2024-09-03
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Head to patreon.com myperfectconsole my guest today is a British citizen journalist and founder of Bellingcat, the website that specializes in open Source Intelligence.
In 2012, while unemployed, he became involved in online discussions about the conflict in Syria, where few journalists were able to operate despite having little prior interest in the region.
He began to study videos of the conflict and started a blog on which he analyzed geodata and weaponry.
This work exposed atrocities and helped establish an evidence base for crimes allegedly committed by the Syrian government.
In 2013, Stuart Hughes, a BBC News producer, told the New Yorker he's probably broken more stories than most journalists do in a career.
In the decade since, however, bellingcat has broken dozens more, investigating the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014 and exposing the true identities of the Russian spies who the British government claim poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury in 2018.
Throughout all of this, my guest has remained a keen player of video games despite quitting World of Warcraft for fear his marriage might not survive his addiction.
And he says that being part of these online communities has been instrumental in honing his talents.
Welcome Elliot Higgins.
Thanks for having me on.
Really excited to talk to you, Elliot.
So I think Bellingcat's work became truly mainstream in 2018 when, as I mentioned in the introduction, the site published the real names of the Russian spies who poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter and two members of the public in Salisbury.
At what point in that story did you just decide it was a case you wanted to get involved in and investigate?
It was almost accidental, actually, because when the poisoning first happened, there wasn't really much to go on, especially in terms of open source information.
So that's the publicly available information we work with.
But when the suspects were named by UK authorities, a Russian publication got its hands on the flight manifest of the flight they were on, which included their passport numbers, which were very close in sequence.