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The Jordan Harbinger Show
1192: Eliot Higgins | The Digital Detectives Making Dictators Sweat
01:15:53
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- [00:00]
Jordan Harbinger
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- [00:45]
Jen Harbinger
Get 20% off by going to vitalproteins.com and enter promo code Jordan at checkout. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
- [00:55]
Jordan Harbinger
Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show.
- [00:58]
Elliot Higgins
I remember one guy invited his girlfriend into their military camp and she just filmed it and posted it on social media. It's just really silly things like that. They had a social media account, the actual brigade and all the soldiers were following the social media account. And we spent a year basically mapping out their entire military unit with names, faces, ranks, where they were on the day of the convoy, whether or not they were in the convoy, all there on the Internet, it's just no one had pieced it together. But it's a network of information and if you can explore those networks, you can find gold.
- [01:32]
Jordan Harbinger
Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional journalist turned poker champion, Hollywood filmmaker or cold case homicide investigator. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, and I always appreciate it, when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, we meet Elliot Higgins, the guy who went from pajama clad hobbyist to running bellingcat, the citizen sleuth outfit that geolocates missile launchers from Instagram selfies and unmasks Russian GRU assassins with nothing but public data and caffeine. We'll explore how open source intelligence cracks war crimes, punctures Kremlin disinformation, and turns a soldier's duck face trench post into courtroom evidence. If you want to see how scrappy digital detectives are reshaping global accountability, keep on listening. Here we go with Elliot Higgins. I remember I followed you for years and I was like, oh, I'm excited about this. And then the book came out and I emailed you and you're like, I don't have time for this. And I was like, I believe you.
- [03:03]
Elliot Higgins
It was a crazy period.
- [03:05]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, Ukraine war, Syrian civil war. I was like, I believe you. I'm not going to fight you on that one. I thought that was kind of funny. I'm curious what your take is on Iran and them getting nukes or Israel slash United States bombing them. Because a lot of people think, well, Iran has a right to defend itself and there's no proof that Iran would misuse nukes. And I'm like, I don't know if we need proof that a theocratic Islamist regime that has militias that take over Lebanon, fight for Assad in Syria and try and take down any country they can in the Middle East. I don't know if we need further proof that they would misuse nuclear weapons to get leverage over the Middle east, but maybe I'm a crazy right winger according to these kids.
- [03:44]
Elliot Higgins
The way I see it, though, is that they aren't really debating the facts. They're giving information from their kind of algorithmically recommended communities to where they find stuff that reinforces what they already believe. They don't really understand the arguments they're making because they're more symbols of their kind of moral identity rather than actually something they're trying to debate with you is to stick to beat you over the head so they can show that, yes, I'm Right about this thing. And you're wrong. Because the problem we have now with modern discourse is it's not really about deliberation. It's about performance. It's about me showing you that I am a morally right person. And that's not because they're bad people. It's because how their kind of moral logic has been formed has been informed by the information they receive, the environment they live in, the kind of doubts that are produced in societies. When we have things like the Iraq War, for example, when we have a buildup that then turns out to have been false and it destroys people's trust.
- [04:44]
Jordan Harbinger
That's what this guy said. He's like, you're just doing Iraq wmd, Bush era talking points all over again. And I'm like, no, that was obviously based on one source. Iran tells us they are making nuclear weapons, they show the inspectors or don't show them the facilities. We know they're enriching uranium. Like we're not just sort of speculating based off intel from some one source. It's different.
- [05:07]
Elliot Higgins
Yeah. I mean, it's also complicated by the fact that with Israel, the Prime Minister has his own agenda that I think goes beyond just Iran. But they do have a legitimate concern about Iranian power in the region because they have been using proxies to put pressure on Israel. So I think he sees this moment as an opportunity to remove all those pressure points on Israel and really undermine Iran's regional power. And with what's happened in Syria recently as well, that's been a huge blow. What's happened in Gaza, all these different situations have really weakened Iran in the region. And I think now the Israeli government has decided this is time to really strike and take out not just their nuclear capabilities, but their military and economic capability.
- [05:48]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, I feel bad for Iranian people, but we have a lot of Iranian show fans inside Iran and outside of Iran. I'm surprised they haven't blocked our show. Honestly, inside the country, but universally they tell me how much they hate the regime. Now granted, this is an English speaking, educated, intelligentsia segment of the Iranian population that's mostly in Tehran and a couple other big cities that I see on the little download map that we have in Iran. These are not people that live in rural Iran that are super religious. I'll concede that point. However, I feel bad for them because when your power gets cut because you're under a theocratic, oppressive regime, it's still your power. Not just the power to the nuclear facility or whatever. Right. It's still your Internet that you can't use. It's still your school you can't go to, it's still your hospital that got blown up or whatever, or is it not usable? So I really feel for them in this situation. I did not intend to start off with the Iran topic, though. So I've been following you. I've been following bellingcat for a while because you guys have broken some pretty damn serious news stories using techniques that are frankly, cutting edge, but also kind of mind blowing. I mean, uncovering FSB agents trying to kill someone in the UK and finding out who they are, I mean, it's just like Chef's kiss. Beautiful when you put these guys on blast. And honestly, I'm actually kind of surprised that you haven't been targeted or whacked by Putin yet. He's not even the only enemy that you've made doing this stuff. So why don't you tell us what bellingcat is?
- [07:10]
Elliot Higgins
First of all, bellingcat does something called Open Source Investigations. Really? This wasn't something that was really possible in this way until the early 2010s. And it's all thanks to smartphone technology, social media, and the wealth of information we have online. Stuff like Google Maps giving you satellite imagery, like ship tracking websites, plane tracking websites, all kinds of information that's accessible to you now. So I started doing this in 2012 as a hobby, arguing with people on the Internet, but looking at videos coming from Syria and trying to understand what they were actually showing. I didn't speak a word of Arabic, so I focused on the arms and munitions being used in the conflict because early on they were kind of really weird and wild stuff being used. There was one I remember, was basically a potato gun, but it fired Molotov cocktails instead of potatoes. And he saw one video of that, so I suspect it wasn't very successful.
- [08:01]
Jordan Harbinger
No, the guy who used it caught on fire on the third round. And that was the end of that. Yeah, yeah.
- [08:06]
Elliot Higgins
It was just a ball of flame that shot out the end of this tube. So it wasn't very useful for them.
- [08:10]
Jordan Harbinger
I think what could go wrong?
- [08:11]
Elliot Higgins
But I just got really obsessed with the idea in Syria that there was so much information that was being shared online by kind of opposition groups, media centers, and all kinds of different people on the ground that was just being ignored by the mainstream media. And that was understandable. There was a notorious case early on in Syria where there was a blogger called Gay Girl in Damascus who turned out to be a white guy in America. But they were widely cited in multiple mainstream newspapers. And the media had lost trust in those kind of sources. I was frustrated that there was very clearly good stuff in there that was being ignored. So I just tried to figure out how can you prove if a video was filmed somewhere? And I realized that you could compare landmarks visible in the video with satellite imagery and do a kind of spot, the difference fit. Now that's a technique known as geolocation. But back then it was just me playing adult spot the difference on social media platform. That then just became a bit of an obsession of mine. I started blogging and found stories from Syria about chemical weapon use and war crimes and all kinds of different things. And more and more people getting interested in open source investigation, which is what I accidentally stumbled across. And then I launched Bellingcat in July 2014. And the intention there was to show people how to do these investigations and give them a platform where they could publish their own investigations. And that was really the starting ethos of bellingcat.
- [09:33]
Jordan Harbinger
What's the mission? The ethos is great. What is the mission? Is it like uncovering news stories that other journalists can't find? What sort of would you say is the core mission of Bellingcat itself?
- [09:44]
Elliot Higgins
For me, it's really about taking open source investigation and getting as many people as possible to use it. We don't just do the investigations, but we also do education, we run workshops, we work with universities to design course material for students. We work with a whole variety of NGOs, media partners with investigations, partly to support their own investigative work, to teach them these techniques as well. I think they're something that's really valuable. I think when we live in an era where the truth is constantly contested, especially on the Internet, it's good to have something where you can not only point to the evidence, but the actual process you use to come to your conclusions and open it up for debate. And I think in this era it's really important that we have places where you can do that because there is a tendency for people just to read stuff that reinforces what they already believe and that causes a lot of problems.
- [10:34]
Jordan Harbinger
Sure does, yeah. So you weren't in a newsroom, you weren't in a war zone, you're in your PJs with a laptop, which I can relate. When did the hobby turn into a global investigative force? And don't worry, folks, we're going to get to geolocation and how that works because it's a pretty cool little set of techniques. But I'm curious, when the PJ mission Turned into we needed office. And by the way, who else makes up bellingcat? This is not just you and your Twitter handle.
