Sway: How Online Sleuths Pantsed Putin

Today, while I'm on vacation, we're sharing an episode from Sway, a fellow New York Times Opinion podcast. Host Kara Swisher talks to Eliot Higgins, CEO of the open source investigative operation Bellingcat. Kara presses Higgins about the perils of taking on Vladimir Putin and how Bellingcat’s work, which Kara calls “gumshoe journalism,” differs from online vigilantism. We'll be back to our regular programming on Tuesday. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld. Special thanks to Shannon Busta and Kristin Lin.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:17Ezra Klein?

  Hello, welcome to Ezra Klein Show. Today with somewhat less Ezra Klein than normal, probably a welcome relief for everybody. I'm on vacation this week, but we're giving you an episode of our sister podcast, Sway, led by Kara Swisher, a podcast about power. You can follow Sway wherever you get your podcasts, but for now, please enjoy.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  I'm Kara Swisher and you're listening to Sway. My guest today is Eliot Higgins. He created Belling Cat, the open source investigative team that's part online detective agency and part news outlet. Higgins Group has broken some of the biggest stories in recent years. Belling Cat found evidence linking Russia to the downing of flight MH17, identified alt-right protesters in Charlottesville, and unveiled the alleged poisoners who targeted Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Belling Cat has become a major thorn in the side of powerful and dangerous people like Vladimir Putin. I wanted to understand how Higgins decides what's worth investigating and what distinguishes his organization from

• 1:41Speaker 01

  online vigilantes. But first, I asked him how he came up with the name Belling Cat in the first place.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  So Belling Cat is based off the fable of Belling the Cat, where there's a group of mice who are very frightened of a large ferocious cat. So they decide that they need a plan to deal with it. And they come up with the idea of putting a bell around the cat's neck, but then they realize they don't actually know how to do that because it's a huge cat and they're mice. So we're, in a way, teaching people how to bell the cat.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  So that they can hear the cat coming.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  So they can hear it coming and be kind of warned of it.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  So you are the mice, presumably, in this scenario?

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, people always call us like the Belling Cats and we're the mice, so.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  All right. Well, anyway, but you are the mice in this idea is that you are facing some ferocious people that could eat you essentially, and that you are going to make sure people can hear them coming or hear them when what they're doing in a stealthy way, for example.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that takes all kinds of different forms. I mean, the work of Bannon Cat covers a pretty wide range of topics. I mean, a lot of it does end up focusing on Russia, but that's because Russia's up to quite a lot of pretty bad stuff at the moment. But we write on a whole range of different topics. And recently, we've been writing a lot about the kind of origins of Q and, you know, clues to who his identity might be. We've written about the kind of violence of January 6 in Washington DC. We've looked into kind of Saudi airstrikes in Yemen, just like a whole range of different topics, looking at, you know, how open source material can be used to investigate those topics.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  I want you to explain what open source means.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  So, open source information is anything that's basically publicly available information, information that you can either kind of go out and find, or you can buy, for example, satellite map imagery. What changed over the last 10 years or so is how much of that information is available and who it's available to. Because of really the rise of smartphone technology from 2007 onwards, and around that, the development of social media sharing apps, people are sharing information all the time. Alongside that, you have the development of things like Google Earth, making satellite imagery accessible to everyone, Google Street View, so you had a view from the ground, you know, anywhere in the world, virtually. And by combining those two kind of almost revolutions in technology, that allows us to do this kind of new form of online open source investigation, where anyone with a

• 3:58Speaker 02

  laptop and internet connection can look at videos and images and information coming from a range of different instance and countries, and start actually piecing together and verifying what this is actually showing.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  I want to know how you got started in doing this kind of digital forensics.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  For me, I actually really started off in 2010 with the events of the Arab Spring. Back then, I was just working in a kind of finance and admin jobs, nothing really kind of grand, but I had an interest in what was happening in the Arab Spring and I was someone who also spent an awful lot of time on the internet. So I was part of these kind of online debates and discussions. So over about a period of a year, I did that more and more and started to build up a following, particularly among people who are interested in the conflict in Syria, be they journalists, people at think tanks, even, you know, people in the kind of political classes and various experts, because no one else was really bothering to look at these videos in a kind of any sort of analytical way. And then in 2013, I actually, using these videos, discovered the Saudi's secret smuggling

• 4:57Speaker 02

  operation to the Syrian rebels, because they were getting all these new weapons from the former Yugoslavia. I figured out where they were coming from and actually working with the New York Times, we were able to establish that this was part of this secret smuggling operation.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  So what you were doing was basically gumshoe journalism, using online tools. I mean, most journalists would go in and see them or take pictures of them and see them. In this case, you're being provided photos, because everybody is taking and uploading photos all around the world, essentially.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's basically just looking at the evidence and figuring out what it said. One advantage I had, funnily enough, was because I didn't speak a word of Arabic, I could only see what was being shown. So if someone was saying something in a video and they were telling a whole story, it didn't matter to me, but I could see that that object on the ground was, you know, like a cluster munition or very particular kind of, you know, barrel bomb design.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  And you're doing all of this online from England?

