Guns for Hire
Guns for Hire
Tracking mercenaries
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As humans share more of their experiences online for the world to see, the blank zones are shrinking. In episode seven of the Guns for Hire podcast, host Alia Brahimi is joined by Eliot Higgins, an award-winning journalist and founder of the independent investigative collective, Bellingcat. Eliot, who was personally sued by the late mercenary leader Yevgeny Prighozin for outing him as the oligarch behind the Wagner Group, discusses the types of online open-source tools used to track mercenary activity, and how anyone with a bit of time and an internet connection can get involved.
“A mercenary might have a friend who uses social media a lot and they’re featuring a lot in these photographs, for example, and then you can start building out the networks from that.”
The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.
Get in touch at: gunsforhirepodcast@gmail.com.
Subscribe to Alia's (free) Substack, "highly irregular": https://highlyirregular.substack.com/
Welcome back to the Guns for Hire podcast. I'm Alia Brahimi, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC. In this episode, we're joined by Elliot Higgins, the founder of the independent investigative collective, Fellingcat. But first, we need to talk about Evgeny Progosion. Since our last episode, and despite a public pardon from Putin, there have been some pyrotechnics. Progoshin's private aircraft was brought down, most likely by a bomb on board, in Russian airspace two months to the day that he launched his abortive march on Moscow. Pragoshin was undeniably a marked man. And in the videos he continued to post on Telegram, he looked haunted and hunted. Stupefyingly, the rest of the Wagner group inner circle was on the unlucky flight with him, including the commander and founding member, Dmitry Utkin. But before Pragoshin came to dominate global headlines in life as well as death, his domain was very much in the shadows. To the extent that he sued journalists for publicly linking him to the Wagner group. In the most high-profile such case, he brought a defamation claim in the United Kingdom against our guest today, Elliot Higgins. Pregosian, who was one of the most sanctioned individuals on the planet, brought the case against Elliot in his personal capacity after a Belencat investigative series named Pregosian as the man behind the Wagner Group. Belencat's reports also demonstrated the Wagner Group's close working relationship with Russian military intelligence, the spread of its predatory practices in the Central African Republic, and the Wagner Group's surveillance and intimidation of journalists looking into the suspicious deaths of three Russian members of the press there in 2018. The investigations were cited in EU sanctions against Prosian. Of course, Progoshin burst out from behind the Aris in September 2022, shortly after video footage emerged of him, mobster-like, recruiting in Russian prisons for the war in Ukraine. As for the years of denials and the aggressive defamation claims, he said, in any issue, there should be room for sport. But Belencat's investigations had clearly rattled Pragossian and the Kremlin, as had Belenkat's underlying philosophy, that facts still matter, that evidence exists online, that verification is mandatory, and that accountability is still possible. I'm joined today by the founder and creative director of Bellincat, the award-winning investigative journalist Elliot Higgins. Using information freely available on the internet, Elliot has helped to pioneer online open source and social media fact-checking and investigations. The detail-oriented obsessives at Belencat have gone on to prove that Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against the Syrian people, to show who was behind the downing of Flight MH-17, to identify violent neo-Nazis rampaging through Charlottesville, to uncover multiple Russian covert operations, to quash COVID-19 disinformation, and to expose Kremlin kill teams, including those behind the poisonings of the Scripals in Salisbury and the Russian oppositionist Alexei Navalny. Elliot is also a research fellow at Berkeley School of Law's Human Rights Center and a member of the International Criminal Court's Technology Advisory Board. In his book, We Are Bellingcat, Elliot writes that what we do is far more than just internet research. We battle the counterfactual forces warping society. We insist on evidence, and we show ordinary citizens how to expose wrongdoing and demand accountability from the powerful. Elliot Higgins, welcome to the Guns for Hire podcast.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for having me on.
SPEAKER_00The Arab Spring played a central role in the origin story of Bellingcat, and you describe in your book how when it broke out, I was just another computer enthusiast, an office worker in my early 30s with an unsatisfying job and an interest in the news. Can you tell us a little bit, Elia, about Bellingcat's founding, taking you from desk jobs in Middle England to taking on governments who lie?