- [10:57]
Elliot Higgins
Yeah. Now we have about 40 staff members from across the world. They work on a range of investigations. We've just actually published one today about a non consensual nudify app. Non consensual pornography that you can use to remove clothes from the women in your life if you want.
- [11:13]
Jordan Harbinger
Or the men. Equal opportunity sexual harassment.
- [11:16]
Elliot Higgins
Or the men. Yeah, that's true. Fair enough. But early on it was really just me working by myself. But Bellingcat was launched on July 14, 2014 and then three days later Malaysian Airlines MH17 was shot down over Eastern Ukraine. And that became a huge catalyst both for the growth of bellingcat, but open source investigation in general. And from that point onwards I started building a team of investigators who were really just interesting people online I was talking to who seemed to get what I was doing and could do it themselves. And we just formed an informal team and then we just took from really just a volunteer blog to the organization it is today.
- [11:53]
Jordan Harbinger
Give us like a digital gumshoe 101. Blow by blow of a day, hunting, I don't know, war crimes, armed with public posts and probably a shitload of caffeine.
- [12:03]
Elliot Higgins
Yes, that's definitely part of it. With MH17, for example, you have an incident that happens. There's lots of people online discussing it, arguing about it. Some people are finding links to posts that are seemingly relevant and that's the first kind of thing you're gathering. You're trying to find what people are sharing, where it's being shared. Dig into that. Just look at that network of information that's emerging from the incident MH17.
- [12:27]
Jordan Harbinger
To be clear, this is a Malaysian Airlines flight that got downed over Ukraine, correct?
- [12:33]
Elliot Higgins
Yeah. So it was flying over Eastern Ukraine and then it was shot down from the sky. And the debate was who shot it down first, was it Russia or was it Ukraine? So both sides blamed each other and immediately there were online arguments about it, There was state level arguments, it was a bit of a mess. But what we started to discover were videos and photographs of a. What's known as a book missile launcher. It has a large missile system for missiles and there were videos and photographs of it being transported supposedly through Eastern Ukraine. And this is where geolocation comes in. We need to know where those photos and videos were actually taken. So we then use things in the background to help us identify possible locations. So there's one photograph that was Taken, you have a missile launcher, is transported on the trailer. You can see that clearly. You can see it's like a gas station, four courts. And in the background, there's a shop with a name on it, but the shop's in Ukrainian, and I don't speak Ukrainian, but someone on the Internet does. And they'll Google it and they'll find a result and share it. And then you find what they're sharing, and you Google Translate it to make sure it's correct, and it gives you an address, and then you can search for that address on Google Maps and it takes you to that spot where you can see the satellite imagery where there is the gas station. And in that specific case, we didn't have Google Street View, but we did have a guy who drove a car around with his dashboard camera on, playing very loud music, and then posting it onto YouTube with a list of the street seats driven down, and that included the name of the street that we were looking for, which turned up in the Google search result. Thank God for people with their weird hobbies and YouTube, because that allowed us to see the actual location from the ground. See the shop sign, see the gas station, see all the little details that, again, confirmed where this was taken. And then what you can also do, once you know the exact location of a camera, you can use shadows in that image to tell the time of day. So this is something we call chronolocation. So establishing the time of day. You also have as well, people posting on social media about seeing this. So we search through all the kind of Facebook pages, Vkontakta, which is a Russian Facebook, or the kind of social media channels where there might be people talking about seeing this thing. And that's something that's really useful for kind of building a network of information around one object. Basically, you're trying to confirm it in as many ways as possible. So with the MH17 investigation, we're able to do this with multiple images and build a timeline of the movements of this missile launcher and show that it was heading towards the suspected launch site of the missile within the correct time frame to be involved with the launch of the missile. There were photographs of smoke coming from this field, satellite imagery showing it was burnt out, and other information that then would confirm this was the launch site. So it's all kind of building up all that information from just the Internet.
- [15:16]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, this is fascinating stuff because basically a Twitter video becomes GPS coordinates by crowdsourcing where this might be and using tools. One of the apps that I thought was Fascinating was you mentioned you have to know what time of day a photo was taken. And there's an app that looks at shadows and GPS coordinates and says, at this location at this time, this shadow would have been this. So this is 2:35pm Approximately Ukrainian standard Time or whatever. That is awesome. That is so ninja.
- [15:44]
Elliot Higgins
Somehow it's all these little tools that you find. I mean, there's something like that. That's SongCalc. But another tool we developed ourself, we make our own tools at bellingcat as well, which do fun things. What it tells you is if there's shadows a certain length and you know the time of day, you can say where in the planet is most likely to be. And they're kind of banned reverse engineering and turning these things around from their expected purpose. Another tool that used to be useful allowed us to do kind of geofence searches for photos. So you could select an area on the border of Russia with Ukraine and then find all the Russian soldiers posting selfies from their military camp, which is useful for us because then we've got to have a good look around and see what was in the military camp. We did a video for Vice probably back in 2015, 2016, called selfie soldiers, where a Russian soldier took one inside Ukraine. And then we geolocated the photograph and then managed to track the guy down to his hometown in the east of Russia. And Simon Ostrovsky, who we worked with, went and actually door knocked him and tried to say hello, and then immediately got arrested by the Russians and flown back to Moscow very quickly, because it was exposing a lie that Russia was saying that there were no Russian troops in Ukraine, but we were finding troops, missile launchers, tanks, a whole army there.
- [16:57]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah. Hey, there's no one in Russia. Well, except for this guy who literally posted a selfie in front of a missile launcher with a tank behind it saying, I'm in Ukraine.
- [17:05]
Elliot Higgins
They would paint logos on their tanks in Russia and for the USR and stuff like that. Then they'd end up in Russia being filmed and photographed. And then they come back to Russia and do a bad job painting over what they'd written. And you could still see it through the paints in their regiment photos. So they were really bad at hiding themselves during a war in another country.
- [17:23]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, people will say, oh, it's because they don't care. I mean, they do care. There's just a lot of ineptitude and corruption and just ridiculousness. One thing I thought that was quite fascinating was the idea that you can fingerprint missile launcher. It's like the side skirts of the thing that covers the treads of the wheels of a missile launcher. It's like they get dinged, they get dented, they get shot at, they get hit by branches, rocks, trees, God knows what else they bump up against other equipment over time. And that pattern of dents and scratches, it's unique to that particular missile launcher. So you can get a high res photo of these things and say, here's this one in, I don't know, the east of Russia on a train. Here it is on the border of Ukraine. Here it is in another part of Ukraine. Here it is in another part of Ukraine. Here it is back in Russia. We know this thing went from Russia into Ukraine. It's not enemy equipment that the Russians are saying it is. It's not something that never left the country like the Russians. I mean, they just can't argue with that because it's like, well, then how come this has the exact same scratch pattern? They just have to ignore it or try to bury it, or like you said, arrest the journalists that found out about it.
- [18:21]
Elliot Higgins
In our case, it was more about claiming that, first of all, we are amateurs who didn't know what we were doing. Then later that we were working for MI6 or the CIA or whoever was the popular spying agency of the day.
- [18:32]
Jordan Harbinger
I don't expect you to remember who you've replied to on Twitter, but I routinely would get, hey, you should interview Elliot Higgins from Bellingcat, or you should interview Crystal Grozev. And then someone will go, they're a CIA front. And I think it was you or Christo who says, I would like any evidence that we are a CIA front. And of course they'd never respond to that, ever. But that's happened at least five times to you and I and Christo because we get the suggestion. And then immediately, whatever bot or whoever's looking for, everybody tweeting anything with you and the go to is, they're just a CIA front. Sure. Show one thing that says that that might be the case and they can never do it. It's just more ad hominem nonsense.
- [19:08]
Elliot Higgins
What becomes really apparent to me, having gone through those kind of conversations a lot, is how really they are being informed by a very small kind of information ecosystem. Because it's always the same arguments, it's always the exact same quotes that they're using to support their claims. They can never actually address the claims directly because it's usually a quote that was from the head of the National Endowment for Democracy who funded us for a few years. And he said back in 1990 that I think it was a Washington Post piece that a lot of what the CIA used to do 25 years ago, we do now. So the conspiracy theorists say, well, that's proof that they're the CIA. But what actually happened 25 years ago was the CIA was secretly funding pro democracy organizations. And when that was exposed, it caused a huge scandal and damaged the reputation of those organisations. So the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to be more transparent about how the US was supporting democracy. But the thing is that context is completely stripped out of it because they only ever see that quote on a website that's quoting that original article to make a point about being evil.