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I was just sat on my sofa every night, kind of looking through the latest videos.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  So how much of Bellingcat's open source forensics are based on social media like this?

• 5:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it is really any public information that we can find is people posting on internet forums or YouTube or, you know, weird social media sites you never really hear about, because they're for like some really minor obscure groups. So, you know, for example, when we were doing our work on the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, we were looking into the soldiers who were connected to the Russian military brigade that sent the missile launcher over the border, and we looked into them using the V contact type profile of. The Fifty Third Air Defence Brigade, which they belong to. So that's like Russia's equivalent of Facebook. Then we looked at all the people who were following them. And a lot of them were soldiers serving in that brigade. And then we looked at their user IDs as search for those user IDs on different social media platforms,

• 6:39Speaker 02

  which then revealed more and more information about them, what they were doing, who their friends were. And we use that basically to map out the entire network of the Fifty Third Air Defence Brigades. Every member photographed rank. We also used an internet forum for the wives, girlfriends and mothers of these soldiers, where they were discussing their concerns about their, you know, sons and, you know, husbands.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Boyfriends.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Giving details of their military operations because they all kind of felt like it was a secure place. But it was a public forum. So it's anywhere where there's information being shared online. And, you know, obviously that's a lot of different places.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Right. The Russian government has cracked down on soldier selfies and things like that. Because essentially they were saying where they were, what they were doing. And so you could make links between them, which is, you know, a banquet for intelligence services and you yourself.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  So your investigations really build on platforms that do a terrible job with privacy. Facebook, for example.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Or YouTube. And you're, are you troubled by the idea that your success depends on their surveillance and their terrible privacy?

• 7:38Speaker 02

  I mean, it's almost a paradox for the kind of work we do because a really good example of this is Facebook Graph Search, which is a search tool they introduced several years ago. That allows you to do very complicated searches on any individuals or groups of individuals. Like you could find out people who work in Washington DC who go to the nearest Starbucks to the White House. Who, you know, like really granular searches, which was fantastic if you were investigating people because you could find out all sorts of things and they're hidden connections. It was also fantastic if you were a Cambridge analytiker and you wanted to swing, you know, the boat.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Or if you're a Russian and you wanted to swing the 2016 election. So that got shut down. So we lost a really good investigation tool. But it also meant that society also lost something that was beginning to become quite toxic to it. And you, you have all these kind of paradoxes. You know, we want people to be safe and secure online, but we also want people to be sharing as much information as possible about certain specific things.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, you, you kind of benefit from the shitty privacy settings that these companies have or and people's demented need to share. Like at this point, because people are carrying surveillance devices every day of their lives.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  We see every single day of our work, how often people overexpose them. It's like when we're looking into cases of corruption, the easiest way to look into a corrupt individual is look at their children and their wife's social media accounts, because they will have all their sports cars and their holidays all over that. Whilst the person might be quite humble in their kind of own social media posts.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  This is why I've switched off all location and access to Facebook, for example.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  This is the thing, and so people have got, you know, a way to share really useful information about incidents that we're interested in. And we want people to kind of pull out our phone and, you know, feel an airstrike, or, you know, the remains of a bomb, or, you know, someone committing a crime. But we don't want them kind of overexposing their lives. It's like the MyActivity thing on Google, where you can see, you go there and they've got a map of every single place you've been to.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  So you also helped ID violent extremists at the 2017 Charlottesville rally. On January 6th, there was a riot at the Capitol. So walk me through it step by step, how your investigators sprang into action on January 6th. When did you first learn about the attack?

• 9:43Speaker 02

  I mean, really, when it was, I was kind of on Twitter and then, you know, watching it kind of escalate, because you had Donald Trump's speech. And so we were kind of just generally watching it as kind of consumers of news. And then when we realized what was happening, that's kind of when we sort of got into actually collecting these videos.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Who did you call first? I want, I want actual details. So what did you do first? You're like, you're like, I bet these people are going to record, we're doing crimes, look at us.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we were discussing it, you know, in the buildup to it, you know, should we do what we did with Charlottesville? And, you know, we were thinking, surely they wouldn't be stupid enough to kind of record what they're doing again, but we were wrong. So with Charlottesville, we collected as many videos as possible. So we did the same thing with January 6th, we put out a big kind of call for material. But the real difference there was the massive amount of material there was, you know, from January 6th compared to 2017, because everyone had a phone there, everyone was streaming. So then, when that was happening, we already had like a Google sheet and a Google form set up for people to fill in. And on Twitter, we just said, if you have a video, could you, you know, pull it into this sheet? And then we'd go through it. So we had these 1,000 videos or so. And then we kind of de-duplicated them, or, you know, figured out which ones had clips in. And that was literally watching every video and, you know, just recognizing, I've seen

• 10:52Speaker 02

  that video, you know, 200 cells beforehand. And then sourcing them by kind of location. So we had like the inaugural entrance was one location. I spent several weeks looking at all the videos of that to put them into sequential order and also figure out their physical position. So we had kind of then a thousand videos from all over that area, but we knew when they were filmed and where they were filmed. And that was weeks of work to do that.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  But what do you do with it? Law enforcement is also working on trying to identify rioters continuing to do. Do you partner with them or intelligence services?

