Financial Times, Jan. 29, 2021
Eliot Higgins: ‘We’re sitting on the precipice of the misinformation age’
The Bellingcat founder on his ‘people’s intelligence agency’, unmasking
Navalny’s poisoners — and why he isn’t another Assange
By Henry Mance
“Ten years ago I would have found a call like this unbearable,” Eliot
Higgins tells me. It’s not the most promising basis for a relaxed lunch.
When Higgins was young, he felt everyone was watching him. He was too
nervous to speak up, too self-conscious to go to the pub. Even now, aged
42, he struggles to stress how extreme his anxiety was: “really
terrible”, “really severe”, “tremendous”.
Every few months, he’d have a panic attack. “I’d feel dizzy and my heart
would start pounding . . . When it’s so much part of your life, you
don’t even realise it’s unusual. I think it held me back a lot.”
The irony is that Higgins now watches other people — in a way that
should make them even more anxious. For a decade, he and his
collaborators have trail-blazed detective techniques that stitch
together social media posts, satellite data and confidential databases.
Their feats are remarkable. They proved that Syria’s regime used
chemical weapons against its citizens. They unmasked the Russian “kill
teams” who poisoned defector Sergei Skripal and opposition leader Alexei
Navalny. Vladimir Putin has changed the law to try to stop similar
embarrassments.
The past decade — from the collapse of the Arab spring to QAnon — led
many people to despair. For Higgins, peering into the dark corners of
the internet allowed him to find himself. The more he tracks the west’s
nervous breakdown on screen, the less anxious he feels. His new
confidence is such that he has to stop himself slipping into interview mode.
“We’re sitting on the precipice of the misinformation age: from the
information age to the misinformation age,” he says, with quiet, precise
urgency.
Higgins lives in Leicester, but we are meeting in his spiritual home:
the internet. He fills my screen with a thick brown-and-grey beard
(“every time I’m about to get it cut, there’s another lockdown announced”).
I’ve been told that often our work is being used by intelligence services
It’s a few days after the storming of the US Capitol. That event proved
that, when people unhinge themselves from reality, reality itself is in
danger. It was a showcase for Higgins’s obsessive fact-finding. He
stared at footage until he spotted a man dragging a police officer to
the ground to be beaten. “It was virtually invisible until you realised
what was happening, because it was partly covered by people’s arms and
legs.”
Bellingcat, his investigative group, analysed Twitter posts by a woman
killed by police as she tried to enter the House chamber. It found she
had backed Barack Obama, before becoming taken by conspiracy theories.
“In the past we were looking at radicalisation of people who joined
Isis. It’s the same kind of process that’s happened with these Trump
supporters. Instead of worshipping Allah, they’re worshipping Trump.”
John le Carré demystified the intelligence services; Higgins has
demystified intelligence gathering itself: his workings are published
online for anyone to check. While le Carré’s novels oozed factual and
moral uncertainty, Higgins’ blog posts are less poetic and less
pessimistic. Their ethos is that truths can be verified, and that
sleuthing can help us to escape our political quagmires. Navalny
described one Bellingcat investigator, Christo Grozev, as “a modern day
Sherlock Holmes”.
Higgins calls his non-profit outfit “an intelligence agency for the
people”. In his new memoir, We Are Bellingcat, he writes, “This is only
the start.” The start of what? Of online detective work? Or of something
more ominous — the chaos that has necessitated the detective work in the
first place? Even in the Biden era, powerful autocracies, state-backed
misinformation and fact-free extremism may continue to thrive.
Higgins is one of the internet’s good guys — a champion of truth in a
post-truth world. Is he destined to be outnumbered?
In 2016, would-be jihadis wanted to show that Isis was present across
Europe. They posted videos of handwritten notes of support in public
places. Higgins asked internet users to identify the locations from
clues in the background. They did, the police swooped, and the Isis
propaganda campaign collapsed.
So I know that Higgins could pin down my location in minutes. I plant my
laptop in front of a blank backdrop, and smugly congratulate myself on
my stealth.
Then, as we wait for our food to be delivered, I hear a voice. My
four-year-old daughter has somehow entered, offering a cupcake. She is
followed shortly afterwards by my cat. If I had really been trying to
hide clues from Higgins, I wouldn’t have lasted long. This is the kind
of oversharing that he thrives on.
“Looking through photos of cats on the internet is a big task,” he
laughs. He does reveal that he recently reunited a family with their
stolen dog, by deciphering a number plate. I open a beer.
Higgins’s success was built on two realisations. First, the internet has
clues to even the most secret operations. Second, established media
organisations were ignoring this potential gold mine.
