Eliot Higgins

Eliot is creating a new field of democratic investigation, training and facilitating citizen journalists using open source and social media investigation to probe issues impacting their communities, their countries and the globe – from Mexican drug lords and crimes against humanity, to tracking the use of chemical weapons and conflicts worldwide – paving the way for more effective citizen and government action.

Eliot Higgins has created a new field in the realm of journalism, education, and justice by creating a movement of online, open-source investigators and equipping them with tools for research that utilize our new, chaotic data environment. Bellingcat’s open-source investigation method, coupled with an innovative scaling methodology, brings together advanced technology, forensic research, journalism, and investigation techniques, while embedding a culture of transparency and accountability in its networks. Bellingcat’s investigators pull from the text, images, video, geolocation data, and a host of other data – the churn of real-time social media has a tremendous amount of evidence to offer if analyzed and synthesized. Working together online, they tap into the power of many minds combined to apply rigorous evidence-based methods, uncover new information, and make their findings public to advance justice. Eliot’s work has also provoked radical transformations in the media industry, placing amateur phone camera captures as equally powerful evidence gatherers as traditional forms. Bellingcat cooperates, shares and trains others to leverage and spread their knowledge, build networks and expand the community of open-source researchers. ​ His organization – Bellingcat – enables ordinary persons to “put bells on cats” and bring people responsible for wrongdoing and crimes to accountability. ​

Bellingcat’s strategy is based on three pillars: (1) investigations and research, (2) justice and accountability, and (3) training and community development to build the critical thinking skills urgent to fight disinformation. Bellingcat operates at the convergence of many disciplines and skills sets, making the establishment of investigative and editorial guidelines both uniquely complex and of paramount importance. The highest professional and ethical principles are values, impartiality, accuracy, and transparency.   ​

The strategy, formula, and ethical principles were applied from the first big investigation. In July 2014, MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine. Over the next four years, Bellingcat discovered key information about the downing of MH17, including tracking the missile launcher that shot down MH17 from its base in Russia to Ukraine, locating the field where the missile was launched from, and identifying a number of suspects involved with the incident. Bellingcat identified that the Russian military was involved years before it was confirmed by European officials. However, the fast reaction of Bellingcat was instrumental for Western countries to react fast and impose sanctions on Russia. Since then, Bellingcat has investigated hundreds of major stories, uncovering important evidence related to NATO bases and the far-right, Russian poisonings, the El Junquito raid in Colombia, to the secret operations of rogue states, conspiracy theories, and the far-right. Eliot and Bellingcat have also established a documentary and podcast arm to disseminate their findings.

Eliot sees the next generation as the core lever for change in the media landscape and has turned his focus to education to equip young people with the tools to do their own investigations, assess fact from fiction, and resist media manipulation and disinformation. He is working to build teams of student investigators in universities including Utrecht, Birmingham, Nottingham and Stirling, and expanding to work with secondary and eventually primary students.

Traditionally gathering evidence, or ability to gather certain evidence, was only available to governments, or well-resourced organizations, like major media outlets and corporations. A private citizen cannot issue a subpoena, order phone records or CCTV footage, tap a phone, order location data, or gain access to all witness statements. The power of investigation was in the hands of the powerful. Governments often have an incentive not to investigate themselves, and even to shut investigations down, while those affected, have few tools to do it themselves, unless they are able to attract the attention of professional journalists, whose numbers are decreasing, and whose resources are limited. The reality in today’s environment is that lawyers, police, and state actors have the power of the mode and form of scrutiny. People who matter – those affected by a government or other large entity’s actions - are spectators.

Today, the information environment and power to investigate is evolving, presenting different challenges. New tools of evidence gathering from multiple sources online offer insights only available to governments and large institutions in the past. However, social media has become a massive (and daunting) information resource. Estimates are that the volume of stored global data is doubling every four years, a significant percentage of which is driven by social media. The advent of the camera phone has created a powerful tool for evidence collection – events, from human rights violations to innocuous actions, are caught on camera every day, allowing them to be shared instantly or stored for future viewing. Realtime streamed videos and live commentary, now serve as witness to events as they happen, and when combined with images and text and other posted data, offer dense trove information to help evaluate and interpret events after the fact. However, this amount of data can be overwhelming, fragmented, and piecemeal – difficult to synthesise, interpret, or utilise effectively at all.