• 11:24Speaker 02

  No, we were actually approached by the FBI on this one, saying if we could kind of, you know, give them any assistance, but we don't want to do the job of law enforcement for them, especially when they're so well resourced. I mean, we're a small organization with a budget of about 1.7 million a year, which, you know, so it's something we had to build up to. What we didn't want to do, though, is end up in a situation where we're saying, oh, we've got to figure out who that guy, who all that guy is, because we know from experience, even if you get some people right, plenty of people get misidentified.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  And that's exactly what happened, the kind of internet community forums to hunt down, you know, the people responsible. And they identified a bunch of wrong people who ended up getting harassed online. And we've seen that, you know, going back years, you know, the Boston Marathon Reddit investigation being a good example of that, where they identified two suspects because of this kind of group think that occurred by having hundreds of people involved. And in my experience, the more complicated the investigation, the less people you want involved, because that's when you start having kind of group think emerge.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Right. So one of the things that I think was important that you mentioned just now was this idea of people misidentifying people. There are a lot of online vigilantes. So we saw after the Capitol attack, many citizens in online forums combed through social media, trying to identify rioters. There's a thing called due process. There's a thing called presuming innocent before guilt. How do you think about that?

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Well, in the specific case of January 6th, we knew from past experience that we didn't want loads of people looking at into the identities of these people, because we knew that would just be a disaster. So we, you know, we said on our, you know, social media account that we aren't looking for people, you know, it's the FBI's job to do that. We knew that wouldn't stop people from doing it, but we tried to discourage it wherever we could. But, you know, when we're doing our own work, when we do identify people, we're looking at details that aren't just, oh, that guy has a similar face. Like when we're looking at the Charlotte Kind of individuals we're looking into. One guy had a very distinct pattern of moles on his neck. And that's kind of the key thing that allowed us to be 100% sure we were looking at the right person. Something that's also quite distinct when we're looking, for example, for these Russian spies, looking at their fake passports and their real identity documents. Not only do you have the shape of their face, but their ear shape is actually quite distinct

• 13:24Speaker 02

  as well. So you can use that almost as like kind of a fingerprint if you look at their ear shapes kind of very carefully in passport photographs. We also now work with universities who have expertise in facial recognition.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Which can be wrong. One of the things that I think you probably are aware of, most journalists, even though they sort of get pilloried, are in fear of getting things wrong and hurting people. I think it's sort of drilled into you at a very early age as a journalist. And, you know, especially with online, people make all these leaps.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  I mean, in a sense, for me, it's kind of was always informed by kind of the origins of my own career path, which is basically arguing with people on the internet and knowing that people on the internet, A, will argue over any point to a ridiculous length.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  They indeed will.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  And if you get something wrong, they will never let you forget it. So those are kind of the two things that inform our work. Plus now we also have Russia basically doing the same thing because if we get something wrong, Russia won't let us forget it either. So that's kind of, you know, I think informs all our work. Plus, the way we actually work is we're often, it's quite collaborative. For example, with the Russia stuff we're doing at the moment, there's like four or five of us in a group who are discussing this stuff quite regularly, examining each other's works, questioning kind of each other. And then that goes to the editorial team who then go through it and then ask more and more questions on top of that.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  All right. Last summer, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was hospitalized in Siberia after being poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok. He was then treated in Germany. You launched a major investigation into who was behind this. How did you start working with Navalny?

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Well, fully enough, it was really a part of an ongoing investigation we've been doing since 2018 with the poisoning of-

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Around poisonings.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  Yes, because in 2018, we started looking into the identities of the two people connected to the Sergey Skripal poisoning in Salisbury in the UK. And using Russian kind of bureaucratic sources, we were able to find out, you know, their real identities and show they were two GRU officers. That then led us to the identity of a third GRU officer who was involved with that case and that they were part of this unit 29155.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  The GRU, that's Russia's military intelligence service. Go ahead.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  And then, yeah, and then that led then to an investigation in Bulgaria where those same, that same unit was involved with another poisoning. That investigation led us to the phone records, which connected them to basically a series of research laboratories in Russia, where there were chemists working there who had been working on the Novichok program.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Right, so this is a sort of a daisy chain of poisoners. And so one, if they did it in one place, it stands to reason they might try it in another or they might use the same people.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  And with the same source for the poisoning. So when Nirvani was poisoned, we got the phone records of the scientists who work at these places and they were actually calling up FSB teams and being called by these FSB officers. So we had to identify who these numbers were. There were FSB officers, we got their travel records and it just happened.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  How did you get those? By the way, FSB is Federal Security Service for Russia. How did you get those records?

