Hi everyone. I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO

of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund.

And today we have a very special

episode. We are recording in front of a

live audience of nearly 200 people.

These are my colleagues

at the Sovereign Wealth Fund. And we are

joined by the very impressive Eliot

Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat,

the world's leading open-source

investigative collective.

Now, Eliot is not a spy, not a trained

journalist,

is actually a college dropout who taught

himself to investigate war crimes from

his kitchen table in Leicester.

He's unmasked Russian assassins, exposed

chemical weapons used in Syria, helped

identify Navalny's poisoner.

And I've been really looking forward to

this, Eliot. Warm welcome.

>> Thanks for having me on.

>> So, just to start, what is Bellingcat?

>> So, um Bellingcat does something called

open-source investigations. So, that's

using publicly available material to

investigate a range of different topics.

And really over the last 15 years, what

is publicly available material has just

mushroomed to just a huge extent. It's

stuff like social media posts,

uh satellite imagery available through

things like Google Maps or other

services,

um all kinds of things like marine

traffic data or air flight data that's

also publicly available. So, we take all

that data and then we investigate

different things. And that's included uh

chemical weapons attacks in Syria, the

downing of Malaysian Airlines flight

MH17,

uh more recently a lot to do with

America's bombing of Iran, uh ISIS and

VHS raids in the US as well. So,

>> How do you decide what to what to focus

in on?

>> Well, early on it's I mean, the whole

field of open-source investigation was

very much led by um

kind of obsessive nerds on the internet

just doing what was interesting to them.

And really the big events were initially

the Arab Spring in Syria, then the

shooting down of MH17, then Russia's

invasion of Ukraine. Um and so really

that's kind of was just a bunch of

volunteers doing things that were

interesting to to them, but now we have

teams who work on financial

investigations, uh, what we call online

ideologies, which is quite broad, uh,

and conflict.

>> So, how many how many different hotspots

are you looking at at each

point in time?

>> Um, it it varies, but it's it's like at

the moment we're looking at, uh, of

course, what's happening in Iran, but

we're also looking at, uh, the DRC and

Sudan and other places where there's

ongoing conflicts. Sometimes an

investigation is a really, you know,

multi-month month process. Sometimes

it's reacting really quickly to events

that are happening on the ground in

different contexts.

>> Now, you live here in Leicester. Uh, you

got an organization in Holland, but you

have a big network. Just how does it

work?

>> So, um, we have the central Bellingcat

organization, which has about 35 staff

members, mostly researchers and

trainers. We then have a community of

volunteers who we train and, uh, we can

direct. That's about 200 people. There's

also a Discord server where we have lots

of people. It's kind of our community

server that has about 43,000 people on

it, and they, um, what's great about

that is they kind of really have the

values of Bellingcat, that it's really

really about the research first before

they form an opinion about something,

and that's something that's quite quite

rare in online spaces. But also, they

find stuff that we're not looking at,

and then that becomes kind of part of

our process as well.

>> are the values what would make me become

one of your

uh,

kind of, what should we say, reporters

or helpers or investigators?

>> It's you never prejudge a situation.

Just because you feel something should

be the truth doesn't mean it actually is

the truth. So, um, I I think that's a

very important over contentious issues

as well, where there tends to be two

sides who just want to pick fights with

each other on the internet. We're not

interested in that. We want to look at

the evidence first and draw our

conclusions based off that evidence.

Um, but also it's about inclusion as

well. It's saying it's not just about

what we do at Bellingcat, but teaching

other people these skills so they can do

their own investigations and form their

own communities. So, community building

with those values is something that's

really a core part of what we do at

Bellingcat.

>> Now, we have just so much to learn from

the methodology here. So, let's just

always think, you know, what how can we

how can we use this? But, let's just

start with the beginning. 2012, you're

sitting at your kitchen table and you're

looking at YouTube clips from the Syrian

war.

What did you What did you see?

>> Yeah, so um,

I would really like to say I had a kind

of noble

>> why were you looking at YouTube clips

from the Syrian war?

>> I I wish I could say I had this noble

intention to become a great human rights

or journalist or something. No, I was

arguing with people on the internet. And

I wanted to win the arguments. And there

were all these videos coming from places

like Libya and Syria. And really in

those kind of online communities, they

were just being used as sticks to beat

each other over the head with. They

weren't fact-checking them. They were

just saying, "Oh, this proves that I'm

right and you're wrong." But, I just

wanted to know what was going on in

these places. So, I realized you could

use satellite imagery to figure out

where stuff was filmed. And we call this

geolocation. It's a core skill now. But,

at point it was just me winning

arguments on the internet. But, I just

really thought, "Well, this is

kind of deepening my understanding of

what's actually happening in these

conflicts." And I started like posting

about on Twitter and then doing a blog

so I had more places to write with no

intention of anyone ever taking me that

seriously, but eventually they did.