Journalists prized on-the-ground reporting, which became near-impossible
in Syria. As for policymakers, their grasp of online investigative
techniques was such that “you might as well be talking in Star
Trek-style gobbledegook”.
I wouldn’t let my kids on the internet nowadays. You might as well be
giving them a crack pipe, because you’re going to mess them up just as much
Higgins, in contrast, was an internet native. The son of an RAF engineer
and a pastry chef, he dropped out of further education. He retreated to
video games and early online communities because of his anxiety.
From 2011, he started discussing the Arab spring online. Despite never
having visited Syria and not speaking Arabic, he picked up details
others had missed: which weapons were being used, who had control of
which village. “I was one of the first people who realised that you
could look at videos and Google Earth, and figure out where they were
filmed.” Studying the angle of shadows could tell you the exact time
that photos were taken.
Media coverage depicted Higgins, patronisingly, as an unemployed,
stay-at-home dad. In fact, he had an admin job: he was just working from
home before it was cool. He then ran his own crowd-funded blog.
“[Journalists] couldn’t quite understand me,” he says. It was “grating”,
too, that they assumed he lived in London.
There have been tragic moments. In 2014 Isis murdered James Foley, a US
reporter with whom Higgins had been in contact. Pictures of Foley’s
decapitated body surfaced on Twitter. “I ended up transcribing
everything he was saying in the video, so [Foley’s friends] didn’t have
to watch it,” says Higgins.
He also watched videos of dead Syrian children to see if their pupils
showed signs of sarin exposure. “You have to be very open in looking at
your own mind and how it operates . . . Vicarious trauma is a big issue
in this line of work. But it’s very easy for me to compartmentalise.”
Others felt besieged by internet trolls. Higgins attributes his
resilience to having grown up online: “I knew that people were shits on
the internet to people they don’t like.”
With flight MH17, shot down over Ukraine in 2014, Bellingcat tracked
Instagram posts by Russian soldiers, and bystanders’ videos, to identify
the itinerary of the missile launcher. The sloppiness of Russian forces
clearly engages Higgins, who, like any video gamer, takes pride in
outsmarting them.
Sometimes black humour helps. Last year, to identify the team that
poisoned Navalny with a nerve agent, Bellingcat bought passport details,
flight records and phone locations, all available on the black market.
Navalny himself prank-called one of the failed assassins, and tricked
him into confessing.
Are Bellingcat’s findings new to western spy agencies? Higgins gives the
example of the so-called bicycle assassin — accused of shooting a
Chechen exile in Berlin in 2019. “We really got the strong impression
that the German security services didn’t know any of the stuff [about
the accused’s links to Russian intelligence] that we managed to dig up,”
he says.
“I’ve been told that often our work is being used by intelligence
services, either to copy what we’re doing and disseminate it as their
own work or being shared from one country to another, which they
wouldn’t be allowed to do with intelligence.”
I ask what happened to the Russian operatives who tried to kill Sergei
Skripal in Salisbury. Were they killed for failing? No, Bellingcat’s
work suggests “they just got given really rubbish jobs, quite literally
in Siberia”.
Does Higgins wonder about the psychology of Assad and Putin? “I just
assume these are powerful people who want to maintain power,” he says,
as if these were simply the rules of a video game.
Our food arrives. Higgins laments that many of Leicester’s best
restaurants have shut permanently because of the pandemic. But he has
managed to secure a lahmacun — a Turkish pizza wrap, with mince, tomato
and cheese. “Quite straightforward so it’s tasty.” His wife is Turkish;
they met in an online chatroom, and have a daughter, 8, and a son, 6.
“I wouldn’t let my kids on the internet nowadays. Half the kids in the
UK have smartphones at the age of 10 . . . You might as well be giving
them a crack pipe in my view, because you’re going to mess them up just
as much.”
Some of his daughter’s classmates “have difficulties because of the
amount of time they spend playing” Fortnite and Among Us. “She’ll
probably be a teenager before I let her have a smartphone.” Instead the
family plays board games, such as Castles of Mad King Ludwig.
My sushi box is the size of a large chess set. I’m guessing all 22
pieces aren’t meant for one person, but the umami is as addictive as
TikTok. Higgins becomes distracted by his phone. “We’ve got to pay some
lawyers in Russia for a court case we’re involved with,” he says. “Could
you give me two minutes?”