- [20:09]
Jordan Harbinger
Sure, it's not a very convincing argument because one, it comes out of nowhere all the time and two, the argument isn't very well thought out. It's always, I'll reply to those people and I'll say, hey, you tell me, why shouldn't I interview the guy from Bellingcat, let me know why there is CIA front and they'll say something like, look at the techniques they use and it's okay. So looking at stuff on Twitter and social media and geolocating it is a CIA tactic and only the CIA can do it. I guess there are tons of people in every country in the whole world who are not getting paid, many of whom are like high school kids and they're just all in the CIA. Now, is that what your argument is? It's not quite as dumb as this, but it's very similar to the FBI. They drive cars. And so if you drive a car, you must be part of the FBI. You know, a lot of people use Twitter, a lot of people use the Internet. A lot of people are curious if a video was taken during the Syrian civil war or if it's from a video game called Arma 2025 or whatever the realistic looking ones are where they're like, look, it's the Iron Dome. And it's, nope, this is the intro from a cutscene. You know, it's always a ridiculous argument. I get it. Like paranoid weed smokers who are unemployed, sitting at home. Everything is a conspiracy and everything is the CIA. But like the foundation of that argument is always just so weak Anyway, how did you identify this gap in the information system? In your book you wrote, politicians and officials with far less of an understanding of the Syrian conflict than I had were making decisions on whether or not to go to war. And that's pretty scary. Like you're looking at Twitter and social media and news stories, and you're saying you're in many ways better informed than a person who's going to sign off on a bill to, I don't know, arm the opposition in a country that's scary.
- [21:48]
Elliot Higgins
It was really frustrating for me to watch the UK Parliamentary debate about the August 21, 2013 sarin attacks in Damascus, because it was really clear, as someone who was really studying that attack carefully, I had, like, images of the missiles used, I could show they'd been used previously and all kinds of information.
- [22:06]
Jordan Harbinger
Sarin gas is a chemical weapon.
- [22:07]
Elliot Higgins
Yeah. So we was. Over a thousand people died, thousands more injured. But the debate was really based around the latest colonists that MP had read at the time. It wasn't about their opinions, it was about just what they'd read recently and their biases. And a lot of it was informed by the experience with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. So everyone's like, oh, we don't want to have another Iraq in 2003. But that was their kind of moral logic that they were applying, that they'd been through this experience, they'd know they'd been lied to, they know there'd been this terrible war and there's no real accountability for it. So now they didn't want to get drawn into another war, so they were looking for reasons for it not to happen. Now, I'm not saying we should have bombed Syria, but I'm saying that if we're going to have a debate about something, it should be on actual facts, not just the opinions of a newspaper columnist you've just read.
- [22:58]
Jordan Harbinger
So you're finding and verifying all this, which I think is quite important, because, look, we can either trust mainstream media, which nobody does, or we can trust the government, which now very few people do, or we can trust this, essentially a group of crowdsourced third parties that just wants the truth. Which is the main reason, I would say, why people in say, or government actors in Iran and Russia want to say that you're part of the government, because that immediately discredits you. Right. If it's like, hey, we're just third party journalists trying to get to the truth. Yes. Assad use chemical weapons against his own people. It's. Huh. We can either argue that that didn't happen and try and really meet you where you are and address the actual argument, or we can accuse you of being part of the big machine, the big lie machine, that's much easier to do. And so that just sort of to me, always proved that what you're doing at bellingcat is really important. Because if it's not important, people ignore you. If it's really important, people start accusing you of being a government shill, whatever it is. I just want to clarify at this point that you're investigating the Syrian Civil War. MH17, you're basically a blogger earning what, ad revenue. How are you funding any of this?
- [24:04]
Elliot Higgins
Early on, I'm doing crowdfunding, so I'm literally working off probably the equivalent of about $25,000 a year at best.
- [24:13]
Jordan Harbinger
Oh, you baller. Yeah. Don't spend it all in one place.
- [24:16]
Elliot Higgins
Yeah, I'm being accused of getting millions from the US government to do this, and I'm scraping by, trying to pay my mortgage. But I think one thing that's really important about this is that I've become really interested in the idea of why people don't trust institutions. And that's not to say they should trust institutions, but actually, why don't they? It's very easy to say, oh, well, it's because of Iraq or it's Trump or whatever it may be. But I think we have to have a much more serious think about this. And I think it's really about democracy gives us a promise in the way, and it promises really that the functions of democracy is. I define them as verification, deliberation, and accountability. We have systems to attempt to find the truth about the world. We have systems to deliberate that truth, and then we have accountability when we uncover what that truth may be. And that could be political accountability, social. It could be laws being passed. It could be people being arrested. Now, the problem is when the public asks the questions, can I know the truth? If the answer is no, then you lose faith in verification. Can my voice be heard? And does it matter if the answer is no, they lose faith in deliberation. And can the powerful be held to account? If the answer to that is no, then you also lose faith in the democratic process, the institution, the entire system, the. And I think Iraq in 2003 was a really stark example for a lot of people of the reality of that. The financial crisis in 2008, when people lost their houses and the bankers still got their bonuses. That was another very stark example to the public that actually none of these functions have actually been formed in the democracy. So we get a bit of hope from Obama, but then again, the same pattern repeats. And then I think we enter almost this kind of crisis cycle where people really can't really name what the problem is, because they aren't really that well educated about the functions of democracy, and then they get drawn towards more authoritarian figures who promising the world that they themselves rarely can deliver.
- [26:06]
Jordan Harbinger
Classy outfits like Bellingcat might crowdfund and rely on donations, but I've got to shill mattresses to keep the lights on. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Saily. We're heading to Portugal soon and one thing I don't have to deal with when we land is scrambling for wifi or hunting down a local SIM card at the airport. Because we set up Saily, it's a super easy ESIM app from the team behind NordVPN that keeps you connected in over 190 countries. You install it once, it takes like two minutes. As soon as we touch down, it's ready to go. No physical sims, no roaming fees, no kiosk roulette. And Saily isn't just convenient, it's smart too. You get built in, ad blocking, web protection, even virtual location features. Plus, if something goes sideways, their 247 chat support has your back. And if your phone doesn't support esim, they'll give you a refund, no questions asked. So yeah, if you're traveling soon, check out the revolutionary ESIM service called Saily. Like daily but with an s. And we've got a discount code for you too, right, Jen?
- [26:59]
Jen Harbinger
Get an exclusive 15% discount on saily data plans. Use code Jordan Harbinger at checkout. Download the Saily app or go to saily.com jordanharbinger today that's S A I.
- [27:10]
Jordan Harbinger
L-Y.com jordanharbinger this episode is also sponsored by Idou. Ever feel like everyone's suddenly an expert on AI and you're just trying to figure out how AI can help you work smarter than that's where Ideo U came in. If you haven't heard of them, Ideou is from the design and innovation company Ideo. They've helped build everything from the first Apple mouse to the modern shopping cart. And their online courses are all about helping you lead and innovate with confidence. I checked out their AI and design thinking programs and it's practical, hands on and built for people who want to stay ahead without losing their minds. It's not about theory or buzzwords. It's about using AI to speed up insights and solve real problems without losing sight of what makes our work human. If you're stepping into a new leadership role or you just feel like your team's moving faster than you are jumpstart your growth with idou. You'll walk away with real, repeatable frameworks that you can use right away.
- [27:56]
Jen Harbinger
Class starts now, so enroll today for a limited time. IDOU is offering our listeners 15% off sitewide. Go to ideou.com jhs that's ideou.com jhs for 15% off I d e o u.com jhs if you're wondering how I.
- [28:14]
Jordan Harbinger
Managed to book all these great authors, thinkers and creators every single week, it is because of my network. The circle of people I know, like and trust. And now I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over@sixminutenetworking.com this course is about improving your relationship building skills, inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you. And the course does it all in a non cringy, down to earth way. It's not cheesy, it's not awkward, it's not going to make you look like an a hole. It's just practical exercises that'll make you a better connector, a better friend, a better colleague. And a few minutes a day is all it takes. Many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong again. It's all free with no shenanigans@sixminutenetworking.com now back to Elliot Higgins. All right, why the name Bellingcat? How does this name come about? Because of course, it sounds like a cat with a bell on this collar or what am I missing?
- [29:04]
Elliot Higgins
That's right. Yes. When I was coming up with the name for Bellying Cat, I'm really uncreative when it comes to names.
- [29:09]
Jordan Harbinger
You're talking to a guy who's naming. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show. You don't have to apologize for a lack of creativity when it comes to naming things. Continue.