• 16:21Speaker 02

  You could literally like go to like some Russian internet forum where some guys sending them for like a thousand rubles for anyone you want in there, if you've got the passport number.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  So these are things presumably our government keeps under wraps.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we got phone records, for example. Now, phone records aren't just the phone numbers they've called, but the cell phone tower they're connected to, which means you can track their movements. We were also able then to get, you know, along with the flight records, we got their real identity documents and their fake identity documents because we realized there was a process they used when they created a fake identity, which allowed us to identify their real identity. They would use the same first name, a date of birth that was exactly one year different and usually the maiden name of their wife or girlfriend.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  And their password was 1234.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  Well, honestly, we have done some investigations where we have found the passwords and it's always like really stupid passwords they use, like GRU1 and stuff like that. We found some when we found their social media accounts where they literally call themselves something like the Terminator or like some assassination related. That is utterly ridiculous. But we pieced this together and then we went to Navani's team and started talking to him and his team about, you know, what had happened. He was really surprised because he thought he would find out in like 40 years' time that the FSB poisoned him, not literally the people who were like at his hotel the night he was poisoned.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Not these chuckleheads.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  And then we basically worked with him. He wanted to make sure everything we were using was also not coming from like MI5 or the CIA. So he wanted to know every single source we were using. So he went through, you know, about, I think about a month-long process of him and his team double-checking all our findings. We got CNN involved as well, who also double-checked all our findings and sources as well. And then we kind of published, and on the day of publication, we decided it would be fun if we phoned up these poisoners because we had their phone numbers. So Navani calls them up, like, say, "Hi, I'm Navani. Why did it poison me?"

• 18:12Speaker 01

  This is in a 33-minute YouTube video with over 28 million views.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  That was a kind of, we built up to that. So what we did is use a phone number spoofing app, which allowed us to pretend to be calling from the FSB head office, called on the FSB officers, so on his caller ID, he had the FSB head office. And then Navani pretended to be an assistant of one of the more senior kind of FSB kind of officers, way, way above this guy.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  And demanded a full report on what happened. And it was, if we hadn't have caught it on camera, no one would have believed us. And Navani basically bullied him into doing it as well. He was, because the guy was like, "Are we, are you sure we should be doing this on an unsecured line?" He said, "No, this is really urgent. It has to be done now. You must tell me." And then he was like, asked him to give like performance reviews for each of the people involved. The thing is, because we had all this information about the case, we could give him names.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  And he would basically say, oh, yeah, he did this, he did this. And that was confirming every single part of our investigation. Now, we didn't publish that on the day because we knew Putin would be giving his big yearly press conference and he would be asked about this. And we wanted to see his response before we published the audio of this conversation. So he gives his press conference, he's asked about Nirvana and he basically says,

• 19:39Speaker 02

  if we were going to kill him, we would have done it properly. Then on the following Monday, we published this video of this guy saying, oh, I don't know why it went wrong, or it's probably because they got him off the plane. Explain exactly where they put the poison on his underpants, you know, all these different kind of details. And that made it a really, really big story in Russia and internationally as well.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  So essentially, you pantsed Putin.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we knew he would be giving this talk. This was a kind of strategic choice when we were publishing because we knew if we, he had something on record about it and we still had this thing in the tank, it would,

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, it would be more entertaining for the readers.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Well, this is dangerous work. Going after Putin has put you on the Kremlin's radar. They have no problem killing people. They've referenced Bellingcat's work before. You have a family. How worried are you about retaliation yourself?

• 20:24Speaker 02

  I mean, certainly a lot more careful. I mean, in a sense, coronavirus has been, you know, always a blessing because I haven't had to go to, on foreign trips where, you know, stuff could happen. I haven't been staying at hotel rooms with balconies and, you know. But it's, you know, you have to have that kind of level of paranoia. There was, there's one time I was staying at a hotel in the Netherlands where I'd stayed there several times before over previous years. And there was a knock on the door one evening I was there. And a door opened and there was kind of a suit with a name badge for the hotel saying, oh, Mr. Higgins, thank you for staying here so many times. We'd like to give you this gift. I was like, oh, okay, this is a bit weird. But when I closed the door, I thought that guy could have been literally anyone with a name badge he picked up from reception. And I can't eat these cookies they give me, even though there's a lot of them, they look

• 21:09Speaker 02

  delicious. So I ended up throwing them in the bin. And it was quite gutting when I came down the next morning and checked out and they said, oh, we hope you enjoy the cookies that you, we gave you yesterday.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  You suddenly become Jason Bourne in this situation. Like, I'm not going in there.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  It's the crappy parts of being Jason Bourne. It's the kind of, you know, having to be a bit more careful.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  What about your family? Do you think about that?