However, they require collective action. Insights are not easily gleaned from one person’s analysis – e.g. cross-referencing location markers, deep rabbit-hole research, matching data points can often require the labour of an army of researchers, which few cases have.

The new world of digitized information in all its manifold forms, has also presented major challenges to legal systems globally. Evidence in a court case has for centuries been paper-based. Lawyers, juries and officials have thousands of hours of transcribed statements, scientific summaries, police reports, and phone records. It has been difficult to align these reams of paper with the modern tools of evidence emerging from the online spaces: mobile phone videos, tweets, immediate social media.

The court system is also much slower moving than the online world. The paper-based system did not admit these digital data points as proper evidence until the work of Eliot and Bellingcat. This is part of a long history of the legal system playing catch up: it took forty years after the invention of the photograph for images to be allowed to be admitted as evidence in a courtroom.

The rise of social media has also provided a new challenge, the increase of disinformation (false information people sharing know to be false) and misinformation (false information people sharing believe to be true), and ‘malinformation’ (information selectively shared to cause harm). These have proven far more nimble than current efforts to combat them, and young people are at particular risk of falling victim. Young people have a growing sense of distrust – says Eliot, ‘we don’t support them, but the grifters do.’ The modern education system is playing catch up. It tends to focus primarily on one-off media literacy lessons rather than an overarching training on how to gather one’s own information. Current curriculum does not reflect the realities of Gen Alpha – they teach young people to fact-check headlines, but this generation of young people don’t read newspapers or watch the 6:00 news. This new reality requires a different approach. We no longer consume information in a top-down way.

‘Doing your own research,’ the clarion call of the misinformed, is often just reading other people’s research which reinforces one’s own opinions. It is a self-referential bubble, which tends to radicalise people towards the most extreme viewpoints. The ‘true believers’, a core source of the problem, lack trust in a source of authority. Teaching genuine tools of investigation, verification, research, and accountability measures can be a powerful tool to combat these factors.

With Bellingcat, Eliot has created an open-source investigative agency for the people, run by the people. Traditional journalism used traditional methods – phone calls to sources, old-school research, which no longer met the challenge of the modern media landscape. Eliot created a platform, strategy, and toolkit to give the powers of investigation to anyone with a laptop. He has utilised the limitless power of open-source collaboration to pool insight and research capabilities. He has built a broad team across continents and a cohort of volunteers who collaborate on investigations, while also consulting with major news organizations globally to help train their journalists in the tools and techniques that Bellingcat has pioneered.

Eliot’s work has three strands: investigations and research, justice and accountability, and training and community development. His organisational focus is subdivided into themes of environment, human rights, online ideologies, and financial crimes.

Investigations and Research

Eliot has created an army of desktop researchers around the world. He has tapped into the greatest power of open-source technology and applied it to investigations: that many minds combined can be far quicker and more powerful than one investigator laboring alone. Bellingcat uses technology to do online investigations, taking visual information to set up a timeline of events; using Google maps and other similar tools to geo-locate, create hypotheses with the information they gather and cross check evidence. Eliot uses a suite of tools including signal, discord, slack, social media channels, satellite imagery, databases, platforms including At-Loss, and a series of open-source software initiatives they have developed to support group investigations. Visual markers in hostage execution videos outside of Benghazi and Raqqa- such as a crossroads, or the angle of the sun - are cross-referenced with satellite imagery to determine the time and place of events. Bellingcat has used these tools to investigate incidents including Syrian Civil War, the Russo-Ukrainian War, the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

He first gained mainstream media attention by identifying weapons in uploaded videos from the Syrian conflict, monitoring over 450 YouTube channels daily looking for images of weapons and tracking when new types appeared in the war, where, and with whom. Eliot used open-source methods to counter fake news (e.g. parties denying they had anything to do with a violent incident), and saw the urgent need to teach others, forming a community and then a movement. His work is based on the principles of identify, verify, and amplify, and radical transparency – qualities he sees as core soldiers in the battle against fake news, misinformation, and disinformation.