>> But, what did you see?

So, I saw pictures.

>> In Syria, I I didn't speak any Arabic so

I was really looking at the content of

the videos. And a lot of it showed

unexploded munitions, um, eventually the

aftermath of chemical weapon attacks.

And I systematically tracked all the

videos coming out of Syria because they

basically used YouTube as their main

distribution platform.

Um, and those channels are usually run

by like media centers or armed groups.

So, you could actually have a catalog of

all these channels and check them every

single day. And no one else had figured

out you could do that. So, every day I

would just go through hundreds of videos

from Syria looking for stuff that was

new or unusual, really focusing on IDing

weapons in particular.

>> Then you started Bellingcat and that the

Malaysian airline was shot down.

Just how how did that case develop?

>> So, um I was blogging um on a really

awful looking blogspot website. I

thought I needed more professional

website and a better name. So, I

launched Bellingcat in July 2014 and 3

days later MH17 was shot down. So, you

have this kind of real mass movement on

social media of people digging through

stuff trying to figure things out. And

Bellingcat kind of been became the kind

of center point of a lot of that. So, I

was publishing articles and then slowly

building up a small team of kind of

volunteer researchers who every day were

digging through every bit of information

about MH17 and searching for stuff. And

that led us to finding all kinds of

stuff that no one else

anywhere had found like the origin of

the missile launcher, where it had

launched from, and other details like

that.

>> So, in the book they go into the story

in great detail and you're going to see

how that how that building that case.

Now, the Russian Ministry of Defense

weren't particularly pleased with you.

>> Yeah, so we've had kind of an escalating

campaign against us coming from Russia,

really starting in 2015 with places like

Russia Today and Sputnik News writing

critical articles of us.

That led to them trying to hack our

emails, our website. Most recently

there's been six Bulgarians who were

jailed because they were spying on one

of my colleagues for 2 years. And that

was linked to the Russian FSB. So,

there's really been an escalation of the

years of how they've responded to our

work.

>> Now, we continued poisoning in the UK.

What was that?

>> Yeah, so um when the Skripal poisoning

happened, we we couldn't really do much

kind of in the initial moment. But when

the identities of the poisoners was were

released, they uh there was a Russian

news site that got the flight manifest

of the flight and their passport numbers

were just a few digits apart, which is

very suspicious. So, one of my former

colleagues, Christo Grozev, he he's very

good at using the kind of um what you

call the kind of

gray market of data in Russia. In

Russia, basically all government data is

for sale if you know the right people to

speak to.

>> Yeah.

>> So, we got their passport registration.

>> only in Russia or is that everywhere?

>> It's mainly in Russia in our experience.

There might be other places, but

Russia's particularly bad for that cuz

you know, the snake rots from the head.

You know, it it's everyone's corrupt.

So, we were buying things like the

registration forms of passports and

discovering they had the Russian MOD's

phone number stamped on these guys'

passport forms and using government

databases of house registrations and car

registrations to kind of unpick their

identity. And eventually, that allowed

us to find the real identity of these

suspects. And so, what happened?

So, um

Well, part of it is we were the first

people to show that these two guys who

had just been on Russia Today saying

they were tourists visiting Salisbury

Cathedral and you know, talking about

the 123 m spire. As they were on TV, we

were getting the data ring showing that

they were Russian spies and we were able

to publish straight away. And that had a

huge impact. We had like nearly every UK

newspaper had our work on their front

page the following day.

Um and that really kind of

led us then to the poisoning of Alexi

Navalny as well because we discovered

the network of chemical weapon

scientists who were producing these

chemical weapons, where they worked, and

we were able to buy their phone records

from people in Russia and hit see them

phoning up FSB agents just before

they're going to poison him. So, we

could track the FSB agents as well cuz

the phone records aren't just who you've

called, it's every single cell phone

tower you connect to, which can then be

mapped out. You can actually follow

people as they're moving around Europe

and Russia, you know, minute by minute.

And that's what we did with their data

cuz Russia's so hideously corrupt in

that way. And then he called them up.

