few months later, because of that, I had my first big interview in The Guardian. It's the first time I ever did an interview. I was really nervous because it was just completely new to me being interviewed like that. And I'm like, now, obviously. But it was really just like this really intense moment for me because it was like the Guardian one week and then the following week every day of the week I had a different news crew coming to fill me in my home where all of it I just all of a sudden had this attention that I've never experienced before and for me I was quite introverted and shy so this was very intense so this is also like okay this is really it was like a shocking moment for me as a person how was that”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you just had this incredible amount of information that no one else had found. And I was like posting blog posts about it. And the newspapers would start using it. And that was very exciting. There would be this video comes from the Brown Moses blog. These tiny credits, but they all drove traffic to my site more and more journalists got to know about me. And that then led me to basically an investigation where I discovered that these Croatian weapons were being smuggled to rebels in Syria. And I discovered that by watching YouTube videos effectively. And that ended up on the front page of the New York Times. And that's kind of when I realized in a journalistic way it could happen.”
2021-02-05 · Intelligence Squared · Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source