Eliot has created a toolbox of online investigative tools for the global network of Bellingcat’s volunteers. He is teaching them, as well as partner organisations, to gather and archive information and video, creating a decentralised and searchable index for all of these archives that could be searchable. This would allow for open-source materials to be available to courts and accessible to everyone. This will preserve current and past investigative work and deepen the knowledge base for future investigations. Eliot’s case files are a trove of information, with each keystroke and all past research captured. Typically, a ‘justice investigation’ takes four to five months, and a more informal ‘editorial’ piece two to three weeks.

Justice and Accountability

Eliot’s work does not do investigations purely for the sake of knowledge – Bellingcat is unique in that their efforts have an advocacy element aimed at bringing accountability. The goal is action: a perpetrator brought to justice, a human rights violation punished, a channel for weapons shut down. He believes that teaching people the tools of investigation, helping them uncover things, and then having nothing happen as a result only increases distrust, so accountability is important. His work goes beyond reporting to creating and verifying a new kind of evidence for use in courts

Eliot and Bellingcat have pioneered the use of digital evidence in the courts, creating some of the first evidence from geo-located YouTube and culled from social media testimony which was admissible. Previously, courts did not know how to use this type of information. For example, in the aftermath of an airstrike in Yemen the court accepted video, but not the audio of the person giving testimony in the background.

Bellingcat has begun collaborating with the European Convention on Human Rights as well as the International Criminal Court, bringing evidence and serving as a witness at trial, and working with them to build their own open-sourced investigations as a core part of their work. This had led to new witnesses, evidence, and information. They have begun coming to him for information. As part of their work with the international justice system, they have conducted mock trials with lawyers and judges to highlight how open-sourced evidence can be used. This work has included working with the ICC on Ukraine.

Recognizing the potential for conflicts of interest between the investigative, the justice and the education elements of the work, Eliot is moving to spin off his justice and accountability work into a separate complementary organisation, ‘firewalled off’ from his existing work, and designed in partnership with lawyers from the Global Legal Action Network. This they hope will also contribute to building funding stability, but this is still in progress. As Eliot says, ‘In the current landscape, truth has become activism.’ Justice and accountability are a longer-term game, with results coming after a typical ten-fifteen legal process.

Eliot has also created an arm to raise awareness of his investigations, building a substantial production company to produce documentaries and podcasts. They have written a popular book, produced three documentaries on their investigations, sold book rights to be turned into a TV series. They worked with National Geographic to do a three-part documentary on the M17 plane crash, and a (UK) Channel 4 documentary on Russian poisonings.

Training and Community Development

A core part of Eliot’s scaling strategy is in building a world where everyone can be an investigator. He ‘never intended for Bellingcat to be the centre of the universe’ and as such has created a series of workshops to spread his methods. He has trained over a thousand journalists and private citizens. His work has had a powerful ripple effect within organisations across sectors: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, BBC Verify, New York Times, and the Financial Times all have open-source investigation arms led by people trained by Bellingcat. He is expanding focus to environmental issues, working with Centro Latinoamericano de Investigacion Periodistica in Latin America, and conservation issues in Africa. His team investigated an oil spill off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago, looking at marine traffic websites and satellite footage, and managed to tie it back to a Venezuelan oil-smuggling operation. This led to a UN marine insurance pay out, vessels seized, and the responsible businessman investigated by police. They collaborate on long term investigations with Forensic Architecture, an Ashoka Fellow organisation whose creation was inspired by Bellingcat.

Eliot has a growing focus on far-right ideologies, particularly in the European Union and USA. This looks at conspiracy theories, Q-Anon, flat earthers, etc, seeking to understand why they exist. Typically, local organisations with knowledge of the far right do not coordinate, and Eliot is providing an overarching coordination role. Eliot’s work has identified a far-right influencer on the run from the US, located them in Serbia, and contributed to their arrest. Eliot is expanding their work into sports corruption and gambling, as well.

Education has become a core focus of Eliot’s work, and one he sees as the next phase of Bellingcat. They currently work with students at the secondary and tertiary levels. In these collaborations with schools and universities, rather than focusing on a basic media literacy curriculum, he is equipping students with the tools of investigation themselves, with everything from how to do a FOIA request to how to turn findings into articles. He is guiding students through shift in how they encounter and engage with online information, taking away the gatekeepers and working peer to peer to participate in knowledge collection, evaluation, and creation. Eliot’s aim is not to counter disinformation, but to create critical thinking skills and integrate this work across curriculums to help young people navigate the online space. He is keen to instruct young people ‘that they have influence and connect them with this new idea of power.’