SPEAKER_01So it really started off because I spent probably too much time on the internet around 2011 arguing about what was happening in the conflict with in Libya. And a lot of those kind of online arguments are often focused around videos or photographs that would emerge online. And really you had the kind of pro-Gaddafi side and the anti-Gaddafi side arguing over the pictures, but without ever really doing anything to verify any of the information in them. And I found that frustrating because I just wanted to understand what was happening, not have a side and defend it. So I figured out during a debate on the Guardian Middle East live blog under the kind of in the comment section about a video that had emerged from a town called Brega, which was at that time an important front line in the conflict where both sides were claiming to have control of the town, and two separate videos were published to show that. I looked at SASLite imagery and realized I could actually use that imagery to figure out where these videos were filmed. And this is a process we do all the time now called geolocation. It's very well known, lots of people do it. Then that was just me playing spotlight difference with Google Earth and these videos, and that led me to realise that both sides were in the town but in different parts of the town, trying to claim they had complete control. So that kind of really started a path towards the launching of Ballingcat because I started a blog, I started digging through videos from the conflict in Syria, finding all kinds of interesting things, and really establishing the methodologies that we still use at Ballingcat today and that we teach lots of people to do. But in 2014, I had been doing this for two years, and I thought I wanted a better-looking website than my blogsblock blog, which looked awful. And also a place where people could contribute under their own names, and we could also write guides and case studies for people. So I ran a crowdfunding campaign and launched Ballingcat in July 2014.
SPEAKER_00I laughed out loud at various points in your book, particularly when you're being maligned by state-run media. So the Iranians call you a UK-based armchair observer and the Russians an unemployed internet addict. But that's the point, isn't it? The lack of formal training is the whole idea.
SPEAKER_01Well, you've seen this happen a lot now with the conflict in Ukraine, where people who just have a keen interest in understanding what's happening in Ukraine, just from all kinds of different backgrounds, use things like geolocation to establish where videos were filmed. And because they're part of a community that's doing this, first of all, it allows other people to find this information and use it. But because it's transparent with the sources and the way it's geolocated, people can easily check that information as well. So really anyone with a bit of time and an interest in what's going on can get involved as long as they have an internet connection.
SPEAKER_00That's amazing. And you say that when it comes to a selfie or a Facebook post or a TikTok video, what people mean to show is not all they're revealing. How does Balencat use this to its advantage in its investigations?
SPEAKER_01Again, from the recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia, in the weeks preceding that invasion, we had lots of Russians on TikTok who were posting videos of interesting things. And at that point it was Russian military movements near the border of Ukraine. At that time, Russia was claiming this was just normal military exercises, but you could see from those videos there were vehicles and units involved that were not typically part of these military exercises. And then in the 48 hours just before the invasion, you could see these TikTok videos being posted from the border of Ukraine just inside Russia of these military units moving towards the border. So this kind of by analyzing all these videos and geolocating them, we actually had a good sense of actually what was happening in real time in those locations. And it did show that this there was this movement towards the invasion, even when there was still this kind of debate and kind of by policymakers and between governments about what was actually happening.
SPEAKER_00And when people are circulating these images, it's not necessarily for the express reason of exposing anything, right? It's just you sort of mine them and come across them accidentally in a sense.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, sometimes it's just people posting stuff on social media because they want the clicks, they think, oh, this is a cool thing I saw today. But what they don't realize is they're part of dozens and dozens of people who are doing the same thing. And if you can identify those people, suddenly you start seeing patterns and you can start linking things together and having a greater understanding of what's happening on the ground.
SPEAKER_00Of course. So as our listeners know, the home turf of this podcast is Libya, which was catalyzed by the staggering buildup of mercenaries there. But what's interesting is that Libya, as you've just um mentioned, plays a prominent part in your own personal story and the evolution of Bellingcat, in that your first breakthrough came with Brager, as you say, in during the uprising in 2011. And then later on, your research into the Cycladeath Squad in eastern Libya, you said that this marked a turning point in the history of open source investigations. So, in what ways was Libya seminal?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think it was the first time there was really a lot of content that was coming from non-traditional sources. It wasn't just journalists on the ground who were telling the world what was happening, but it was local people who were filming stuff, sharing this online, putting it on YouTube, and that being found and being shared on Twitter. And it's the first time that kind of social media played a really big part in our understanding of the conflict. But also at the same time, there was uh the kind of more traditional sources like journalists and policymakers and governments had no idea that this material was really useful. And out then, journalists in particular, they'd had some bad experiences using kind of bloggers who attended to there's one called Gay Girl in Damascus, who was a white guy in America, turned out and kind of made a lot of them feel burnt when it came to online sources, video and photographic evidence that was really something that was quite unique to that conflict and the quantity of it being produced.