Yeah, he called them up. So, um

we we had this um filmmaker with us who

was just filming interesting things uh

we were doing. And uh we thought

wouldn't it be fun to call these people

up now we've got their phone numbers.

And [laughter]

we thought it would be like

over in 10 minutes. They'd all hang up

or you know swear at us or something.

And that happened for the first three or

four calls. But then And then Navalny

was the guy calling them up. So, then we

tried we um spoofed the phone number of

the FSB, called one of the guys up, and

Navalny pretended to be uh kind of a an

officer assessing the assassination

attempt.

It's worth tracking down the video and

watching the whole thing. It's in the

documentary we did, but the full video

is an hour long. And he um got the guy

to give him a blow-by-blow account of

exactly how the poison had done. They'd

basically got to his hotel room. You put

poison on the seam of his underpants.

And then when he put them on and went to

the airport, it activated and uh started

to nearly kill him. But he just gave us

a blow-by-blow description then how he

when they recovered Navalny and he was

injured, they got his clothes and then

cleaned his kind of underpants really

carefully to get rid of the um poison

they'd used in the assassination. And we

recorded the whole thing and then that

became our documentary. But we'd

actually um Putin on the Friday after we

did that phone call that just given a

big speech about, you know, I've nothing

to do with this. Navalny, you know, this

is all untrue. And then on the Monday we

were able to reveal this hour-long video

of one of his spies explaining exactly

how he did the poisoning.

>> Do you check your underpants every day?

>> [laughter]

>> It's I mean I would advise everyone does

that every day.

>> I mean you're a you're a high-value

target, right?

>> Well, I mean it's it's something we have

to take seriously. So, it's like at the

moment I have West Midlands or East

Midlands counter-terrorism police uh

paying me the occasional visit to let me

know what's going on in their world,

which is always a bit disconcerting. Um

you do have to be kind of a lot more

security-aware, and aware of when

something weird happens is you kind of

think about is that just general

weirdness, or is that a weirdness that's

particularly focused on on me? It's like

we had one guy after a big event we did

in the Netherlands, a couple of the team

were walking around, and this guy was

following them around taking photos of

them. So, they managed to snap a photo

of him, thinking this guy's dodgy, maybe

a spy. And they they spent weeks trying

to figure out who this guy was. He was

just a fan. He was just too shy to come

up and say hello, so he was just taking

photos from a distance, which is, yeah.

We we contacted him and said, "Hey, by

the way, please probably best not to do

that in the future."

>> Yeah, well, the the the people taking

photos today are fans, too, so

Um now, um

we put I think we probably put in a

jingle here because we're suddenly

changing topics. The difference between

now and 2012 in terms of what's

available online in terms of material,

what um what's the magnitude of change?

>> Well, I I think one real change is the

access we now have to satellite imagery.

So, back in 2012, you were very reliant

on things like Google Earth and Google

Maps. Um now, for a monthly fee, we use

Planet Labs, where we can only get daily

imagery of of various sites, but we can

actually task satellites to specific

locations. So, sort of a James Bond, but

if there's this area we're interested

in, we can put in a tasking request and

get satellite imagery of that in the

next few days. Which, for our kind of

work, when you're trying to verify stuff

as quickly as possible, is incredibly

useful.

Each kind of conflict or situation has a

kind of different a kind of um

uh characteristics around how social

media is used. So, with Syria, you know,

Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were

where most stuff was being posted. With

the conflict in Ukraine, especially

since 2022, Telegram was the kind of big

website. It constantly changes. If

you're looking into criminal activity,

you might find a lot on TikTok, for

example. There's lots of people who do

crimes and post them on TikTok, and then

um do that for months and months and

months until someone like us comes

across it and unpicks the whole thing.

So, um yeah, it's more

you constantly have to learn, you have

to see how different situations evolve,

how technology is being used, and look

for opportunities. And you know, there

are like with Iran, the internet was

shut down there for a very long time in

the early parts of the current conflict.

Um and that meant we had to use other

techniques to analyze satellite data,

for example, cuz there was no satellite

data, either. So, we used a system that

uses um infrareds

um satellite imagery and compares the

differences to them using a

very complex program I can't possibly

explain. But um that allows us to see a

kind of heat map of where damage is

occurring across Iran and elsewhere in

the Middle East at a time when there was

no visual satellite imagery of that kind

of stuff.

>> Supposedly, Israel hacked into normal

civilian's camera all over Iran, right?

To check out where the

the leaders were. Do you hack into

systems like that, too?