- [29:16]
Elliot Higgins
My first attempt was TheOpenSource.com, which was terrible. But I had a friend, Peter Jukes. He's a playwright. So I gave him a call and I thought he'll know some clever words to use. His first suggestion was, what about belling the cat? I said, what's that? And he said, there's a fable where this group of mice are very frightened of a large ferocious cat. So they have a meeting and someone suggests putting a bell on the cat's neck so they can be warned. But a very old and wise mouse says, who's going to bell the cat? You know, who's going to be the one who's brave enough to do it. And I thought that seems quite good. So I searched bellingthecat.com and that was $4,000 and bellingcat.com was $40. So I went with that.
- [29:53]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, smart. It's got a good ring to it. How does, for those of us that aren't English majors, how does that relate to the mission of what you do?
- [30:00]
Elliot Higgins
So what we're really trying to do is expose power in a way, show people how to do that. It's coming back to those ideas of verification, deliberation, accountability. We're very much about all of those three things, but accountability is the most important. I was talking to someone today about WikiLeaks and the work that they were doing by publishing all this stuff. But I always found the problem with WikiLeaks is often they didn't see themselves as part of a system of accountability. It was more like get the stuff out there and then accountability will happen. And that's not how the world works. You need those systems and processes in place. And that's as much as part of our mission as it is doing the investigations.
- [30:37]
Jordan Harbinger
I agree, but I also feel like WikiLeaks turned into I'm going to exercise this power that I have, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. I'm going to exercise this as power by strategically leaking Hillary Clinton stuff during the election. And it's like that wasn't about, hey, everybody needs to know everything, regardless of how damaging it is. I'm going to pull this lever because haha, I can and you can't stop me. And that was not really what I was looking for in an organization like WikiLeaks, honestly, because I'm all about get the information out there accountability. That's why I like Bellingcat. That's why I previously really liked WikiLeaks. But I just think they just jumped the shark in many ways.
- [31:14]
Elliot Higgins
I think the Duma leaks. So basically in 2018 there was a chemical attack in Douma and Syria and WikiLeaks published emails that they framed as undermining the OPCW investigation, which was the official investigation by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. But they were leaked in a very selective way to purposely damage the investigation. The thing is, I look at this through the lens of kind of a moral logic that often when we look at people in the other camp, we can then see them as being immoral, that somehow they are bad people because of what they believe. But really they're following their own Moral logic. So in the case of WikiLeaks, they know the government lies. They know the government likes invading countries by claiming they've got wmd. They know they've been targeted for telling the truth. So in their moral logic, they're actually doing something that is a moral act. But for me, that moral logic can actually capture your behavior. That when you're led by your moral logic in terms of who's the right person who can say things, who's the people we ignore, who are the batting cats, who are the CIA, then what you're actually saying is a large amount of information doesn't need to be looked at, that we can just automatically say, no, that doesn't count. And that creates a kind of process which is fundamentally flawed in trying to actually come to the truth and establish accountability. Because you aren't starting with the idea that we need to verify information. You're starting with the idea that you need to filter information. The good information versus the bad. Based off my past experience of dealing with a completely different situation, but now I'm so almost morally injured by that situation, I'm now applying that to every situation.
- [32:51]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, yeah, I can. I can definitely see that. Okay, so look, take us to a holy crap moment where you're muttering into your coffee when a shaky Instagram clip clicked as courtroom grade evidence. And I know that's not a hair. We gotcha with this one little thing. Maybe a good example is some of the cell phone metadata stuff where you exposed the gru. I know that's not an Instagram post, but I would love to hear that story, because I think the cell phone metadata thing is just one of those, like, you can just see the GRU going. How did we not cover that one? Damn it. Somebody got fired for that.
- [33:25]
Elliot Higgins
So for a bit of context, Russia is an incredibly corrupt police state, which means that a lot of information that the police state gathers is actually for sale, and it has been for a long time. I read an article from about 15 years ago in the Financial Times about a market that was selling DVDs of Russian databases in Moscow. And it's just stuff like that. So all this information was quite easy to get access to. Now, normally we wouldn't use this stuff, but the Skripal poisoning was a rather unique event. Sergey Skripal was a former Russian spy who defected to the uk and several years ago, he was poisoned. And it became a huge thing in the UK because a few months later, two civilians picked up a perfume bottle that had been thrown away. And it turned out it contained a nerve agent, the same one that nearly killed Sergei Skripal, and it did actually kill one of these people in that situation. At that moment, we didn't have too much information. But then the UK police released the identity of both of the suspects, and a Russian newspaper purchased the flight records of the flight they flew in on. And their passport numbers were there, and they were literally like five or six digits apart, which is really suspicious because there were two supposed strangers who had very close passport numbers. And our colleague thought, wouldn't it be interesting if we used this kind of data market in Russia to buy their passport registration forms, to just see how they filled it in? And we're thinking, they surely wouldn't have Secret Service and put the Russian mod's phone number on there. But that's actually what they did. They had actually stamped it with Secret Service and the phone number of the Russian mod. And that was like, oh, a real oh, God moment. But that was just the start of it, because then, using all these Russian databases, we could find their entries in, like, Moscow, where, like, in 2012, they didn't exist. And then 2013, they'd been living there for years. So these identities were clearly fake, but they were also linked to addresses and phone numbers. And eventually, as part of this investigation, we were able to get phone metadata and it allowed our investigator to take all that metadata. So it was not just who they'd called, but every single cell phone tower their phone had pinged as they were carrying it. So it's basically like a GPS for their whole route that they'd been taking. And we were able to track them throughout Europe, showing that they'd visited other locations shortly before. There were mysterious, like, warehouse explosions that were later connected to them. And this is all in their phone metadata, but also we could see them phoning up their commanders. One fun thing is that there was three top phone numbers. It was their boss, their wife and their girlfriend, always the top three phone numbers that they were calling. One of the guys was also the head of the chemical weapons lab. You'd often see in the phone calls as well. Wife, girlfriend, girlfriend, as they were clearly trying to organise their evening.
- [36:04]
Jordan Harbinger
Oh, my gosh.
- [36:05]
Elliot Higgins
Yeah. So the wand guys was the head of the Chemical Weapons Production Lab, which was secret at the time that produced these chemical weapons. And when Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, was poisoned in his phone metadata, which we were still able to get hold of, showed him shortly beforehand talking to officers of the Russian intelligence service. We got their phone data and showed they'd been following Navalny for a long time on all his trips, including the one where he was poisoned. So the Russian state's fingerprints were all over these attempted assassinations.
- [36:34]
Jordan Harbinger
Wow. This is a little tangential, I suppose, but I just love how you find these poisoners. And they're registering their vehicles as well to GRU headquarters. So it's, oh, where's his car registered? Oh, this is a weird address. Let's find out where that is. Oh, it's not residential. It's the headquarters of the gru. So the Russian CIA. Then it's I wonder who else has registered their vehicle to this building. And you find all of these supposed top secret covert agents traveling all over the world. And it's like here's 24 people who have all registered their cars to the Ministry of Defense GRU office. Very covert guys. And I would imagine now every single one of those agents is blown. Because once you find out who they are and find out what they look like, they can't go abroad and pretend that they're tourists looking at a church. Church ever again.
- [37:16]
Elliot Higgins
Well, there's that. And also the other issue they had is the passports. When they faked them, it seems like they were given like a batch of passports that were sequential, and then whoever faked them would print them all out. But it meant that we discovered several passport numbers of a range of about 150 numbers. So you can safely assume every one of those 150 numbers in between there are likely a Russian agent of some sort. So immediately, even without knowing who they are, they're at risk if they're traveling abroad. So I think what we did was very disruptive for the Russian intelligence services, and that certainly put us on their radar.
- [37:50]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, that cracks me up, because all that the west has to do is go. Did anybody within this range of 150 numbers travel to any country that we have access to their immigration database? Ok, where's the photo that they took when they entered? All right, here are photos of every Russian intelligence agent. Wow, that guy. Okay, he works at an embassy. This person has non official coverage. Every single one of those people is blown. Even if they change passports because they can't change their face and their fingerprint. So that's a multi, multi million dollar setback for their intelligence service because covert agents are expensive to train. And if you blow 150 of them at once, that is years and years of work. I mean, it might even be like a decade of work.
- [38:29]
Elliot Higgins
But what starts happening now is you're getting Russia using basically telegram Channels to find people in the west who will be paid £1,000 to burn down a building or throw a bomb into a warehouse or something like that. So they're kind of outsourcing intelligence operations because those people get arrested and that telegram channel disappears, and then they're the ones who have to bear the brunt of it. So it's like a cheap way of doing espionage, but it's also not a very effective way of doing espionage because you're dealing with just ordinary members of the public who are trying to make a quick buck.