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's again, I mean, my wife, she kind of is concerned kind of about my safety and, you know, that kind of stuff. My kids are quite young, so they don't quite understand, you know, what I'm doing. I mean, they're six and nine. So maybe as they grow older and get a bit more context to what I'm doing, they might start worrying a bit more.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  We'll be back in a minute. If you like this interview and want to hear others, follow us on your favorite podcast app. You'll be able to catch up on Sway episodes you may have missed, like my conversation with the CIA's chief technologist, Don Myerics, and you'll get new ones delivered directly to you. More with Eliot Higgins after the break.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  So let me ask you about the ethics, because The New York Times doesn't partner with Navalny in that way. Do you see a problem in partnering? Because you're doing journalism in a different way. Why didn't you do the investigation on your own, or at least how to have an arms-length relationship with Navalny?

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, we do a lot of collaborative work at Ballincat anyway. I mean, it's not usually with the, you know, the targets of poisonings, but it's just kind of our natural way. You know, if we are working on our topic, we'll find another media organization who's working on the same topic in a more local sense. And we've done that on a whole range of topics. It's just in the case of Navalny, he was the victim of a poisoning attack, and he was also this big kind of media figure in Russia. So he's really the ideal person to approach with this. Plus, it meant by working with him, we could get more details of his kind of travel records and other information that we didn't have, which is unusual.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Well, most journalism organizations would want to do that, maybe, but don't do that, right?

• 23:17Speaker 02

  I think as well, because Ballincat is kind of this weird hybrid of an organization as well. Like, in a way, the journalism is one outcome of the kind of investigations that we're doing. I think primarily, we're investigators, and then what we do with those investigations can be a whole range of different products.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  And become journalism.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we break down our process, you know, to three steps, identify. Verify and amplify. So we identify material, verify it, and then we amplify it. But that amplification stage can be a kind of more traditional kind of journalistic output. Or it could be, you know, a document for, you know, justice and accountability process. It could be a YouTube video, a documentary. It could be all of them because it's all using the same verified information.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  So journalism is just a byproduct of the investigation. It could be a byproduct. So Russia's state-run Russia Day did come after you. They honed in on one line item for eighteen hundred pounds paid to Bellingcat from the UK Foreign Office in December of two thousand and eighteen. It was for, quote, consulting management and public relations. Can you explain what that was about?

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so basically we run workshops that are publicly available. You know, anyone can join them. And someone did a freedom of information request and found us and kind of won these kind of things. And basically there was a journalist from Eastern Europe who went on one of our courses and then had their course fee paid by the Foreign Commonwealth Office, which was one thousand eight hundred pounds, which was the same as the other twenty participants paid. So that's pretty much the entire story. But of course, Russia Today has been desperately looking for proof that we're secretly working for MI6. And, you know, this was all the proof they needed. It's this kind of six degrees of CIA station they like to play. If they can find one connection, then the rest just come naturally. I mean, the thing is, it's evolved over time.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  And, you know, early on, it was really more the Russian media who like, you know, Russia Today and Sputnik, who were either like saying, I'm some amateur and no one should listen to me, or that I'm probably connected to the intelligence services. And that's certainly, that intelligence service angle certainly ramped up after the scribble thing.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Sure. So let me ask, are you connected to the intelligence services?

• 25:22Speaker 02

  No, we're not. And it's, you know, many, many people seem to think that. And one of the fun things about the internet is the people who think that all find each other and then constantly tell each other that, yeah, we're working with the CIA and make all these connections.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  But it's like when you've got Russia saying that and like the Russian ambassador to the UK gave a press conference following the scribble poisoning, where he repeatedly said that Bellingcat was working for the British deep establishment, as he called it, and was paid for by the intelligence. Services. But when the journalists asked him for evidence, he said, oh, well, we have a feeling I can't show you the evidence. And this is the thing, if Russia cannot show evidence that Ballin Cat is working for the CIA, then what help does, you know, a bunch of conspiracy theories on the internet have? Because Russia has the resources behind it.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  But has the CIA or any other intelligence service like MI6 ever offered you leads and information? Or you say you don't do sources, but would you accept help from those sources?