>> No, and we we try to avoid crimes

whenever possible. But [laughter]

>> What what does that mean, try to avoid?

>> Well, well, it's For example, the um

sometimes I mean, pretty much everything

we do is a criminal offense in Russia at

the moment, mainly cuz we did it and

then they made it a criminal offense to

do it. So, for example, the um

Russian soldiers used to post loads of

social on social media about where they

were, what they were up to, their

friends. And we used that to reconstruct

exactly where they were on the MH17. But

then the Russian um government passed a

law to ban soldiers from doing that ever

again, partly cuz of what we were doing

in terms of that. But it's also like the

stuff we're doing with the um Navalny

and Skripal investigations. We wouldn't

buy data anymore, because that's become

that's kind of of area we felt even when

we were doing it, but it's kind of a

choice of, you know, we we knew how the

data was and if we ignored it then

people were literally being killed with

chemical weapons and we found that there

were multiple people who were killed

like that that hadn't even really made

it to the media. So, there was that kind

of

complex ethical conversation we had

around that.

>> What's the weirdest source of data

you've used ever?

>> Um

This wasn't one of our investigations,

but it always I think it definitely

ticks the weird box. So, a a

couple years ago there was a Instagram

post that was being shared on social

media. It had been copied and pasted and

it was supposedly from Alexandria

Ocasio-Cortez's

social media account and it showed a

pair of women's legs in the bath. It's

like a saucy photo. Now, very quickly

the WikiFeet community, which is the

foot fetish community, who rates

people's feet, immediately said, "That's

not her feet. We know what her feet look

like. It's actually this person's feet."

And they found the original photograph

of it. So, but you know, in all of this

work, I mean, if you go back to

um

you know, the rendition flights that

were happening in the early 2000s, it

was plane spotters who found that

network. So, people with really really

specific interests and hobbies can

actually be a really useful source of

information. You just have to kind of

know what kind of people out there and

how to interact with them safely, I

guess.

>> So, nerds nerds are good.

>> Nerds and perverts, yes.

>> [laughter]

>> We have the old nerd, too. We love them.

>> [laughter]

>> What's the most shocking piece of

disinformation that you've seen ever?

>> Oh god, I mean, it's so so constant.

It's like there's an ongoing campaign

from Russia at the moment. It's called

various things. One of them is the

Russian doll campaign cuz what they've

been doing is making fake videos of news

sites, including myself.

And they made a 3D animated kind of

PlayStation 2 era graphics

avatar of me to do some of the videos.

Uh, another thing they did in that

campaign. So, a typical video would be

like, you know, the Armenian president

is a drug addict. Not that anyone would

even bother interacting with that post,

but they just churned dozens of these

out every single week. And they sent

email them to us directly, so we engage

with them, which we don't. But, they

included jigsaw pieces in some of these

posts. So, it'd be the fake news video

and a jigsaw piece.

And, um, they were all numbered.

So, I started piecing them together over

a period of weeks and weeks. And what it

was, it was a jigsaw puzzle of my face

on a pile of poo with, um, "Belling

at Elliot Higgins" as the logo. Sorry my

language, but they'd included this in

their disinformation as a kind of weird

personalized message to me. But, things

I like doing jigsaws, so for me this is

just fun. And then I had like something

I could kind of post on social media as

well. So, it was like, "This is just

keep doing it." They actually started a

third jigsaw puzzle. There were two, and

they did a third one. And I think I had

posted so much about the second one they

did, they actually got told to stop

doing it, which I was very disappointed

about cuz it looked good.

>> What are we up against in terms of

number of people? What are What kind of

the resources, let's say,

uh, in Russia to

conduct those kind of campaigns? What

are we What are we What are we What are

we up against here?

>> Well, I mean, it's kind of a what we're

looking at is a kind of development of

the Internet Research Agency, which

really kind of dominated the kind of

2016 scene. Um, that was linked to

people who had now been killed by the

Russian government. So, now it's being

run by another oligarch. But, they're

they're dealing with hundreds of people

who are doing this. The The thing with

disinformation, though, we tend to treat

it as a kind of foreign actor issue, but

a lot of disinformation and

misinformation comes from online

communities who generally believe

they're creating good, useful

information, but also have kind of

grifters in that community and sometimes

Russian or you know, foreign

interference that's kind of amplifying

those communities. But for

disinformation to work, you need people

who want to engage with it. And this is

why a lot of this recent Russian

disinformation doesn't work. They did a

huge campaign around Armenia, hundreds

of videos, fakes, all sorts. It got no

engagement because not really that many

people who speak English on social media

really care about what's happening in

Armenian politics. So it got no genuine

uplift.