- [39:00]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, I can also imagine that's a great vector to get into something, right? Like, okay, I'll take this. And then the FBI certainly must be all over that particular vector. I mean, if somebody proves themselves, you can eventually, I would imagine, lure these people out of hiding. Who knows? I love that this is the alchemy that turns a duck face Instagram story into prosecutable intel. I mean, I love the idea that these Russian soldiers are taking photos just on a little vacation to Ukraine. And you can imagine a year later their commander or somebody in the intelligence office going, why did you do that? New rule, Stop frickin posting on social media, you morons. Which I believe now is a rule in the Russian military.
- [39:39]
Elliot Higgins
Yeah, they actually passed a law at the State Duma to actually make sure that soldiers couldn't share information about their military service. There were a lot more photos being shared of mobile phones being nailed to the wall when people were using them, when they shouldn't have been using them. They are very strict on that because it was incredible the amount of information we were finding. I remember one guy invited his girlfriend into their military camp and she just filmed it and posted it on social media. And it's just really silly things like that. Or like the wives, girlfriends and mothers of soldiers in Russia have Internet forums where they discuss what's going on. Like, oh, my son's just been sent off to this training facility on the border of Ukraine. It's like, okay, let's find out what he's up to. Like, with MH17, we identified that the missile launcher came from the 53rd Air Defence Brigade in Kursk in Russia. First, by following videos that Russians were taking of this military convoy back to the base. And this was like a 500 kilometer distance and it was just people filming it across the route that gave us where they came from. But they had a social media account, the actual brigade and all the soldiers were following the social media account. And we spent a year basically mapping out their Entire military unit with names, faces, ranks, where they were on the day of the convoy, whether or not they were in the convoy. Like, that whole thing was just all there on the Internet. It's just no one had pieced it together. But it's a network of information, and if you can explore those networks, you can can find gold.
- [40:58]
Jordan Harbinger
I'm going to laugh when in 20 years someone's doing a history of the Russian regime during the Putin era and they're like, man, these Russian records are really sloppy. Who's got the best records? These bellingcat guys have the whole organization mapped out, and it's better than what we got from the Russians. It's actually quite possible that your data on that unit is better than what they have in Moscow.
- [41:19]
Elliot Higgins
It's a real mess out there as well. And it's just what I love about this is there's always kind of new doors to open and walk through. People often say, oh, weren't you worried about Russia stopping soldiers from posting? Or aren't you worried People figure out what you do? And if they figure out what we do, then we've got, like, lots of other options to use. Because the thing with the Internet is it's constantly evolving and growing and new stuff's out there. And there's new problems with websites, which means you can find leaked data, you know, all kinds of things. So there's never a point where I think we've done everything and there's nothing more we can do because there's just so much.
- [41:50]
Jordan Harbinger
Especially you're talking about buying databases that are leaked from Russian sources. And Russia's, like you said, a deeply corrupt police state. Okay, what can we do to fix this? You can fix your entire society so that people at the cell phone company don't sell tons of metadata records for a thousand bucks or 500 bucks. Can you give us a ballpark of what you've paid for these?
- [42:09]
Elliot Higgins
It was my colleague Christo Grozev, who. He was buying it with his own money, which I'm not sure his wife was too impressed with. He claims to have spent by this point, which includes a lot of investigations, like $150,000, but record by record, it would be like €20 for someone's flight data, for example. So it's not like breaking the bank. But now with bellingcat, we really try and focus on purely open source material because it's all about being as inclusive as possible. And it's not just about allowing people to see our working, but giving them the ways to actually do it themselves. Yet if we start saying, oh, you have to buy a Russian database for $150,000, that immediately starts kind of, you know, excluding people.
- [42:46]
Jordan Harbinger
It does. I just think it's quite funny that the only real solution to the problem that Russia has is fix the entire society from the bottom up so that it's not corrupt and people don't sell personal and private information for a pittance so that they can survive because they can't really plug that hole. It would be harder than disarming the gun owners in the United States from a government policy level. Okay, no more corruption or what? It's a crime. It's already a crime. We're going to start enforcing it.
- [43:12]
Elliot Higgins
Okay.
- [43:12]
Jordan Harbinger
If you find out about it, but you're not really, because I'm going to bribe the police when they find me, which is what I've been doing for the last decade, you know, they're screwed.
- [43:19]
Elliot Higgins
You find this time and time again that it's the thing with Russia that it's corrupt from the top all the way down to the bottom. And the people down the bottom know that the top's corrupt, so why the hell shouldn't they be?
- [43:27]
Jordan Harbinger
Right? Exactly. Especially because what's the harm? It's just flight records. No one's even going to find out that I'm the one that sold it without a massive investigation, which they're not going to do for €20. It's just not a thing. You ever scroll past a trench selfie and just think, okay, congrats, you've just geotagged your own indictment.
- [43:44]
Elliot Higgins
I've been actually quite impressed in terms of this current conflict in the way that Ukraine has really stopped that kind of stuff coming out too frequently. They're very controlled of that. On the Russian side, it's very similar. I mean, there have been cases early on in the conflict where a Russian soldier posted a photograph of where he was in Ukraine and very shortly afterwards that place was destroyed. So we know the Ukrainians are looking for this information. I think that's partly because Bellingcat, before the 2022 invasion, spent eight years doing open source investigations, not just on MH17, but Russia's other involvement in the conflict. And within Ukraine, we had a very high profile because of our work. And I think that actually really influenced the way the Ukrainian intelligence services then approached the conflict. They realized open source was a fantastic source of information for what they were trying to do. The conflict in Ukraine has been quite remarkable in that regard. But also things like the use of drones in warfare A huge development that I think sometimes people underestimate is really going to change the way wars are fought. Yeah. But seeing how the shift in how the Internet works, how we've moved from a kind of top down media model where we have newspapers and TV kind of telling us what's going on to this kind of more peer to peer, many to many network where everyone is like the point of contact for information. You're the one who verifies it, you're the one who shares it and that can be very dangerous, but also very powerful. And in conflict you're seeing the same patterns happen again and again where the people who are trying to tell us what's happening in the conflict from these official sources constantly being undermined by people like bellingcat who are actually saying, actually this is the stuff that's coming from the ground that shows that you're actually lying about this. And that's something that I think is very powerful for the truth.
- [45:22]
Jordan Harbinger
I agree. Look, you're not a career spy soldier or even a traditional journalist and it seems incredible that. Would you say you had no formal training when you started uncovering state level crimes and assassination plots?
- [45:35]
Elliot Higgins
Literally just figured this out with a whole bunch of Internet and then somehow it worked?
- [45:39]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah. Was there ever a moment where you were like, I'm in way over my head or was it like screw it, I've already come this far.
- [45:45]
Elliot Higgins
Oh, I'm thinking that right now. I think that every single day, every hour.
- [45:48]
Jordan Harbinger
I bet.
- [45:49]
Elliot Higgins
But I think it's also for me really important to not turn myself into the hero of this story. Because the work that we do at ballingcat isn't just about me. It's about our organization, our community, the people around us. It's about the stuff that we do where people learn from us and they go off and do it themselves. That's the stuff that really excites me when other people do their own balloon catting in some other subjects I've not even thought about because to me that's showing us that there's value even beyond what I can imagine in terms of what open source investigation can do.
- [46:18]
Jordan Harbinger
I would have loved this. Probably back in my social engineering days. I remember mapping out the MCI at the time was the telephone company telecom network of Iraq before the war. I mean this isn't like in pursuit of the truth. We were kind of doing some patriotic stuff because I'm old enough to remember when America was the good guys. But we mapped out the telephone network and the idea was we were going to take it down. But it was just very similar stuff. It was like, use some social engineering here, request some documents there, pretend we're these guys, get the MCI blueprint for Baghdad and surrounding areas. And it was just like, we just did that. And we're a bunch of random teenagers and college kids. This is pretty cool. I remember the kind of high when something clicks and you go, I can't believe we just got away with that. And it's, you didn't do anything illegal. You just put stuff together. And I have to wonder, have professionals, war crimes prosecutors, maybe even intelligence agencies come to you and said, wait, how did you figure that out? How often are three letter agency folks and prosecutors sliding into your DMs? I guess that's my question.
- [47:15]
Elliot Higgins
We avoid the intelligent services because otherwise it'll be a Twitter thing. So avoid that.
- [47:19]
Jordan Harbinger
I think you should. Yeah, that makes sense.