SPEAKER_00Right. And you and you actually described that your your lack of kind of Arabic language was actually a strength in that it forced you to focus on the background of images and thereby hit upon crucial details.
SPEAKER_01That's right. It's things like kind of weapons and arms that were being used in the conflict and the question of where this stuff was actually being filmed, because people could claim something in a video, but unless you could independently verify that, then in one sense those claims weren't worth very much. They could point you in the right direction if they were truthful, but ultimately you wanted that geolocation to confirm it.
SPEAKER_00Elliot, in 2021, you were personally sued by the mercenary leader of Genny Pragoshin for defamation until the case was finally dismissed in May of this year. He was a heavily sanctioned individual when he initiated the lawsuit. Plus, it was widely seen as a slap case. So can you tell us a little bit about what a slap is and what you think was behind it?
SPEAKER_01So a slap case is it's uh basically when wealthy persons sue someone like me, an investigator, to stop them being able to report, cause them harm. And this is something that's quite a big issue in the UK because UK liable laws allow these cases to get very far, which means that individual journalists, news organizations can incur massive costs, even if the case is completely false. It's just something that it's been very difficult to avoid if you're in the UK and you're investigating these kind of figures because they have more money than you and they can cause you a lot of trouble. So that's really where it started for me over a few minutes. Yeah, so it started with a few tweaks and it went on from there.
SPEAKER_00And your costs uh ran to £70,000, I read, which I suppose was the point of the thing. Will you ever be able to recover that?
SPEAKER_01These costs, the £70,000, are likely to be recovered. I think at this point we'll be suing Prigoshin's estate, given what's happened to him recently. We're still waiting for a complaint we made against the solicitors who represented him in the UK as well. So that's also something we have to wait for the result for. And keep in mind this £70,000 of cost is only because the case got thrown out because his lawyers stopped representing him after Putin invaded Ukraine and they pulled out the case and he didn't report to the court properly, so it was thrown out on a technicality. And had it not been for that, we would have had to fight the whole case, which would have cost us hundreds of thousands of pounds.
SPEAKER_00So how was it that Belencat had come to tangle with progression and the Wagner group in the first place? When did their activities first cross your screen? And what sort of misdeeds did Belencat investigations uncover where they clearly uh hit a nerve?
SPEAKER_01It was really a couple of investigations where we made accusations that progosion was linked to Wagner Kruger's activities in Africa. We had been working with journalists from CNN on an investigation, in fact, about journalists from CNN being spied on by Wagner proxies. And that had caught his attention. We had also had some other incidents with him. So his troll factory website, Rhea Fan, had published an article about one of our colleagues, which was based off a series of faked direct messages where my colleague was threatening and trying to bribe Rhea Fan staff members, but these were all fake. So we sued them in the Netherlands and won. And I think that also got his attention. But what I was sued over was not things I had said myself, it was a series of four or five tweets where I had basically just linked to two Ballingcat articles about our research and a CNN and Spiegel article about the same research. And I rather than suing any of the publishers, he came to the UK to sue me personally for making those tweets. And later it came out that his lawyers in the UK and his lawyers in Russia had that the Russian emails were hacked. So there were these discussions about my case that came out. And it was clear from those discussions that the UK lawyers were very concerned about what it would look like if he went to the UK to sue me rather than to the Nevolence to sue Bellingcat. And that's how we ended up where we are today.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I see. But that effort to discredit you was all a bit ham-fisted with doctored photos and forged WhatsApp messages, and it was also obvious they even used a Belgian number for one of your Dutch colleagues. It was all sort of low rent, and yet they managed to get quite far.
SPEAKER_01I think they weren't really expecting us to go as far as suing them or even thinking to sue them outside of Russia. So when we were able to see them in the Netherlands, I think they were caught out a bit there. And then they didn't even really produce anything in court whatsoever to back up their case, not even the fake messages themselves. They just kind of turned up and said, Well, we don't have anything, and they lost. It was an easy case for us. But in the end, they were told to put a message up on the site saying this story's untrue and told to pay us money. But of course, none of that ever happened. But we at least have the moral victory.