>> When you start these uh investigations,

how do you make sure do you have like a

hypothesis and you test it, or how do

you how do you work? How do you make

sure that you aren't biased in your

research?

>> Yeah, I mean, it depends on the starting

point and the scale of something. So,

um with the Alex Wrecker and Manny Good

Shootings in Minnesota, there straight

away you had videos that were being

shared and dissected on social media.

So, in that case, what we were trying to

do is get information out quickly that

looked at certain key claims, which we

could say yes, this is true or not. So,

Alex Wrecker was disarmed and then shot,

and that became a point of contention,

but we released a

video that kind of synchronized multiple

videos to show the moment he was

disarmed and then shot in one complete

sequence rather than the fragments that

were out there. So, that's when you kind

of have to respond quickly because there

is a discourse, and you know, the

government's going to lie about it, too.

But in other cases, it could be a lot

more, you know, gather a huge amount of

information, start looking at what

patterns it's showing you, um try to

verify as much of that information as

possible. So, uh we're looking at kind

of Israelis um air

air strikes in Lebanon very, very

recently, and that was a huge data set

we were looking at rather than kind of

individual videos and focusing on just

one particular incident. So, there's

just it's a matter of scale and you

know, what question we're trying to

answer.

>> You mentioned the importance of speed in

the Minnesota case. Just why is speed so

important? Why is it so important to to

the truth out before

uh

false perceptions have uh kind of

established themselves.

>> Cuz generally once people feel they know

the truth about a subject,

they'll not change their mind about it.

And in those moments when there's, you

know, just a few hours where there's a

really uh vigorous discourse online, and

you know that it's going to be a

government that's going to come out with

a version of events that's probably not

going to match reality, trying to get as

much information into that discourse is

important because

people take those kind of objects you

create and then spread them across

multiple websites where all this

discourse is occurring. So, you don't

have to distribute it just as as like a

single node. You're kind of can rely on

other people to pick that up and take it

elsewhere. When it's something that's uh

kind of longer-term, kind of deeper

investigation, you don't have that kind

of engagement happening. So, you have to

really approach that in a different way,

both in how you investigate it, but also

then how you distribute that

information. How do you reach the

audiences you want to see it?

>> So, how fast do you need to be now?

Let's say there is a shooting, which is

bad.

Where How fast How quickly do you need

to be out there with a narrative?

>> Well, I mean, I I I

think you've got

at best two or three hours in many

cases, if it's something like those um

shootings in Minnesota.

Um something that took a little bit

longer, but was still kind of influenced

the discourse, which if we look at the

um Iranian um school bombing where the

girls were killed, um we found a video

of Tomahawk missiles hit striking close

to that building, but not on it. But we

got that information out there um

probably within about 48 hours of the

air strikes happening. And then Donald

Trump was being asked about, you know,

why is there a video of Tomahawk

missiles? By journalists who had seen

our work, know where reliable, and then

could actually ask that question knowing

that, you know, that is a fact, not just

something that they've kind of read on

the internet and rumored. And then

Donald Trump responded by saying, "Well,

the Iranians have Tomahawk missiles as

well." Which is completely ridiculous,

but he was forced into that position

because we could present verifiable

evidence.

How much more are governments lying now

compared to

10 years ago?

I mean, it depends on the government, I

think, more than

>> didn't want to be I didn't want to be

specific.

>> Certain governments that are kind of to

the west of this country, they

are lying The thing is

it's kind of a it's authoritarian

capture ultimately, because then it

becomes about loyalty tests. It doesn't

come about the truth, it becomes about

how you demonstrate your loyalty to the

the in-group, and then how you can

define the out-group by their refusal to

tow the line. So, this is really what

we're saying seeing in the US is

authoritarian capture of various

institutions, the presidency,

the kind of bending of the knee of

various organizations, where the truth

is no longer important. It's all about

those loyalty tests.

>> How do you think this will develop?

>> Uh so, a lot of my work at the moment

looks at issues around disinformation

and democratic theory and kind of where

we've got how we've got to where we are

at the moment.

I think the the the one thing that

really worries me about that work, and

I've spent a long time doing this, is

that the way we've kind of set up our

society and information system now has

changed completely. We've gone from this

information system that was top-down,

elite-controlled,

uh and also normalized because of that.

