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NY Times, Dec. 1, 2019
These Reporters Rely on Public Data, Rather Than Secret Sources
By Marc Tracy
LONDON — Leaked documents and interviews with whistle-blowing sources
will always be a part of investigative journalism. But thanks to the
rise of digital technology, and the easy availability of data that has
gone with it, reporters have more ways to get stories than ever before.
“You can be on your couch in front of your computer and solve a mystery
of a missile system downing a plane,” said Aliaume Leroy, a journalist
who is part of the BBC’s Africa Eye team.
Internet sleuths who piece together stories from available data, a
practice known as open-source journalism, have helped identify the white
nationalists who assaulted counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Va.;
unmask the Russian intelligence officers who the British government said
tried to kill a fellow Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury,
England; and show that the suspects in the murder of the journalist
Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul included associates of Saudi Arabia’s crown
prince.
With its emphasis on raw facts, open-source journalism has an immediacy
that is effective at a time when readers all along the ideological
spectrum have become skeptical of the news media.
“If the BBC tells you they’ve got a source that proves this, the BBC is
the middleman and the source is behind it — you can’t see it,” Mr. Leroy
said. “But if you’ve got the visual evidence, there is no middleman. You
connect directly to the evidence.”
The craft of building a story on publicly available data was part of
journalism in the analog era, but it has come of age in recent years,
with the ubiquity of smartphones and the expansion of social media.
The blogger Eliot Higgins made waves early in the decade by covering the
war in Syria from a laptop in his apartment in Leicester, England, while
caring for his infant daughter. In 2014, he founded Bellingcat, an
open-source news outlet that has grown to include roughly a dozen staff
members, with an office in The Hague. Mr. Higgins attributed his skill
not to any special knowledge of international conflicts or digital data,
but to the hours he had spent playing video games, which, he said, gave
him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.
“It’s imagination and perseverance,” he said. “You look at a problem and
say, ‘I know I need to do this thing. I know I have this range of tools
I can apply to this.’”
Thanks to social media and camera-equipped smartphones, a great number
of the world’s seven billion people cannot help documenting newsworthy
events. Open-source journalists at Bellingcat and elsewhere try to track
down that evidence and place it in context.
“It’s what humans do,” said Nick Waters, a Bellingcat investigator.
“They are gregarious. They are addicted to social media, because social
media platforms are designed to be addictive. And they like sharing
their experiences.”
The site made a name for itself with its investigation of the downing of
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, when the war
between Russia-backed separatists and the Ukraine government was raging.
At the time, Bellingcat was a group of volunteers who collaborated
mainly over a Slack channel. Relying on photographs of the crash site
and Facebook updates, they identified the launcher used in the attack,
reporting that it had been moved from Russia to rebel-held territory in
Ukraine days before the missile was fired, killing all 298 passengers on
board the jet.
A scene from the documentary “Bellingcat — Truth in a Post-Truth World.”
Hans Pool, a Dutch film director, was inspired to make the film after
reading about Bellingcat’s work on the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight
17 over Ukraine in 2014.Credit...Submarine Amsterdam
In June of this year, a Dutch-led international team of prosecutors
indicted three men with ties to Russian military and intelligence
agencies in the attack. Moscow has denied any involvement. The site
produced a podcast this year detailing the story behind the story.
Hans Pool, a Dutch film director, was inspired to make a documentary
about Bellingcat after its reporting on the crash. “It was about a house
father in his spare time doing research on the internet,” Mr. Pool said.
“I was wondering, ‘What is this?’” His documentary, “Truth in a
Post-Truth World,” recently won an International Emmy Award.
Bellingcat alumni, as well as formerly amateur open-source
investigators, have found jobs at established news organizations
including The New York Times, whose Visual Investigations unit
incorporates open-source analysis in its reporting, and the BBC.
Open-source analysis also has homes at the University of California,
Berkeley, Law School; Amnesty International; the University of London’s
Forensic Architecture; and Storyful, a news agency bought by News
Corporation in 2013.
Bellingcat journalists have spread the word about their techniques in
seminars attended by journalists and law-enforcement officials. Along
with grants from groups like the Open Society Foundations, founded by
George Soros, the seminars are a significant source of revenue for
Bellingcat, a nonprofit organization.
The melding of open-source journalism with more traditional methods can
be glimpsed in the work of BBC Africa Eye. “It was obvious in 2011 and
2012 that Eliot Higgins was by some margin ahead of established media
organizations in discerning from a distance what was going on in Syria,”
said Daniel Adamson, a BBC producer who helped introduce open-source
reporting to the unit.
Africa Eye’s 2018 documentary short, “Anatomy of a Killing,” a winner of
a Peabody Award, shows how the news unit investigated an atrocity. The
group started with a viral video of soldiers shooting two women, a young
girl and a baby on a dusty rural path. Tipped by an anonymous source — a
favorite tool of the old-school reporter — Africa Eye’s journalists used
photos from the satellite imager DigitalGlobe to connect the silhouette
of a distant mountain range seen in the video with a region of Cameroon.
From there, they nailed down the coordinates to locate the murder site.
They also came up with an estimate of when the crime happened by using
Google Earth photographs and treating the soldiers as walking sundials.
Further, the soldiers’ weaponry indicated that they were part of
Cameroon’s army, and Africa Eye closed in on the shooters’ identities
through an overheard nickname and a soldier’s Facebook profile. The
seven suspects are now awaiting trial.
Open-source journalism has the same vulnerabilities as traditional
journalism. A biased reporter or a reliance on sources with an agenda
can lead to skewed stories. Some journalists and activists hostile to
what they characterize as Bellingcat’s pro-Western narratives have
criticized some of its coverage of the war in Syria.
At issue is an April 7, 2018, attack on Douma, Syria. Bellingcat
reported, based on an analysis of six open-source videos, that it was
“highly likely” that Douma civilians had died because of chemical
weapons. In March, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons reported that there were “reasonable grounds” to say that
chemical weapons had been used in the attack.
Critics of Bellingcat have pointed to an email from an investigator with
the organization, saying that it raised questions about the findings.
WikiLeaks published the email on Nov. 23. In a response, Bellingcat
defended its reporting, saying the final report on Douma from the
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons reflected the
concerns of the investigator whose email was published by WikiLeaks.
Open-source journalism often takes the form of the authors showing their
work, a transparency that tends to make their brand of journalism more
believable. The documentary “Anatomy of a Killing,” for instance, is as
much about how the investigators reported on the roadside shootings as
the incident itself. The effect is like a magician walking you through
each step of a trick.
For champions of open-source journalism, narrative transparency is
crucial to the form’s credibility. It has also proved useful when its
practitioners are attacked by the governments they investigate.
“I’ve seen some very sane people tell me there weren’t chemical attacks
in Syria, in the same way I’ve seen very sane people tell me the Saudis
aren’t bombing civilians in Yemen — they’re just bombing military
targets,” said Rawan Shaif, who until recently worked on a Bellingcat
project tracking Yemen’s civil war. “All you need is that doubt in order
for people not to believe facts.”
For her, open-source journalism is an antidote to spin.
“You can show people how much information you know and how you know it,”
Ms. Shaif said, “and they can make their own decisions.”
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