SPEAKER_00You got the moral victory, yeah. And you demonstrated quite clearly in one of your reports and the tight integration of the Wagner group with the Russian Ministry of Defense and its intelligence arm, the GRU. And your evidence included joint airline bookings, leaked phone records. So that clearly rattled the Kremlin to the point where Pragoshin pursued this legal action, and the Russian foreign minister even denounces Bellenka as a CIA front. So again, yeah, you really struck a nerve.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and that was really part of a recessive reporting we were doing at the time. We did that reporting, but alongside that we had the investigations into the scriple poisonings and Russia's temporal weapons program and Vali and all these other poisonings and assassinations. So I don't know if this was something he was doing just because of what we'd been reporting about him, or it was part of a broader attempt to attack Balinkat from the Russian state.
SPEAKER_00From the Russian state, yeah. You say that global blank zones are shrinking, and our problem is never too little information, but too little time. So two of the headline benefits of using mercenaries for anyone, but especially right now for the Kremlin, is that they operate in the shadows and that their risky activities are deniable. So does this spread of smartphones, satellites, social media, geolocation, consumer data dunks, does that all work to undercut those advantages, just making it easier to expose mercenary activity as well as who their paymasters are?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And it's not just mercenary activity, but all kinds of different activity, both in conflicts and on other issues like environmental issues and other topics. It's really possible to find out a huge amount of information now, thanks to the availability of things like satellite information, for example. Even a few years ago, we wouldn't have what we have now, which we're able to task satellites to pretty much anywhere in the world now to have a look at what's happening the next day. And that the conflict in Ukraine has proven to be very useful. There's so much information out there from social media sources about events that are happening on the ground. It's possible to piece together all kinds of information. And that's not to say that open source investigation is some magic wand, you can just point at anything and you'll get a result. But there's certainly a lot more opportunities to do those investigations than there were 10 years ago.
SPEAKER_00I wonder if you think that there are tools that can be useful, for example, with the flooding in Libya in identifying kind of criminal responsibility. Do you see that as a potential kind of arena for these types of uh tools?
SPEAKER_01Well, we've certainly done a lot of work building processes around justice and accountability using open source information. That can vary depending in especially in the cases like the flooding on what you're actually trying to prove. If it's some kind of documents related to a company, you may be related waiting for something that's more of a leak than stuff that's out there publicly. It really depends on how you establish the cause of the dam breaking, for example, that caused so much of these problems. But yeah, there are so many different options. And it it even surprises me when we get asked to look into a new topic, and I think, oh, there won't be much out there. And then you look around and you go, wow, there's actually you know way more than I would have expected on that topic.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. In cracking the Scripal case, the Salisbury poisonings, you drew on a fantastic array of sources everything from phone metadata and flight manifests to a wedding seating plan, documentaries about Chechnya, and photos from military academy reunions. What do you tend to look at to track specifically mercenary activities? How does it work?
SPEAKER_01If we're lucky, these are the sort of mercenaries who don't mind posting a few personal photos from their activity online. It it's their social media profile can be very useful because it has who they're friends with, the kind of things that they're doing in their spare time, which can also often be with other mercenaries. And it's like the often when you're doing investigations, it's about not the person and their social media profile, but the people around them. A mercenary might have a friend who uses social media a lot and they're featuring a lot in these photographs, for example, and then you can start building out the networks from that as well. Sometimes you're relying on leaks information or hacked information that has become available, but generally it's exploring every possible avenue you have in a kind of open source sense in social media, finding not just who these individuals are, but their family members as well and seeing what they're sharing, because often it's those family members who are oversharing, whilst even if the kind of target of the investigation knows better than to share information.