We had institutions, the media, who, you

know, they kind of controlled the flow

of information to the public to a large

extent. And the public were recipients

of information. And in that

relationship, the public had to trust

those institutions to produce verifiable

information that they could be

deliberated on it procedurally through

courts, through parliaments, and then

people would be held to account for

wrongdoing. And that was the public the

kind of social contract we had with

those institutions. That's now collapsed

into a peer-to-peer, many-to-many

information system, where institutions

are competing for attention with the

public in systems that rewards

engagement over the truth. And those

platforms like X, for example, that

monetize their social media process,

rewards basically engagement more than

anything. So, what that leads to is a

system where populist, authoritarian,

and conspiratorial ideas perform really

well because they don't need the

procedural certainty behind it. You just

say this is true, and people nod their

head because they're prepared to believe

that in a way.

>> And the whole clickbait

>> Yeah, yeah, it's just all about, you

know, what engages people rather than

what's truthful. And we see this often

around conflicts where there's a lot of

public engagement. You know, the

situation in Gaza produced a lot of fake

information because people just wanted

to get the clicks and monetize the

engagement that they were get getting on

platforms like X.

>> One of the bigger questions on on

democracy, [clears throat]

I mean, you talk about verification,

deliberation, accountability. Could you

just explain briefly the concept?

>> Yeah, so you can understand democracy as

having three core functions when it

works well. That's verification, how do

we know what's true? Deliberation, how

do we decide to what we do on that? And

then accountability is how we hold

powerful the powerful to account. And

when that functions, it restrains power.

But what we tend to see more in our

democracies is a kind of performative

version of that where

it's not really about holding the

powerful to account or real

verification, it's about getting

elected. It's about building a coalition

of voters who'll be enough to get you

in. But that then slides into a form of

simulated democracy which becomes

disordered where verification is now

about a predecided set of truths. And if

you go outside of that, you become

attacked by the in-group. Deliberation

is also about really identifying who's

loyal rather than identifying what to do

on this information. And accountability

is always targeted outwards from the

in-group. And you can look over to the

US and see that happening very, very

clearly every single day.

>> And so what can democracies do

to counteract this? Well, unfortunately

it's a big issue and it requires a lot

of

involvement with lots of different

sectors. I I speak to policy makers,

government, people working in civil

society about these issues and there's a

recognition there's a huge problem.

>> Yeah.

>> The problem we've got is really since

2016 has been defined as an issue of

foreign interference, of disinformation.

And that if somehow we can get rid of

that issue that false information,

society will fix itself and democracy

will flourish again.

Problem is that's complete nonsense.

It treats disinformation and the

problems it causes as a kind of supply

side issue. That if only we get rid of

the supply then all these problems will

fix itself. But really that's driven

when people feel a sense of betrayal, of

distrust in those institutions and they

look for alternative sources

in these online spaces where engagement

is rewarded over accuracy. So even

though they might be trying to seek this

truth, they're going into environments

which are not designed for truth

seeking. They're designed for

engagement. So people get drawn towards

more conspiratorial ways of thinking and

again authoritarianism, populism and

conspiracy theories perform extremely

well and slow procedural verification

through institutions, the media, through

Bellingcat doesn't perform as well in

those environments.

>> Do you think any of this is important

for us as a long-term investor?

>> Well, I think

when reality becomes contest, I mean

Does anyone work on anything to do with

Iran at the moment and do you know what

the hell's going on? Cuz day-to-day the

story of what's happening changes. So So

without that reliability without being

able to rely on what could be truthful

and what's not, then it's very hard to

make any real, you know, tactical

strategic decisions about things. And

this is where open source investigation

is so valuable. I mean we train people

in all kinds of different sectors. I

mean we've trained investment firms,

journalists, you know, all kinds of

people to do this kind of work.

>> But if you take if you take the Iran

conflict as an example, how much

information flow is there now from each

side? I mean, how would you think they

compare?

>> Um

>> [sighs]

>> information I mean

>> Cuz we got so little information

>> is also information. It's just very poor

quality information that you can't

trust. So, you then have to use other

ways of figuring out what's going on.

And this is why a balance account we've

been looking at Iran, there is a limit

on satellite imagery and social media

information that has been useful in the

past, but there are other ways to look

at what's going on there.

>> How is AI changing all of this?

>> Um

I think AI gives people a permission

structure to deny reality. So, if they

see a picture they don't like or a

video, they can just say, "Well, that's

AI." And that's the kind of end of their

engagement with that particular object.

