The Man Putin Hates For Shooting Down Fake News
Angry Planet
Matthew Gault
4.3 • 882 Ratings
🗓️ 8 September 2017
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The impunity of some of the world’s most frightening men is under threat from people stereotyped as geeks in basements around the world. In the 21st century, well-informed and observant social media addicts have extraordinary powers. Eliot Higgins started watching and reporting on war from the comfort of his living room in 2012. Five years later, he’s using his skills to help the International Criminal Court in The Hague to prosecute war criminals. It’s been a strange journey.
This week on War College, Higgins walks us through how he built Bellingcat—a team of investigators who use open source-intelligence and social media to investigate a variety of subjects. They unearthed Russian lies about the shootdown of passenger flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, proved the existence of chemical attacks in Syria, and looked into financial crimes in England.
Higgins is a self-taught open source intelligence expert who thinks anyone can learn to do what he does. Bellingcat doesn’t only investigate crimes, it also teaches its readers how to do the same. For Higgins, it’s a hobby that became a job and a mission. One that’s earned him the admiration of the international community and more than a few enemies.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Love this podcast support this show through the a cast supporter feature |
| 0:05.1 | It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now |
| 0:17.0 | War college is now an independent production not associated with Reuters news. Yeah, he's a commander in General Hatters, I guess you could call them an army, and he posted a series of videos where he was executing prisoners who were captured in military operations. |
| 0:33.6 | Now, he was mainly claiming these were kind of ISIS and jihadis |
| 0:37.0 | and that they'd gone for a proper judiciary process. |
| 0:41.0 | But, you know, these, one thing that's disturbing about these videos is it starts |
| 0:44.8 | off being you know one person and it starts ramping up until there's eventually rows of people |
| 0:49.6 | in orange jump jumpsuits being executed. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front |
| 1:06.0 | lines. Here are your hosts, College. I am your host Matthew Gault. My co-host |
| 1:26.4 | Jason Fields is on vacation in Ireland this week. Open source signals |
| 1:30.9 | intelligence is a new and game-changing form of intelligence gathering that pulls information from social media, government releases, and publicly available satellite photography to paint a picture of conflict zones. Bellingat is home to pioneers of the method and this week on |
| 1:45.6 | war college we're talking to Elliot Higgins about his life and work chasing |
| 1:49.2 | down rumors of chemical weapons and dodging Russian propaganda attacks. |
| 1:52.4 | Elliot thank you so much for joining us. |
| 1:54.4 | Thank you. |
| 1:55.4 | Alright Elliot, can you tell us a little bit about what Bellingat does and how they work? |
| 2:01.8 | So Bellingat, I founded that in 2014 after I've been blogging for a couple of years under the name of Graham Moses, |
| 2:10.0 | using open source information to investigate the conflict in Syria. I saw over that time |
| 2:16.2 | there were a lot of people who had started using this kind of these investigation techniques |
| 2:20.5 | who weren't getting the same sorts of attention I was. |
| 2:23.0 | So I decided to launch a new site under a new name |
| 2:26.0 | where I could bring those people together and also produce kind of guides and case studies |
... |
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