SPEAKER_00In your investigations into Progosion, the initial ones, which poked the tiger, you had access to his personal phone records. So how did you get his number? So how would that kind of work? His personal number.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so a lot of it is looking through publicly available kind of things like business records or documents that have been published or bits and pieces of leaked information. Sometimes you might get it through you're looking into one target and they've been phoning up a bunch of people. So when you get phone records, they don't come with the put they have the number, but it doesn't say who those people are linked to. But if you do a kind of pivot table of all the numbers, it's usually the kind of wife, girlfriend, boss with these kind of Russian oligarchs and stuff like that, and commanders and stuff like that. And then you figure out who the boss is and that connects you to more people. So it's really identifying the most important people in those phone calls, and sometimes that's how you come across these. And quite silly how you get this stuff because in Russia they have these phone book apps where you get a phone number, you type in with a number and you put someone's name next to it. But that then goes to a centralized server where if someone else puts in the same number, it auto populates. So what that means is that if someone meets, say, I don't know, Sergei from the GRU, they'll put that into their phone with the GRU in it. And then two or three years later, we'll find some phone record and plug that into a telegram bot or an address book app, and it'll give us the names that be associated with that number, and then we'll say, Oh, it's a DRU guy, because someone's typed that in at some point.
SPEAKER_00Because someone saved it that way. That's so interesting. So it's not how they identify themselves, but how they're perceived. And sometimes you use that. I'm thinking of the Kremlin Wagner group liaison, Pikolov Mazai used that method to isolate his number. People would say Constantine from you know Wagner.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it almost got to be a bit of a joke inside Balinkat because it was like so often people. Just say they would meet some FSB guy and put their first name in and then FSB, and then that would be publicly available on some app that you know and it will produce it's Skype as well. There's so many times we've gone through just plugging people's names, phone numbers into Skype, and then it populates with what their phone number is, their full name is.
SPEAKER_00I had a talk last year, you observed that with the conflict in Ukraine, open source investigation has come of age. What do you mean by that?
SPEAKER_01So over the past decade or so, I've seen the open source investigation go from something that was done by a small group of amateurs on the internet to gaining more and more recognition in a range of different fields by different kinds of people. So we're seeing uh news organizations using open source investigation more and more, and there's great work being done by the likes of the New York Times visual investigation team, for example. We're seeing international bodies, including the UN, the International Criminal Court, recognizing the value of this kind of evidence. And what we're seeing with Ukraine is a lot of these different developments coming together. Like in the first few weeks of the conflict, I was involved with a lot of meetings among the NGOs and organizations working on legal accountability who had spent a lot of time working on Syria, where they'd learned about open source material, but they'd been very frustrated about the lack of action around it. And part of it was because it wasn't done from day one. It was something that was really, by the time they'd figured it out, it was six or seven years into the conflict, and interest had been lost, and there wasn't really much being done with it. But with Ukraine, everyone came together very early on. And I think open source investigation was something that kind of brought a lot of people together because they saw how valuable that could be, that this digital evidence being collected from the conflict zone could be so useful. But you've also seen the news media start using this more, and there's been some really great reporting from a range of organizations, and a lot of these organizations that Banning Cat trained to do open source investigation because part of what we do is teaching other people how to use this. Also over the years, because of the reporting that we've done on a range of topics, and I think the Scripples was an particularly important case along with Navarani, is that policymakers, government officials, people who can have real impact, trust open source investigation. And it you saw in the build-up to the invasion the US being a lot more transparent about the intelligence that it was collecting, being verified through open sources thanks to basically the community that existed out there. So, really from day one of this conflict, we've seen all the kind of elements of the open source community and all the things it's touched come together and really work effectively. And what you've also seen is I was when I came into this conflict, I was thinking you're gonna have Russia doing the next level of disinformation. They've had years to we've taught them a lesson through Bellingcat how not to do disinformation by catching them out all the time. Surely they're gonna adapt and evolve and do something more cleverer. But they didn't. It was like the same, if not worse. And because you then had a community online who understood open source investigation, how to verify stuff and pick stuff apart, you actually had a very rapid debunking of uh fake videos and claims that were coming out prior to the invasion that stopped them really entering the kind of alternative media ecosystem that would normally propagate that. And I think that's very important. We have created the kind of white blood cells to react against that poison that's been injected into the kind of ecosystem, kind of the truth around what's happening in the conflict. And I really think that's had an impact as well. So now you're seeing more and more organizations who are rapidly processing this information, sharing it, and making use of it. And I think it's going to play a really big role in future accountability efforts with regards to what Russia's done in Ukraine.