Um it also allows people to kind of make

cases for stuff that's not really true.

It's kind of

you see so often people will engage with

an AI image, they know it's AI, but it

supports something that they think is

true. So, it's this kind of truthiness

of the imagery comes across rather than

it being factual. Um

I mean, one example of that is there was

a far-right UK rapper who was entirely

AI-generated. The music, the face,

everything was fake, but lots of people

engaged with it because it was content

that they, you know, wanted to see and

that they thought other people should

see as well.

Um in terms of actual open-source

investigation,

I haven't really um seen AI really add

much to our actual

you know, processes so far. You can do

stuff like vibe coding sometimes to like

scrape a website that's being awkward,

but there's nothing that's really like

completely changing the game around

open-source investigation.

>> think that's a bit surprising.

Do you think it will happen when you get

more kind of agents in place?

>> It it might do. I mean, I use AI a lot

for various experiments and stuff like

that. So, you know, just recently I I've

for years wanted to scrape um all the

Syria documents of the Organization for

the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons

website cuz that's my thing I'm into.

That's a nerd thing, don't worry about

it. But, it I just basically went to

Claude and said, "How should I do this?"

And it wrote me a Python script and

within 10 minutes it done a job that I'd

been putting off for 8 years. So, that

can be really, really useful for just

kind of experimenting and poking around.

We've tried to get AI's to do

geolocation

and they have um a mixed set of results,

I think it's fair to say, but they can

also provide context clues that you

might miss. Like, it might identify a

certain type of tree that's only going

to grow in a certain range of, you know,

hills in some country and then you're

like, "Okay, I know where to look now."

You of course got to double-check that's

actually true, but it can provide extra

clues.

>> And geolocation is a game you play with

your son.

I gather.

>> Yeah, so

>> Tell me about the game. I mean, how do

you play a geolocation game?

>> Well, I just like find some photo and,

you know, he'll kind of try and find it

on Google, not that like a walk run,

but, you know, it's just um it's a fun

thing to do. We're actually saying that

there's a like a game that's based off

geolocation that's being released soon

and we'll probably do a live stream of

that for our fundraising. So, it's kind

of weirdly like there's um this guy

called Rainbolt who does this thing

called GeoGuessr. So, GeoGuessr, it

gives you an image and then you click on

a map of where you think it could be in

the world. And he's like

like the world expert in it. He'll look

at a picture, immediately click, and

then be within like 100 m of where the

picture is taken. He can see all the

context clues immediately. But, yeah, he

often gets photos from people saying

like, "Here's a, you know, family

member, you know, where could he be?"

And they'll find it in like 5 minutes.

>> Cool.

>> Now, you've been spending a lot of your

life trying to find the truth, right?

Which is in a way what you do.

>> Mhm.

>> What's what's driving you here?

>> Well,

I mean, it was as I said when I started

it was arguing with people on the

internet, to be honest, but

um

over the years it became really clear

how important this information was in a

lot of different contexts that

you know, this like with MH17

immediately the Russian government were

lying and producing fake evidence, but

we could say that was fake evidence

because we could do open-source

investigations to examine it and verify

if it was true or not. It turned out it

wasn't true. It with Syria and chemical

weapons use, which I spent a lot of time

on, there's a huge amount of

disinformation and propaganda about that

coming from online communities and the

Russian government. Um and again, it's

there's always going to be things that

are contested, but usually when there's

got contestation happening, it's just

two people or two communities arguing

with each other about what they think

should be correct rather than doing

analysis. So we're trying to say build

communities around those values and

ideas that

you do the investigation, you verify

information, and then you have your

opinion. You don't have your opinion and

then fit the investigation around that

is often kind of what happens around

that discourse.

>> What are the personal costs to you as a

person?

>> I Well,

>> I mean, not monetary, but just as a

>> Well, I mean, this there is the security

aspects of it cuz um like there's

certain places I won't travel to at the

moment. Obviously, Russia's off the

table forever.

But like I can't travel to the US at the

moment because um this is conspiracy

theory called the censorship industrial

complex, which presents the idea that

the Biden administration and academics

and journalists basically colluded to

you know, do various things. And um

Bellingcat kind of got tied up in that

just weird kind of

got had nothing to do with it, but

people don't like Bellingcat certain

communities, so we got kind of named

with everyone else. And there's people

in the State Department who've been

looking at communications between

myself, Bellingcat, and the State

Department to prove their case, but they

don't exist. So that just makes them

think there's a big cover-up around this

stuff now. Um Elon Musk

>> So you have to I'm sorry, Elon Musk

>> Yeah, so Elon Musk called us a psyop. So

um we know this yeah, the US

administration is definitely knows who

we are and we've been very critical of

them, published embarrassing

investigations, and I don't want to take

the risk of, you know, turning up at an

airport in America and then being off to

a nice detention center for some reason.