- [47:21]
Elliot Higgins
With the MH17 investigation, a few months after we started doing our work, I was invited to my local police station to talk to the investigators and I spent about eight hours just going through every single post we did, line by line. And I kind of now realised that was me actually giving them a free workshop. But I think they were really impressed by how every kind of line we wrote was based off a piece of evidence and that we explained our conclusions very clearly. I heard that several months after that they sent up their own open source unit within the team who were doing the investigation. But now, I mean, most recently, we've been working with the International Criminal Court on investigations related to Ukraine. We've designed a whole process to do investigations specifically for war crime investigations for use in places like the International Criminal Court. So for me, it was really important to say it's one thing to have an argument with someone on the Internet and say, I've got all these pictures that prove that I'm right. You have to go to a courtroom and present to a judge that you have enough evidence to evict someone. But that's the standard I want to meet with the work that we're doing. Because there are plenty of crimes that we've documented throughout our work, and some of them have led to real accountability, but the vast majority don't. And my question is, how do we actually make accountability something that happens more frequently?
- [48:33]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, look, it's tough as an attorney, I know talking to a judge who doesn't understand the evidence you're showing them is very frustrating. I've been in litigation where I say, look, here's this person doing this and this and this. And they go, that's the Internet. Anybody can post that. And I'm like, but it's coming from their account. Here's the IP address. It's mapped to his house. That might be fake. And it's like, why would you assume that it's fake? That is so much harder than assuming that this is potentially real and taking it into consideration. And they just go, I'm throwing out this whole binder of evidence where this person literally confessed to everything. And it's like, because you don't understand how the web works, you're going to throw away literal confessions and all of this evidence. And I would imagine people now are going to go, that's AI. And it's, no, that's you shooting someone in the head. Well, it's AI. And it's, oh, gosh, how do we prove this? It's just so frustrating because a judge watched a TikTok that showed fake AI and now they can't believe any photographs anymore. It's, oh, my God.
- [49:26]
Elliot Higgins
This is the kind of risk with AI for me, it's not about tricking people into stuff they wouldn't believe anyway. It's actually. It creates a permission structure for people to deny reality. Because now they can just say, oh, that thing I don't agree with. It's AI. And we see that happening all the time already. For me, a lot of this is really about how different communities create permission structures to deny reality by saying, bellingcat is the CIA or that's AI or you can't trust that community or this community to tell the truth. And you hear that happening just all over the place now, and it really undermines the fundamental principles of democracy that if we can't establish some form of shared truth, then we can't even start discussing what to do about it. And I think you'll see this kind of fracture happening more and more, not just in the U.S. but all over the world.
- [50:10]
Jordan Harbinger
So while Elliot's out there pinpointing missile launchers, I'm about to pinpoint some great deals on the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. I've got homes.com as a sponsor for this episode. Homes.com knows when it comes to home shopping, it's never just about the house or the condo. It's about the homes. And what makes a home is more than just the house or property. It's the location. It's the neighborhood if you got kids. It's also schools, nearby, parks, transportation options. That's why homes.com goes above and beyond to bring home shoppers the in depth information they need to find the right home. It's so hard not to say home every single time. And when I say in depth information, I'm talking deep. Each listing features comprehensive information about the neighborhood, complete with a video guide. They also have details about local schools with test scores, state rankings, student teacher ratio. They even have an agent directory with the sales history of each agent. So when it comes to finding a home, not just a house, this is everything you need to know all in1place.homes.com We've done your homework. This episode is also sponsored by Progressive. You choose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice. Progressive loves to help people make smart choices. That's why they offer a tool called Auto Quote Explorer that allows you to compare your Progressive car insurance with rates from other companies so you save time on the research and can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you. Give it a try after this episode@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. This episode is also sponsored by BetterHelp. You ever fall down one of those mental health rabbit holes online? Let me help you cut through the noise. Talk to a licensed professional therapist and get guidance that's specific to you. Therapy isn't just for people going through major trauma. It's for anyone who wants to learn better coping strategies, communicate more clearly, or just stop spinning their wheels and the same issues over and over again. And with BetterHelp, it's easy to get started. It's the world's largest online therapy platform with over 30,000 licensed therapists and more than 5 million people served. You can match with someone and talk via video phone or even message, whatever works for you. Sessions are super convenient and if it's not a fit, you can switch therapists at any time. It's private, flexible. It actually works. Live Sessions average a 4.9 out of 5 rating from over 1.7 million reviews. And if you've been thinking about trying therapy or you just want to get out of your own head a little bit, check out BetterHelp. It's a great first step toward feeling better and getting unstuck.
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Jen Harbinger
As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Talk it out with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10% off their first month@betterhelp.com Jordan that's better h e l p.com Jordan if you like this episode.
- [52:43]
Jordan Harbinger
Of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. They make the show possible. We all of the deals, discount codes and ways to support this podcast are searchable and clickable on the website@jordanharbinger.com deals if you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code. Email us jordanordanharbinger.com we are happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Elliot Higgins. The crazy amount of depth that you go into to find the intelligence, I love it. I mean, is this. You've already given a brief overview of finding examples of Russian soldiers entering Ukraine, but I just want people to appreciate how exhaustive this is. I should say you look up their family members, everybody who comments on any post, look up those people, their profiles, all of their photos, and you can really find this 3D full image, not necessarily an actual image, but you get this impression, I should say, of who this person is and where they've been. And is this legitimate? Because it just becomes impossible to fake after a while when grandma's like, I miss him so much. He's in this place. No, I thought he was over here. He was in that place earlier. And you just map the whole thing. That's probably not fake. And then all Russia can do is go, eh, fake news and just pray that people don't look into what you're doing. You're really combating disinformation, especially against Russia in this case, and doing a good job of providing real intelligence proof. Are you not worried that Putin, who, by the way, as you have yourself seen, seems to have no problem killing people he doesn't like, even if they live in the uk. Are you not worried that he might have you a string and your picture tied to someplace on his wall?
- [54:21]
Elliot Higgins
Yeah, I mean, we've had people followed. I mean, there's just six Bulgarians convicted in the UK because they were spying on Christo Grozza for two years. And that was directed by. This is such a weird story. So Jan Marsalik was chief financial officer of Wirecard, which is a financial transaction company in Europe, and he disappeared with about a billion dollars and he reappeared based on what we were finding, taking a flight into Russia and he ended up actually being the person who was running a six member Bulgarian team who was spying on Christo Grozev and planning things like kidnapping, murder, breaking into his apartment. All kinds of different things. They've all been convicted now, but Jan Marslik is still on the run. But it looks like he's been a kind of proxy for the Russian intelligence services running this operation on their behalf. And the whole thing is very bizarre because there was like in the trial a photo produced of me sat with Christo that one of the spies had taken drawn their spying off him. They followed him on multiple occasions. They broke into one of his apartments. Whole bunch of stuff that was very disturbing. But at the same time what we do is important. And this is exactly what those people want. They want people like us to be scared off actually trying to find the truth. And if we let the world just be run by people who want you to shut up, then it's going to be a very dark place indeed.
- [55:41]
Jordan Harbinger
I agree with you. I would imagine you at least if you're not getting followed, broken into attempted poisoning by the Russians, they're at least hacking Bellingcat. I mean Russia has groups like Fancy Bear and other sort of offensive cyber units. Do you find, oh, our systems. This got deleted, this got penetrated, this got all scrambled, this got stolen. Surely the office has some great cybersecurity, but it's probably also getting pinged every day, all day by groups like this.
- [56:07]
Elliot Higgins
They certainly try. We were actually targeted by the same phishing campaign that ended up with the pedestrian emails being published on the 2015 campaign with Hillary Clinton. They sent us the same emails, but we saw them and thought this is misspelled. They misspelled like Google and stuff like that. It's really obvious. So we just thought they were like some kind of Nigerian prince scam thing going on. Turned out is the Russian intelligence services trying to hack our emails.
- [56:29]
Jordan Harbinger
They just don't run spellcheck.
- [56:30]
Elliot Higgins
They tried that again with Proton email. There was a period I used to do a lot of speaking events in public, which I'll do less now for security reasons. But there would always be someone from the Russian embassy sat at the back taking notes on what I was saying. So I always like to say hello to them.
- [56:44]
Jordan Harbinger
Do you wave to them and say, hey Vladimir, I'm glad you made my talk.