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, on that note of future accountability, I understand that Bellingcat is working on searchable archiving, so you can keep this stuff for posterity and perhaps later war crimes investigations and that sort of thing. So that's about holding people to account in the future, isn't it? Because there's so much information that can't immediately be processed or put to use if it involves a legal case. But the point is that you you have it and you tag it, and it's there for when it's needed.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, this is really based off um lessons we learnt in Syria. So there have been efforts to archive videos from Syria, but one of the big issues is often that isn't done alongside things like geolocation. And really, when you're searching for these videos in the distant future when most of this accountability stuff may be happening, it's not very helpful if all you've got is a kind of YouTube title to describe it. If you have coordinates from a geolocation, then it makes it searchable. If you have dates as well, it also makes it even more searchable. So the idea is we're having this effort where we have a team of volunteers who are geolocating videos, we verify those with our staff members, and they're added to our um civilian harmat, which is at ukraine.bellingcat.com. And that data is also available to download from anyone who wants it. And those are open source videos and photographs classified by different types of incidents where they've happened that anyone can use. But another project I'm working on at the moment with HALA Systems is developing a platform called the Index for Accountability, where the idea is that with Syria, we saw lots of organizations collecting digital evidence and having lots of separate archives. But when it comes to accountability, that's a big problem because unless you know about these organizations and have relationships with them and can email them to say, can you send me this? And you can describe it in the correct way, it's very hard to get that information. And even if you can do it that way, it's hours and hours of work to deal with this, just getting one request now. So the platform we've created, prototyping it at the moment, will allow multiple archives to be indexed and that index to be searched from one centralized platform and then direct transfers from those archives to stakeholders, such as, for example, the ICC, as a possible example of what who would use it. So they can quick basically with a few mouse clicks, get all the archive videos from one incident in one location on one date and get it sent over to themselves so they can review and analyze it themselves.
SPEAKER_00Wow. So the blank zones really are shrinking.
SPEAKER_01And it's really for me making sure that the kind of process chain from the person on the ground capturing a video to the point that it's being used in a courtroom and a judge is making an assessment of that is fully functioning because it's not enough to record something. You've got to be able to make sure it's preserved and like make sure that archive content is accessible and there's good analysis of it. And that analysis itself is understood by the lawyers and the judges who are going to be seeing it. So it's not as easy as just do a good analysis. You've got to make sure that everyone along that process understands it and knows how to use it.
SPEAKER_00And that it's preserved in its original state as well, with a sort of chain of custody kind of parallel. AI and deep fakes. Do you think that's gonna present its own challenge?
SPEAKER_01I kind of see that in two different ways. One is in terms of evidence as part of investigations. For that, I'm not worried about it at all, because when you're doing those investigations, you're triangulating different kinds of information. And for example, if you create an AI-generated image of a location, it can't be geolocated because an AI system like Midjourney, for example, cannot create realistic, real-life backgrounds. It can make something that looks real, but if you were to geolocate it, everything would just be completely off. I see. But on the other side, as information, it's very dangerous. And my concerns around AI generated video, we're already seeing US presidential candidates using AI generated imagery in their campaigning. That's I think morally repugnant. But I also think that social media platforms need to have a be required to have inbuilt AI detection software so that when someone posts something, it can immediately be tagged saying there's a high percentage that this is an AI-generated image. Having a Twitter fact check underneath 24 hours after something's gone viral is not going to help anything with these images. And people do not look at these images for more than a few seconds before they decide to reshare them. And this is the problem. They are doing a careful analysis of the picture of kind of Mike Pence wearing a pride suit or something like that. They're just getting annoyed and retweeting.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, on that issue of deep fakes, that there's a growing link now between mercenaries and disinformation, uh, not just through the empire of of Ifgeny Pragoshin and the troll farms that he built to meddle in European politics, push Brexit, interfere in the US elections. But we also have information warfare being waged wherever the Wagner group operates in Africa, whether in CAR, Libya, or Mali. What do you think is the Kremlin strategy and how might we build a firewall against it?