• 26:16Speaker 02

  No, I I suspect they're a little bit worried about exactly what we would do with that. I mean, if the CIA came to me, I'd probably tweet, oh, the CIA has just been in touch because I'm not, I'm not the kind of person who's great at keeping secrets. I mean, it seems like spy work, but it's like all publicly available information we're using. It's not often like really big secrets.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Right. So you wouldn't want to accept their information.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the thing is, it would be, again, not open source if they did that. Like if they came to us with a list of YouTube videos, that would just be more weird than anything. So if they came to us with a bunch of secret videos saying you can't tell us, you know, telling where you got this from, then that would be a completely absurd situation for us to be into. And we wouldn't accept any information from any kind of intelligence service anyway.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Okay. So I want to talk about Ballin Cat's methods because you do things like paying for data sets, like you talked about, which is probie, as they call it in Russia. You're buying black market data, essentially.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  It's basically Russia is this huge corrupt bureaucracy. So you can buy any data you want from phone records, but to passport application forms of anyone you want. So we've been using that data, which obviously isn't open source in a traditional sense, even though it's very available to anyone. But there, we would use multiple other sources to cross-reference every single piece of information to make sure it's correct and it hasn't been altered. And it's like, okay, there's one assassination here, there's one here, oh, here's the secret weapons lab. And it was all coming from this data. So, you know, considering the value and the importance of this, we thought it was kind of justified ethically because if we didn't do it, then there was a good chance that these guys would still be doing what they were doing today, murdering more people.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Okay. So you weigh that. In a way, Journal Origin wouldn't pay for it. Now, would you pay for controversial facial recognition software like Clearview AI? Have you considered that?

• 27:57Speaker 02

  No, the thing is, it's difficult. I mean,

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Having facial recognition, kind of reverse image search is something that we've used elsewhere in other investigations. Like in Russia, there's sites that basically scraped the entire social media site, V Contacta, and use facial recognition. So if you plug in a picture that you've taken or found online, it will find a matching face in that entire dataset. And that will include Russian soldiers, Russian spies, like really like useful information. So I can see the value of that. But we wouldn't be like going, okay, we've got this facial recognition map, that's the job done. Let's go and arrest that guy, as often happens with some of the people using these platforms, especially, you know, US police. It's tricky as well, because, you know, Clearview clearly is scraping a huge amount of information that I suspect it doesn't necessarily have the rights to be scraping.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Are you using Clearview?

• 28:48Speaker 02

  No, we're not, no. I think as well, because of our position, we scare off some organizations like Clearview, who might have a slight degree of shadiness around the way they collect data, because they don't want to be an article on Bellingcat.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Right, okay. So talking about information selling, TMZ pays for information. I know Harvey very well. The National Enquirer pays for tips. Rupert Murdoch pays for it. Should in the future, American news outlets think about paying for data? Is that the way journalism is going, bought and paid for in a way?

• 29:17Speaker 02

  The thing with Russia is it is extremely unique in the way that you can buy this kind of data. It's not like you can do this in any other country in the world that we've kind of looked into or, you know, invested in investigations in. So it is very unique. It's also very unique of the severity of the case that we're looking into, you know, Novajin assassination programs, targeting, obviously.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  You didn't pay to hack into her phone.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, we aren't paying people to like hack into stuff or anything like that. And one thing we did when we published the Nirvani case, we knew straight away that Russia would say, oh, this is MI6 or the CIA giving the information. So we did a very long piece explaining where this information came from, what source, you know, what those kind of sources were, without linking directly to the sources. But that meant media organizations inside Russia, as this story was kind of, you know, being attacked by the Russian government, actually went and brought the same data and said, oh, actually, this is exactly what Bellingcat says it is. And that actually undermined the attempts to attack. Bellingcat for, you know, doing this investigation. So even though it's not open source in the traditional sense, it's so freely available that even with a little bit of kind of understanding of it,

• 30:20Speaker 01

  You don't need that.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  You can go and do it yourself. Yeah. And this is why I think when we're having this conversation about the ethics of using this kind of data is very difficult to play in the context of other countries because you don't have that situation. Like you wouldn't be able to do that in the US.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  But you certainly can buy information.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. And but it's also, what are you buying it for? I mean, if you're buying it for some celebrity gossip, then, you know, I don't think there's any kind of justification for that in my mind.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Fusion GPS is another entity that does that says they do open source investigations. Fusion is famous for commissioning the infamous Steele dossier on President Trump. That work was thought to be funded by unknown Republican client during the Republican primary. Fusion was founded by a former Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson, who left journalism to make money. As he put it, we don't use the word sold out, we use the word cashed in. Explain how Bellingcat is different.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, Bellingcat now, as it is, is actually a charitable foundation in the Netherlands. So we aren't a private company that's trying to do this work for profit. We're funded through donors, you know, small donors and kind of larger kind of organizations. We're funding for running workshops. So it's for us, it's not about making a profit to kind of make ourselves rich and happy. And, you know, we don't really care about, you know, what's happening. We're doing this because we want to grow and develop the field of online open source investigation and look at where it can be applied in a whole range of different fields. That's why at the moment, we're doing a lot of focus, for example, on justice and accountability and developing online open source investigation methodologies and processes that we can use in these kind of justice and accountability focused investigations, knowing that they meet a standard that they can be used in a courtroom.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  I get that. But I think the question, I think it's a fair one to ask, is who are you actually accountable to? Now, I know you're a Chair of the Royal National in the Netherlands. You have an independent supervisory board to oversee Bellingcat management, but it's, and if you said if we fail to live up to board members' scrutiny, they may take action against any of us. But there's only three names listed, a tech entrepreneur in Amsterdam, a pretty well-known international policy director at Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and a director of cultural center in Amsterdam. So they don't ring out, you know, Bob Woodward to me or something like that. I mean, not that he would be necessarily the right person to pick for here, but who are you actually accountable to?