- [56:47]
Elliot Higgins
Yeah. You always want to acknowledge them to say, yeah, hey, how are you doing? And then we've had various cyber attacks against us. We've had lots of disinformation state backed information campaigns, both kind of Russia today going after us. There's a really weird campaign that's going on at the moment, the Russian Dole campaign. So what Russia's been doing for the past few years is they make videos that mimic the style of legitimate news organizations. And that's like France 24, the BBC, all kinds of news organizations and Bellingcat. And we're like, oh, that's nice. They're included as all this international media. And one thing they do, they'll deep fake orgio so they'll have a deep fake version of me saying Ukraine's mad and that kind of thing like that. But they do loads and loads of these. And we noticed last year they started including barcodes with verified written on each of them and a little jigsaw puzzle piece. And I thought, that's weird, but I didn't really think about it anymore. Then in the last week they've started a new campaign and again these jigsaw puzzle pieces have come back, but now they're kind of larger and clearer and I've started piecing them together. And the jigsaw is a big pile of poo with my face on it with the title shit. A lot shittings of belling shit. And they've put this in their disinformation campaign as a jigsaw puzzle, apparently specifically for me to piece together. And someone said they'd pieced together the previous puzzle and it was CIA, but with the bellingcat logo as the I FBI, with the bellingcat logo as an I, a slur and then a middle finger. That was the jigsaw puzzle. So these Russian trolls for some reason have decided that I'm the one they need to communicate with through these kind of weird puzzle pieces.
- [58:28]
Jordan Harbinger
Wow, this reminds me of. Oh, God, I might butcher this. But there was a hacking group, this is several years ago, where they were finding little bits in the code and that was how they identified. I think they were like North Koreans. And then when they tried to do that again to another hack, they put the bits of code that were added out of place together. And it said something like, screw you, capitalist pigs. They're like, screw you, America or screw you, CIA. It was because they were like, this is how they found us last time. We know they're going to look for that again. So let's just put this little insult in there. And I can't remember if it was North Korea or Russia, but it's interesting because this is like their spies going. It's the intelligence equivalent of writing something on a missile that lands in the enemy territory. They're not going to see it. They might see a photo of it later. They might find the piece after they Drag it out of the building. We hit, and it's going to say something like, screw you, Yankees, or whatever, but it's the digital equivalent of that. It's funny, but at the core level, it's still a little scary, right? Because these people are really thinking about me a lot.
- [59:22]
Elliot Higgins
I don't know. It's kind of one of the nicest things anyone's ever done for me. I've got my own jigsaw puzzle now, honestly. Want to print it up and get all the pieces and build it and frame it because it's just. It's such a weird object now, and I love weird objects. It just. It's almost like a kind of outsider art piece that kind of is specifically for me.
- [59:39]
Jordan Harbinger
You should absolutely put that in the office. Tell me about the effect that looking at all of this stuff online has on people working at bellingcat. We talked about some of the dangers you face doing this. We talked about Putin maybe slash, maybe not trying to kill you, but cyber threats. We talked about authoritarian regimes are always dangerous. But what about psychological issues? Because aren't bellingcat researchers looking through lots of war footage, lots of airlines, wreckage with people's body parts in it? And it just, after a while, it's not good for you to look at that all the time.
- [60:13]
Elliot Higgins
People tend to handle it differently. And that's not to say there's tough people and soft people. I've never had too much of an issue with the kind of violence of it, because it's almost like you have to learn to disassociate yourself from the person. It's really about the image and what the image is telling you about something. You're looking not at the kind of bodies, but the missile parts, and they might be. But we have, like a psychological support at Budding Cat. We're very open about talking about things around trauma. There's other types of trauma that sometimes are a bit easier to miss. So there's the very obvious trauma of seeing all this horrific stuff, but then there's moral injury that when you're doing this stuff and you're looking at hours and hours of horrific footage, and then you go on Twitter and someone's saying that's fake news and being really abusive about that, that really heightens kind of your sense of injury from that. You're so offended at a deep level. That actually can be very serious in a lot of people. So it's kind of assessing that as well. The fear of the threat from Russia as well is something that some people find Overwhelming. So what we try and do is at least create spaces where people can talk about that one on one. We talk about it as a team. It's important to have that healthy environment. I know when I was first doing this, I would hear tales from certain human rights NGOs. When they were first encountering this imagery for the first time, coming from places like Syria and Libya and Egypt, they were told just to tough it out because it wasn't real. It was like a picture on the Internet. You're not out there in the war zone, you're here in an office, nice and safe. Because they didn't really understand the dangers of vicarious trauma. And that's also something that I've really kind of put at the center of, like how we deal with our staff at banningcat, that we make sure that's front and center, not something we just say, get on with it.
- [61:49]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, it's not safe to do that. Ptsd, a lot of people who have been in war zones have this, and there's other people in the military who might have just worked at a warehouse in the Green Zone, and their PTSD doesn't get taken seriously because they didn't see any combat. But when you see people coming home in boxes and people at the hospital, I mean, it still affects you. It's still that vicarious trauma. And also, the more familiar something is to you, the more it could hit you. One example I think that was in your book was what happens when you see a toy that your own child has in airplane wreckage, and then you just. You immediately, of course, you're thinking, oh, this is from a baby that was in that plane that crashed in Ukraine.
- [62:28]
Elliot Higgins
I had the same issue as well. Around the time my children were born, there were quite a few chemical attacks in Syria. And I would see a baby wearing a nappy that was the same brand as my children's who'd just been hit by chlorine. I was, like, coughing up bloody mucus because of it, and that kind of stuff, because it's like you can compartmentalize. But then when you see something kind of almost subconsciously that you associate with your real life, it just brings you right back into that moment and makes it very real for you.
- [62:54]
Jordan Harbinger
And.
- [62:55]
Elliot Higgins
And you've got to know about those moments because that will happen to kind of anyone doing this work. And that's the kind of moment where you stop. There's a temptation to say, now I must really look into this. But that's the moment where you have to stop, step away, and Give yourself that chance to just process what you've just seen. Trying to kind of push through that is a really bad idea, and it's just going to make things worse.
- [63:15]
Jordan Harbinger
How will Bellingcat try to fight things like deepfakes and AI? You touched on that earlier, but it seems like that is just a major enemy of what you're doing here. I took an AI training on Monday that was run by a friend of mine, and he showed me something that took him. I think it was like 10 or 15 minutes. And half of that is waiting for the computer to do its thing. It was a woman riding a bicycle, and she just sort of went back and forth on the bicycle side to side because it was on a stand or something. And then they did modify video and it became her with different hair, slightly different face, full makeup, a different outfit on a motorbike, going really fast in an urban environment. And I said, wow, this is incredible. He goes, there's about 14 minutes for me to make that. And like I said, half of it was waiting for it to render. And it's like you can essentially film yourself in a garage waving your hands around, and then you can say, turn this into a torture scene with isis and it will just make that. And how can you combat that?
- [64:09]
Elliot Higgins
I think it's really about this idea that the verification part of how we kind of build our understanding of the world used to be done by institutions who really had the control of the knowledge we had. It was really documented well by Walter Lippmann, who wrote a book in 1922 called Public Opinion, how basically, rather than actually having a full understanding of the world, we actually have that mediated through gatekeeped institutions, for better or for worse. And we build what we call pseudo environments about our understanding of the world. So now what we have is we've all become the verification element of that process because we're seeing this stuff for the first time. So it's up to us to make the decision of whether or not we share it or even look at it for long enough for the algorithm to notice that we're looking at it for too long. So what we need to do is really lead this by education. There's no silver bullet where we can say, oh, there's a piece of software or a course that you can take. We need to actually create an education system that's based around critical thinking skills. Not checking, not media literacy, but fundamentally across all subjects, critical thinking skills.
- [65:08]
Jordan Harbinger
I like this because media literacy is one thing, but now you've got to be on the bleeding edge of everything. And it's scary. It doesn't bode well for people like my dear parents who really can't tell an advertisement on the Internet from a news story. And I was reading this might have been in your book, but I was reading somewhere something like 80% of middle school students also can't tell the difference between an ad and a real news story. My mom will ask me something like, oh, did you know this? I just read it in the news and I'm like, show me the news story. And it's like a thing she clicked on. That was an ad inside a newspaper that takes you to a blog that is definitely just marketing. That sort of looks like the same newspaper where they ran the ad, depending on where you come from. And I've seen that ad elsewhere and I started clicking on it and it just, whatever they've done, they've made several clone sites of whatever site where they run the ad. And it knows which site you came from. And it's just designed to look like another article on that site. But it's just an ad for some product. And this is the weight loss miracle everyone's been waiting for. And it's, oh, this is not real. It's an ad that looks like cnn.com I can't believe they allow this. And I'm sure that they try and combat that at some level, but they're also being paid to promote it. So it's just like you really have this massive uphill battle, but it's just bad acting or it's corny acting or the dialogue seems stilted. But within a few months, all of that could be more human like, and all of the glitches that you see with your brain and go, that doesn't look totally real. All that's going to be resolved. So it's almost like you train someone to look for that and then six months later Adobe or whatever fixes that and you're just always, here's the update. Now you got to look for this because the other thing got fixed. This is how I feel old. I have to ask 20 year olds on Reddit why something is fake. Because they go, that's fake. And I go, crap, how do you know? And they got to explain it to me, like, the lighting is too good. And I'm like, oh God, I would never have spotted that.