You could compare Higgins to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, but he
wouldn’t like it. He disdains Assange’s “cult of personality”, and has
worked to underpin Bellingcat’s investigators, who are based in more
than 20 countries, with a charitable structure. “I can get fired by the
supervisory board, which is not really something you could have done
with Assange.” Bellingcat doesn’t want to be a repository that needs
double-checking: it wants to teach others. “A lot of this analysis is
not sophisticated. It’s spot-the-difference for adults.”
In 2016, leaked internal WikiLeaks chats accused Bellingcat (wrongly) of
being funded by the UK defence ministry. In fact, Bellingcat had little
reliable funding. Higgins was having to lend his own money to keep it
afloat: “It was constantly a nightmare.” Now it is funded mainly by
European charities and journalism workshops.
But how impartial is Higgins? As a teenager, he was “very interested in
leftwing stuff that was outside the mainstream — Noam Chomsky, Naomi
Klein, Michael Moore, listening to weird music”. His tweets make clear
he’s anti-Brexit, anti-Trump.
Once people were amazed that he could investigate anything. Now some
want to know why he is not investigating everything.
A lot of this analysis is not sophisticated. It’s spot-the-difference
for adults
“If civilians are being harmed, that’s what makes me focus,” explains
Higgins. Wars, such as Syria’s, are “quite straightforward — it’s who’s
shooting at whom”. It was hard to investigate US bombing in Syria,
because “you don’t have the same level of social media use” in Isis-held
areas, and even harder to investigate the tangled web of corruption in
many countries.
Bellingcat also struggles to investigate China, because of a lack of
contacts. Meanwhile, Russia is “a special case”, because of the black
market in official data. “It’s just a really leaky government.” Putin
has tried to block access, but “when your politicians are corrupt, it’s
a lot easier for [a junior official] to say, I’ll take a few hundred
roubles here or there to do this tiny little thing”.
What has Higgins really achieved? His investigations have exposed abuses
by the footsoldiers of Rupert Murdoch (phone-hacking), Bashar al-Assad
and Putin. But all those men’s power remains intact.
Bellingcat takes its name from a fable where some mice ponder how to
stop a cat from eating them. Has the group managed to bell the cat? For
instance, would Russia use nerve agents again? “I’d really hope not, but
I don’t think the international community has done a lot so far to rap
Russia on the knuckles.”
Higgins points to other results. Four Cameroonian soldiers were jailed
for killing civilians, after a BBC investigation using open-source
techniques. The EU coast guard is under pressure, after Bellingcat and
others suggested it has been complicit in pushing back boats of asylum
seekers.
Higgins dreams of justice: his work on Syria being used in cases against
war criminals, for example. He sits on the technology advisory board to
the International Criminal Court.
What about thwarting misinformation entirely? “Sometimes it feels like
the forces involved are so massive and so misunderstood that it’s very
hard to start addressing.” He supports banning Trump from social media,
but admits it could be an “overcorrection” that leads hardline Trumpists
to connect with neo-Nazis online.
We just can’t accept that building communities around insane conspiracy
theories is OK
I ask if Bellingcat wants to be the sewerage system for the internet. He
replies that they’re just pointing to disgusting sewage “and saying
someone should really do something about that”.
There is a problem. Every tool he uses can be used by dictators. If
Bellingcat can identify Russian secret operatives, surely Beijing can
identify democracy activists?
“I would be really worried if I was an activist [in China] of ever
leaving any digital footprint whatsoever . . . You’d have to just stay
indoors all the time connecting to the world through a VPN, which isn’t
very easy for an activist.”
Bellingcat is the silver lining; the cloud is our total loss of privacy.
Even so, Higgins opposes “cyber-miserabilism”. People will keep
oversharing. “We can’t limit people’s access to the internet. They’re
not my kids. But we do need a certain degree of control. We just can’t
accept that building communities around insane conspiracy theories is OK.”
The line is tricky though. He doesn’t want to censor the Assad
apologists who disagreed with him over Syria: “I can understand why
people are confused about chemical weapons.”
I have eaten all 22 pieces of sushi plus one cupcake, and am wondering
whether my belly may soon be visible on Google Earth. Higgins takes a
swig of water. If this call has been unbearable after all, he hasn’t
hinted. He seems anxiety-free.
Watching TV shows such as BoJack Horseman, which focus on people’s
internal worlds, helps him process his experiences. He has become less
nerdy, and more mindful: “I do a bit of meditation now.”
But he receives death threats. Autocrats bear grudges. One day their
fury, like QAnon supporters’, may not just be online. “I think about
this a lot,” he says. “I don’t think I could live any other way from
what I’m doing now, even though there are risks inherent in that. I
don’t think I could be happy not doing this . . . I’m very happy with
who I am now.”
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