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, this comes in a number of different forms. I think we do have the supervisory board and, you know, we are accountable to those people and it's something that we're growing as the organisation is growing as well. We're also, you know, legally accountable as well. Is there any organisation is when we publish something?

• 32:49Speaker 01

  You can be sued.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, plus we're also accountable in the sense that we're willing to go to court with the information that we have and sit in front of a judge and explain it in detail and be cross-examined as well, which I think is something that's, you know, very unusual as well. So there's that accountability there. Also, if we publish stuff that's untrue, you know, we're accountable to the people who are reading us. So we have to kind of be, you know, very careful about making sure that we're, what we're publishing is accurate, that it can be stood up, not just for our audience, but also, you know, to a courtroom, both from the perspective of being sued, but also actually using this evidence for accountability. And, you know, also just accountable to the supervisory board.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  All right, but who chose these three individuals? Did you?

• 33:27Speaker 02

  Not myself personally. It was, we now have a management team as well. So it's not a kind of WikiLeaks situation where I'm the Julian Assange of Bellingcat.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  No, then you'd be in an embassy without a cat, an actual cat. But go ahead.

• 33:39Speaker 02

  Then I'm part of a board of directors at Bellingcat. So it's myself, our business director and my colleague Eric Toller, who was one of the first people who joined Bellingcat.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  But how did you get these individuals and can they fire you?

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, they can fire me. Part of the reason we became a charity was to make sure that I couldn't become the king of Bellingcat and do what I wanted to. Also because we're required to have a yearly audit, because we wanted to be transparent about who was funding us and where this money was coming from. So, you know, we approached figures. So Marjorie Tract is someone that I had known from kind of doing some work around Brussels. The other two people I didn't know, but they were recommended to us as people who kind of understood the areas we were working in. And we wanted a supervisory board as well that wasn't just made up of investigators who could get very excited about our investigations. We wanted people who had an understanding of, you know, when we're getting a bit overexcited or when.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Is that going to get larger? That board going to get larger?

• 34:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're growing as an organisation. I mean, generally we've doubled in size every single year since I launched. I launched in 2014 with a Kickstarter for about $80,000 and we've basically doubled in size every year since then. And now we have, I think our budget is about $2.1 million now.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  There's no journalists on the, on the board. That's really interesting to me.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we did have a journalist on the board. The thing is, the journalists we know are all very excited about Ben and Cat's work. And we wanted people who wouldn't get excited about Ben and Cat's work every single time we go, oh, we've got a new investigation. Because they want to be 100% sure we had a reason for doing what we were doing.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  You could put Dick Cheney on it.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  No, I really don't. Gosh, that made me feel dirty if I did that.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  I'm saying he doesn't like the media and he has a lot of spy experience. I think you'd be.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  That would be terrible, though.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  So let's finish up talking about the business. You mentioned the workshops. How are you paying your bills?

• 35:27Speaker 02

  So we get, I think, about 30% of our yearly income from running workshops. And they were in person, but they're now all online. We have about, I would say about 10 to 15% comes from small individual donations. So this would be from things like Patreon or direct donations through the websites of our readers. Then the remaining kind of percent, it comes from a combination of different funding organizations. I think we've got like eight or nine. We're actually about to publish our yearly audit, so it'll all be on there. Whoever really cares about the secrecy of it.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Okay, but not a big Bill Gatesian kind of thing or suddenly.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it would be, you know, be nice if someone came along and gave us a billion dollars to do with what we want, but we actually rather prefer that we have lots of different sources of income because then we're never really kind of like if someone says, you know, I'm not going to pay you any more money unless you do this, we can say, well, goodbye, we'll post an article about that and then.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, don't be beholden to a billionaire. But one of the things you do is these workshops where you train people in open source investigations. Do you ever worry about putting powerful tools in the hands of bad guys or teaching people, wrong people to avoid detection?