- [66:55]
Elliot Higgins
Yeah. It's also something that is catching out mainstream media in some countries. So there was a recent conflict between India and Pakistan where a video emerged that showed a Pakistani general saying that Two aircraft had been shot down by the Indian military. That was then picked up by the Indian media who kind of trumpeted this great success. But it turned out the audio and the lip movements had been deep faked and that this person hadn't said it at all. But it took me having to go through the YouTube channel of the kind of Pakistani military media to find the speech and match his arm and kind of face movements with the fake video to show that what he was saying had been changed to actually categorically prove that. And that takes time. If we don't train media, not just in our own countries, but you've got to really do it internationally because everything is an international thing now. A story that's reported in India will be picked up in my hometown of Leicester and then become the fact of the community who lives here. You need to teach everyone these fundamental skills and it can't be about. Here's how you Fact check a TikTok video because the next generation might be using something completely different. It has to be about how do you actually think about things. And we're really actually often very poor about teaching students that certain countries are better than others, certain US States are better than others, but generally speaking, it's not taught broadly enough. It's like an add on. It's like, oh, now you're 16, you can take an extra class on critical thinking. No, it has to be the minute you're starting school, you're being taught these skills. And it doesn't have to be like how do you fact check a fairy tale, but it can be just little questions that teach children to ask an extra question when they're looking at something and then build it from there. And there's already education organizations doing this, like Cambridge Education is starting to do this. Ballingcat works with universities, develop course material around not just critical thinking, but actually implementing open source investigation ideas, creating investigative hubs at universities. All these different things have to contribute. There's not one solution. It has to be a whole society solution if we want to really deal with this problem.
- [68:50]
Jordan Harbinger
I wholeheartedly agree. I don't know what that curriculum looks like, but I would love to see that implemented. And I think countries like Denmark and I think Estonia and the Baltic States have done a really good job with this because they were getting bombarded with Russian disinformation I think since the 90s, aside from when they were occupied, which was obviously a massive disinformation landscape that they couldn't do anything about because they were under the thumb of The Soviet Union. So they kind of realized how important this was early on. When I talk to Estonian and Finnish, for example, show fans, they're the first people to be like, oh, this is just a disinformation campaign. And I'm like, oh cool. They're the online equivalent of me asking the 20 year olds how they know something is AI because they go, ah, this has all the hallmarks of fake Russian news. Look at this. And I'm just like, wow, I would never notice that. I would never ever pick that up. And we need that here in the States. I routinely have friends of mine go, have you seen this video? And it's something from rt, which is just a Kremlin mouthpiece. And they go, this is the only legit news source in the US now. And I'm like, no, this is actually just completely fake and I'm sad that you believe it.
- [69:50]
Elliot Higgins
The iOS, why do they think that? And it always comes back to how these institutions have had their trust completely destroyed across large sections of society. So part of the solution is, yes, we need to teach these critical education skills, but we also need to teach people how to engage in democracy and even what the value of democracy is. If you ask the average person on the street why is democracy important? You're going to get an answer that, oh, I get to vote and help what happens in this country. And they don't actually really dig into that. Like almost our we won World War II, so we beat fascism, then we had the 60s and 70s, so we fixed racism and sexism. And now we kind of got managed into the 80s where we all got to make lots of money if we worked really hard. And now we're in a situation where no one trusts anything that they're being told. Because what actually happened was all these institutions that were used to deal with these issues, these what are known as counter publics, were hollowed out that we were taught that democracy is healthiest when there's free markets, that everyone can work really hard. But there's this idea of negative freedom and positive freedom. So negative freedom is what you're free from. So freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assessment, assembly, we get lots and lots of that in Western democracies, which is great. But the positive freedom is like what you're free to do. Are you free to actually influence the democracy you live in? And we don't really have that anymore. It's like we're still also living in a system where if you want to become a politician, you go to a great university you work really hard and you get an internship and by the time you're in your 30s, if you're lucky, you might be elected to some office where you might have a bit of influence. But now in the current system you can do that or you can just go on Twitter and just make a lot of noise telling people what they want to hear. And now you're an influencer in a political system that is so broken that everyone's constantly thinking why everything's going wrong without actually examining the deep rooted issues that are behind it. And they just point their finger to Clinton, Trump, Democrat, Republican. But really it's a much, much deeper issue and what we're seeing as symptoms of those issues. So yeah, we need to start with critical thinking skills, but you also need to think about democracy a lot more and teach students about that in school. Because it's not obvious now to a lot of young people why democracy is important. And it's really obvious to a lot of older people that democracy doesn't work the way that we've been told it works. We have a media culture that tells us about the kind of lawyer fighting against the bad business. You've got the police officer solving crimes. You know that if you find the evidence, if you expose it to light, you'll find justice. Is that really what you feel that America, the uk, Europe is about at the moment? No. Maybe you get to be a big influencer and maybe have a voice then. But as an individual, a normal day to day individual, does your voice matter? Can you actually find out what the truth is? You've got a Fox News truth, you've got a CNN truth, you've got a Trump truth, you've got a Democrat. You get given the truth that you want to hear rather than the truths that actually exist. And then finally is, can we hold the powerful to account? Do you think we can hold the powerful to account at the moment? Because it certainly doesn't feel so.
- [72:53]
Jordan Harbinger
No, of course not. Man, this has been fascinating. How do people join bellingcat or is that not something you're looking for?
- [73:00]
Elliot Higgins
Well, we have a Discord server, it's got about 40,000 members on and that's a great community. Often we'll actually identify investigations the community are doing and help them finish it and publish it, which is great fun. We have a volunteers program that people can sign up for if they want to really get into the weeds of it. That's very popular. So you'll be waiting for a while. But that's fun. Read the website, go to our YouTube channel. Just see what we're putting out there and see what inspires you to do something.
- [73:24]
Jordan Harbinger
I like that. So are there ways for folks to start learning this stuff at home? Is the Discord server kind of the best place to find those resources?
- [73:31]
Elliot Higgins
Well, if you Discord's a great place to find like minded people. If you go to the Battling Cat website, we have guides and resources. The YouTube channel has hands on kind of case studies where you can watch our researchers explain how to do stuff. Yeah, I would just say give it a go if you're interested because that's what I did and they turned out quite well.
- [73:49]
Jordan Harbinger
What if Earth isn't the exception, but one of millions of planets that could host life? Astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger takes us on a mind bending journey through the cosmos, revealing how close we actually are to answering the question, are we alone?
- [74:03]
D
We have found more than 5,600 planets orbiting other stars, but we haven't seen most of them. And that's what we're looking for. That we live in this incredible time of exploration because with bigger telescopes, with more time looking, we can find smaller worlds. We can find worlds that take more time to whizz around their star. But we have actually changed our whole understanding of the cosmos in this respect that there are so many other stars out there so we don't have to ship to get there yet we can catch the light and read it. There's hope and there's wonder and there's our human curiosity that gets us to investigate our our search for life comes down to the question can we find it? And that I think is what it takes to figure out how we fit in this beautiful cosmos. And science is so much fun and I think this is what we sometimes don't get to convey. This research is not just about are we alone in the universe? It's also about understanding our planet, getting a gold glimpse in our potential future when we look at older Earth and using all that knowledge to safeguard our pale blue dog.
- [75:28]
Jordan Harbinger
If you've ever looked up at the night sky and wondered who might be looking back, check out episode 1056 with Lisa Kaltenegger. All things Elliot Higgins and Bellingcat will be in the show. Notes@jordanharbinger.com, advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show all@jordanharbinger.com deals Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also our newsletter we bit wiser the idea behind this it's a two minute read every Wednesday. It's specific, it's practical. It'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology and or your relationships. If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It is a great companion to the show. Jordanharbinger.com News is where you can find it. Don't forget about six minute networking as well, once again for free with no shenanigans. Over@sixminutenetworking.com I'm oordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. I'm also on LinkedIn and this show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting, and the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in citizen journalism, activism, interested in the Ukraine war or Russia, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time. Hey, it's Austin James. Yes, I'm living with diabetes, but it doesn't have to define me. Thanks to the freestyle libre 3 plus sensor, I get real time glucose readings throughout the day. The Freestyle Libre 3 Plus sensor is small and easy to wear, giving me the freedom to focus on my life as a parent and a musician. Now this is progress. You can get a free sensor at Freestyle Libre US offer available for people who qualify. Visit MyFreestyle US to see all terms and conditions. Certain exclusions apply. Data on file Abbott Diabetes Care or prescription only Safety info found at Freestyle Libre US.