Eliot is working with a number of universities in the Netherlands, UK, and US (including Utrecht, Birmingham, Nottingham, and Stirling) to develop courses based on open-source investigations, creating investigative hubs. His goal is to expand to four or five new universities each year. Eliot is connecting these hubs to local media, non-profits, and building a network across universities. These have already resulted in a national story around police violence at a Palestine protest. Eliot sees these university hubs as a core piece of his strategy, as local media and NGOs typically do not have the capacity to do open-source investigations on their own, so these local hubs can fill a deep need.

Bellingcat’s collaboration with universities extends beyond journalism schools to engage students in other departments, such as computer science to create tools to use for investigation and streamline existing tools that make data-gathering difficult, such as government databases with terrible user interfaces, including US business registration sites so badly designed they are nearly unusable. Bellingcat’s new tools make information vastly easier to access – for example, a search tool that allows an investigator to type in things they see on a map (‘palm tree next to a crossroads’) and it searches for the images on an open street map. With the universities, Eliot and Bellingcat are developing this type of software, centralising useful code on GitHub (a platform for software developers), and building a toolbox with an AI search function to facilitate citizen investigation.

Bellingcat currently has forty staff across nearly as many countries and community of 30,000 active members who communicate with each other over Discord (a highly secure communications platform). Reflecting the principles which underly his philosophy of ‘everyone an investigator,’ he has eschewed traditional hierarchies and cultivated a flat structure, transparent structure for his organisation. Staff co-develop strategy and are enabled to take initiative.

A military kid, in his twenties Eliot found a home and deep inspiration in technology. An early adopter, he began using the internet in 1995, and saw how communities were created, grew, and blossomed in real time. He loved the freewheeling forums and discussion of the early internet. His teenage years were bookended by the first Gulf War and the war in Iraq. His older brother exposed him to anti-authoritarian post-punk bands in the US, and to thinkers like Noam Chomsky. He worked in admin and finance roles for companies until 2011, using his technological chops, but leaving him uninterested and dispassionate. Eliot was always captivated by the internet, seeing it as a place of exploration and learning. As the Arab Spring devolved into open conflict in many countries, he began to see more and more videos of Libya and began to question their authenticity. Looking at videos of the capturing Libyan forces, he realised that he could use video landmarks with satellite photos to geolocate specific places. Human Rights Watch began to pay him a few hundred pounds a week to identify as many videos as possible using these new techniques, which did not exist previously.

He started blogging, digging into topics that piqued his curiosity, more as a recreational pursuit. His first blog, Brown Moses, began to develop a following. He uncovered some genuinely new information around Syria’s civil war, as well as UK phone hacking. His first ‘big break’ came in 2013, when he identified weapons being used in the Syrian conflict, whose use had never been documented before. Eliot broke open this investigation in 2012. He uncovered and documented the use of cluster bombs in 2012, which the Syrian government denied using; the proliferation of shoulder-launched heat-seeking missiles known as MANPADS; and the proliferation of Croatian-made weapons which was reportedly connected to the United States. He has also investigated the Syrian regime's alleged use of chemical weapons. This evidence was submitted to the US government and ended up on the front page of the New York Times, The Guardian, and five other news sources. Eliot, up all night with a new baby, and remembering his rejection from a traditional journalism training course, found this an unusual juxtaposition.

In 2013, Eliot used crowdfunding to support himself until he launched the Bellingcat website in 2014. As he spent more time in online spaces, he found that people were not arguing about facts but trying to fit their facts around their positions. His emerging vision for Bellingcat sought to develop and spread the habits, tools, and techniques to identify facts first, and then develop positions. Eliot began leading workshops to raise funds for his organisation, before setting up a full organisation, whose flat leadership structure mirrors the ethos of the internet.

He was an amateur, who had a hobby which grew into a piece of work with global implications. This sense of being an amateur is an important ingredient in Eliot’s work – he believes that anyone can be an investigator, that you don’t have to be a lawyer to build a case, that you can facilitate a democratic way of investigating.