Big Tech S3E13: Eliot Higgins On Citizen Journalists’ New Form of Intelligence Gathering

May 13, 2021

Listen to this week’s new episode of Big Tech, where Taylor Owen speaks to Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat.com, about how online open-source investigators are able to verify or debunk state-led propaganda and expose atrocities using the vast volumes of publicly available data from videos, satellite imagery and social media posts.

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat.com, an open-source intelligence and investigative journalism website. Higgins’s site uses publicly accessible online data to investigate and fact-check human rights abuses, war zone atrocities and other criminal activities. Bellingcat’s reporting on the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine gained the site wide attention, including from the Kremlin, whose public statements on their role in the incident were being refuted by the site.

The online open-source intelligence and investigation community operates adjacent to state-run intelligence gathering and journalism. As Higgins explains, Bellingcat can be an interface between the person on the ground and justice and journalism institutions: “The person on the ground who’s filming these things, you know, they film it because they want there to be accountability. It’s not just [about] raising awareness of it.” Bellingcat is now doing mock trials to show how these open-sourced investigatory efforts could lead to justice for victims.

Additionally, Higgins sees the work of online investigations as a counter movement to the increasing polarization of media and the distrust in institutions that are leading people into online conspiracy communities and fringe thinking. “What I think we need to do is start teaching people actually to, you know, use things like … open-source investigation in their own lives,” says Higgins. He sees this as an opportunity to teach the younger generation how to engage positively online: “Rather than them going off [and] just being mad about something in the world and then finding some community of people that are going to kind of draw them into conspiracy theories, they actually are able to find communities that can actually help them positively contribute to these issues.”