• 36:30Speaker 02

  We're pretty careful about who we invite. I mean, there's only so much we can do to look into the background of people, but generally we'll have people coming from places that are kind of big NGOs or news organizations. So they're kind of known quantities. I mean, we sometimes get private individuals who want to learn how to do open source investigations. But if someone comes to us saying, I'm from the, you know, British Ministry of Defense or I'm from the CIA, then we say no, because we don't train kind of military or kind of intelligence or.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Well, they don't tell you that.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Well, this is the thing. It's also how do we know who they are? But fortunately, you know, being open source investigators, we always have a bit of a dig into people to make sure they're representing themselves because equally it could be someone coming from, you know, Russia today or the Russian Ministry of Defense or the GRU who's coming to our workshops. So we have to be, you know, careful. But now everything's online as well. There's less kind of worry that our cups of tea is going to get poisoned whilst we're at a workshop.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Fair point. So one of the things you also aren't you training your competition? News outlets are hiring their own visual investigation teams. The New York Times poached one of your investigators, Christian Triebert. Do you worry about giving away your secret sauce?

• 37:33Speaker 02

  I think we're still quite unique in the sense that it's not just about doing the open source kind of journalism side of it, but the other kind of outcomes that we have. So that keeps us fairly unique in kind of that sense because, you know, the New York Times team does really amazing work. That kind of stuff for me is actually good to see because that's bringing the work we are developing into the mainstreaming.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Would you consider selling Bellingcat to a major news outlet?

• 37:55Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I, we can't sell Bellingcat because it's a charitable foundation now. So it's, it's not something I could do, but I wouldn't want to do that anyway, because once you set it to one specific kind of organization, like a news organization, it becomes a news organization.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  So has anyone tried to buy you?

• 38:09Speaker 02

  No, I mean, I've been tried to, the, the, when I first started doing this and I realized it was something I wanted to do, I applied for jobs at like the BBC and ITV as a trainee journalist and I immediately got rejected.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  They said no, right?

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then now I'm training them. So that's a satisfying, but it's like, the thing is, it's like now when people are actually asking me if I want to work for them, it's like, no, I'm really happy with where I am at Bellingcat.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  That's funny. I, I still keep all the rejection letters I got from every newspaper and there is a pile of them. And sometimes like, I really admire you, Cara, as a journalist. I'm like, you wouldn't hire me. Anyway, so Bellingcat is choosing specific cases and stories to investigate. As you said, there's, there's so many to do. Some critics question your impartiality. How do you answer people who said, what's your agenda? Why do you pick what you pick?

• 38:54Speaker 02

  I mean, like with the Russia stuff, it's not like we wake up thinking we'll investigate Russia today. It's more like, you know, Russia wakes up and someone decides to assassinate someone and, you know, we discover that.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  There they go again, as well, Reagan would say.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  But, you know, we're looking now at topics, for example, we've been looking at Columbia, working with local journalists there, drawing the protests and kind of mapping out the police and security forces violence there. There's like a million things we could do across the world and we're only 20 people. We have to select a topic, a region where we can kind of start actually building the capability there through education, through collaboration.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Regional versus you were looking into, who is Q essentially, tracing metadata and looking where Q drops occurred?

• 39:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's actually come from a small community of kind of researchers who've been looking into that independently of Bala Cat. And we're now kind of giving them a platform where we can kind of review their work, have it edited properly and then published on the website.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  So what would you like to investigate most of all right now? What is of interest to Eliot Higgins?

• 39:51Speaker 02

  Oh, God, that's so, I mean, this, I mean, the situation in Ethiopia and at Rivertrea was really interesting because we did a bit of work there and there was a lot of video footage coming from there that shows some really horrific stuff. But then you look at, you know, another part of the world where there's this stuff and like the stuff that's happening, you know, Israel and Palestine is worth investigating as well. For me, it's always about, you know, seeing if there's any kind of sense of accountability that can be brought to what's happening. I mean, even in the smallest kind of senses, I mean, I've been helping an organization, you know, just a few hours here and there called dogloss.co.uk, which is a website for people who've had their dogs lost or stolen. And we've been using a number plate analysis technique we developed to investigate murders to help

• 40:32Speaker 02

  detect dog thefts. And we've already reunited two dogs with their families. It's literally just like a couple of hours.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Well done, Elliot.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  The thing is, you don't usually get that. If you're investigating a Syrian war crime, it's like, okay, I will have a result in 10 years.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  So the cats are saving dogs, right? Is that really pretty much?

• 40:49Speaker 02

  It's the mice saving dogs.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  The mice, the mice who bell the cats are saving dogs.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Very confusing.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  All right. Elliot, thank you so much. I really appreciate this.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  Cheers.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Sway is a production of New York Times Opinion. It's produced by Na'ei Marazza, Blakeney Schick, Hiba Elarboni, Matt Kwong, and Daphne Chen. Edited by Na'ei Marazza and Paula Schuman, with original music by Isaac Jones, mixing by Eric Gomez, and fact checking by Kate Sinclair. Special thanks to Shannon Busta, Kristin Lynn, and Lyriel Higa. If you're in a podcast app already, you know how to get your podcasts, so follow this one. If you're listening on the Times website and want to get each new episode of Sway delivered to you with a box of mysterious hotel cookies, download any podcast app and search for Sway and follow the show. We release every Monday and Thursday. Thanks for listening.