Is the truth open source?

Beyond Today

BBC

News

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 July 2019

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is part two of our interview with Eliot Higgins, the man who began investigating international crimes from his living room in Leicester after dropping out of university. Despite having no formal journalism training or experience, he quickly gained a reputation in the relatively new field of open-source citizen journalism, where people analyse publicly available materials to uncover new facts about major stories. On yesterday’s episode we heard about his investigative website Bellingcat and how it helped discover who shot down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17. Bellingcat has also carried out important work investigating everything from chemical weapon attacks in Syria to the identities of the men accused of the Salisbury poisoning. In today’s episode Eliot talks us through Bellingcat’s techniques and how anyone can get involved in international crime-solving, using nothing more than their laptop. If you’d like to hear the whole story of the MH17 investigation head to the Bellingcat website and listen to their new podcast: https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/podcasts/2019/07/17/mh17-episode-guide-1/.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:06.4	Hello, I'm Matthew Price.
0:08.2	This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4.
0:10.9	Every day we ask one big question about one big story.
0:14.0	Today is the truth opens up.
0:22.0	Today is the truth open source.
0:27.0	When we were planning the episode that we put out just before this one
0:35.0	about the shooting down of Flight MH17 and the team from Bellingcat who worked out
0:39.5	who fired the missile we spent a lot of time talking to Elliot Higgins who set up Bellingat and we discovered there was
0:46.2	more to talk to him about than just that investigation. Bellingat's done some amazing
0:51.5	investigative work on atrocities carried out in the Syrian war.
0:55.3	They were a lot that worked out who the men who carried out the Salisbury poisoning attack were.
1:00.5	They're working right now on looking at Saudi Arabia's role in the world's worst conflict zone, Yemen.
1:07.0	Elliot and his team have pioneered a new brand of journalism.
1:10.0	They say they're still learning as they go, but how they do it is now being picked up by established
1:16.8	old-time media organizations like the BBC and the New York Times.
1:22.0	Pretty amazing for a guy who dropped out of college, logged on from his
1:25.4	living room in Leicester, and started investigating and blogging about what he found.
1:31.6	Open source is basically something that's been done for a long time.
1:34.0	Back in the earliest days of intelligence gathering.
1:38.0	It's stuff that was in newspapers, publicly shared information,
1:41.0	but what's changed in the last 10 years is now we're
	...

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