SPEAKER_01I think they've probably recognized that in the global south in particular, the work that you see being done in the West around disinformation, countrying disinformation, looking at Russian propaganda just hasn't been happening. There's been such a focus in the West on what's affecting us, we've not really thought about BRICS penalty, for example, and that's where they can have influence. That's where they can change people's minds. It's just not really being developed there in the same way it has elsewhere. And if you actually look at it, might seem like from the West that the conflict in Ukraine is very black and white, the Ukraine's on the right side, Russia's on the wrong side, the Russia's doing lots of propaganda, we see the propaganda being picked apart. If you look at other countries in the BRICS regions, that's really not the same case because there hasn't been that ongoing multi-year effort to build communities, to debunk disinformation, and actually have the analysis that we can rely on here. So one thing that I think we have to do is start really doing what we've done in the West in those regions, teaching people how to identify disinformation. I don't want to turn it into a let's fight Russian propaganda around the world because it's there's a more fundamental issue here, which is really about people's trust in the media and the government in the even receive. And if you're from a country that may be an authority or a state where you're used to the kind of government lying to you, then you just assume that they're lying about everything. And that's where kind of conspiracy theories start coming in and breeding.
SPEAKER_00You've said that you want everyone to be doing this stuff. And in many places in the Middle East and North and Sub-Saharan Africa, online open source investigations, as we've spoken about, can become a much needed basis for accountability. So what advice would you give to any listeners that are interested in making a start?
SPEAKER_01I would say that for one thing, there's a huge amount of information out there how to do open source investigation now. We have it on the Ballycat website, we have YouTube guides, we do, for example, we have a Discord community that I'd encourage people to join. But we have stage talks where people are invited to talk about their work on open source investigation, show people how to use different tools. But also by being part of that community, you can see the discussions that are happening around different events, see how people analyse things. And I would just really encourage people to get involved with those communities. Prior to a year or two ago, I would say Twitter was a very good place to go and do that. But unfortunately, due to recent changes at Twitter, it's become less useful for open source investigation. But that's partly why we've started building our own communities. And we do have a Discord server that has attracted people from all kinds of backgrounds, and a lot of them are people who've been engaged with open source investigation for a very long time, engaging with people who are kind of new to the topic. And it's a great place to learn how to do that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Finally, I assume Bellingcat isn't going to partake in any investigations into Pragoshin's death and the highly suspicious events in Russia.
SPEAKER_01We were looking, but the problem is they cleared up the mess quite quickly. I mean, straight away there are videos of the remains of the aircraft being dragged away. I mean, they it's quite a mafia move to first of all send all his troops off to Belarus, get all the heavy artillery off them, then stick all the leadership on a plane and then shoot it down over Russia. So, you know, that was a very kind of master mafia plan from Putin.
SPEAKER_00Stephen Segal movie, yeah. Elliot Higgins, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast, and indeed for belling the cat on behalf of us all.
SPEAKER_01Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_00Yep, as far as unemployed internet addicts go, he's quite formidable. Thanks for joining us on this episode. Unfortunately, as we recorded, the scale of the devastation in eastern Libya from a Mediterranean hurricane was beginning to emerge, though still impossible to process. In Delona, the city of Jasmine, there worries up to a fifth of the 90,000 strong population has been lost to the floods. Alongside the natural component, a distinctly man-made dimension to the disaster was immediately apparent in the bursting of two creaking and unmaintained dams, despite maintenance budgets which ran into the tens of millions, and about which warnings were issued as recently as last year. In the shelter-in-place order, blasted out by the Eastern authorities, controlled by Haftar and his LNA, in the lack of functioning meteorological and emergency management services, notwithstanding the vast oil rents which accrue to the state, and by the years of targeted violence and neglect that kept Dharna in a state of near collapse, thereby decimating its defenses. Only hours into the aftermath, the disinformation mill began to grind. As expected, key figures such as the Prime Minister of the Eastern Parliament and Haftar's sons claimed that, in his wisdom, that's a quote, Heftar had in fact issued an evacuation order, but that many citizens failed to heed it. The most notable output was a bizarre faked video involving the mayor of Derna, a relative of one of the main power brokers in eastern Libya. The extraordinary footage, clearly doctored and depicting the mayor standing out in the storm-ravaged streets, warning residents of an impending disaster, was even picked up and broadcast by the TV station Sky News Arabia. Let's hope the international community stays alert and that, as in Ukraine, the white blood cells of which Elliot spoke can react to the poison. When I wonder about the LNA's disinformation strategy, helped along ably by political operatives from the Wagner group, I think of that line from the wire. The bigger the lie, the more they believe. Goodbye.