So you basically have to stay in

Leicester.

Yeah, well, I can travel a bit outside

of it if I'm lucky, but yeah.

>> [laughter]

>> How do you fund How does Bellingcat fund

you fund itself?

>> Yeah, so

um

when I started I crowdfunded using

Kickstarter, but then as we've grown,

um there's been foundational funders

like the Open Society Foundations, um

family foundations. We raise about 30%

of our income from workshops. We have

small donations, but um one of the

things that's happened recently that's

been a real shock to the whole kind of

sector has been um the US aid funding

cuts.

About 25 to 40% of the global funding

for the kind of, you know, investigative

journalism NGOs was lost overnight

because of those US aid funding cuts. So

even though Bellingcat didn't take any

of US aid funding money, it the whole

funding environment is a nightmare now.

So you have to kind of really rely now

on

kind of small donors, high net worth

individuals, um cuz the foundations are

now under a huge amount of pressure to

basically save a lot of organizations

that are going under. And especially in

the global south where a lot of that

funding had was coming from US aid, a

lot of these small media NGOs who are

doing really high quality investigative

journalism just shut down overnight

because of it.

>> So when you look at the world, are you

an optimist or pessimist?

>> Um

I I I would say I'm a cynical optimist.

It's the best way to think of it. I The

thing is in my work I've seen what you

can do. This

um

you know, getting not just what we do at

Bellingcat, but showing other people

these skills, be they

um you know, journalists in lots of

organizations we've trained. I mean,

we've probably trained several thousand

journalists and activists in open source

investigation. But also the online

communities that have seen our work and

learn how to do open source

investigation just by the way we kind of

include all the details in our articles

and case studies and then they find

stuff themselves that is really really

impactful and does actually make a

difference. That's something that gives

me hope. The difficult part is doing

that at scale. How do we get as many

people involved as possible, especially

now we live in this environment where,

you know, the attention is really the

name of the game, not the truth. And

that's really kind of poisoned the

information environment for a lot of

people.

>> And is that a temporary thing? Are we

just temporarily in a bad spot when it

comes to lies and truth and democracies

or

is this

just a step on, you know, is this going

to just going to continue and get worse?

>> I think the situation we're now in at

the moment fuels those kind of worst

aspects and is the default state unless

we actually take real action against it.

It's been interesting to look at Keir

Starmer's recent kind of the reporting

on what he's been saying about online

safety, you know, 16-year-olds being

banned from social media. I think there

needs to be more around education in

terms of building critical thinking

skills in young people. So, a lot of our

work at the moment is working with

things like Cambridge University Press

and Assessment, the National Institute

of Teaching about developing those

critical thinking skills and teacher

training material and for students. We

work with universities to build

investigative hubs and open source

training material so students can do

their own investigations and build their

own communities around that. So,

you have to proactively build this

stuff. A lot of people, you know, look

back at the kind of interwar period

where, you know, there's the rise of

fascism and they think that democracy

just kind of fixed itself and figured it

out and, you know, Nazi Germany was an

outlier. But that took real action to

build democratic systems to actually

make people feel they could trust those

institutions again after World War I.

And nowadays it's just kind of like,

well, you know, people figure it out for

themselves cuz democracy is the default

and that's really not the case.

>> So, last question, Elliot, if you

uh what would be your advice to young

people who would want to try to make

this a better place?

>> Well, that's a that's a very big

question. Um

I think they need to really consider

what they, you know, when they share

information, when they look at something

and they think maybe I should do that.

They need to think about what impact

that does have. It's it's like um I was

talking My daughter's 14 and a lot of

her friends use a lot of social media.

We really try and not to let her use

that much social media, but they'll

mimic trends they're seeing and some of

those trends are really about making

stuff up because it'll get engagement.

And it's kind of actually talking to

people about what impact that actually

has and that has a big impact on society

if everyone was just telling lies for

engagement. And that's, you know, just

the basics we need to start with. Yeah.

>> Right big great big thank you to you.

Thank you. Thanks for everything you're

doing.

And thank you.

>> [applause and music]

>> Yeah.