Original subtitles

-------HDETG1.xyz------ [ominous music]

This is a BBC news special.

A Malaysian passenger plane with around 300 people on board

has crashed close to the Ukrainian border with Russia.

There are unconfirmed reports that it was shot down.

The Malaysian airliner had been flying normally

without problems and...

An American journalist has been beheaded

by ISIS terrorists.

A video showing the horrific killing

was released on the internet a short while ago,

along with a message to the United States...

Devastation in the rebel-held Sucari neighborhood of Aleppo

on Wednesday.

Activists blame a barrel bombing by government forces.

At least 100 people have been killed

The flight would have been at cruising altitude,

which means it would be at about 32,000 feet.

For someone to mistake that for a hostile aircraft

between Russia and Ukraine would be difficult.

It's difficult to see

how this could just be a mistake.

This is nonsense.

There are no Russian armed forces

anywhere in the east of Ukraine.

A horrific scene in Charlottesville, Virginia.

A white nationalist rally that descended

into deadly violence and chaos.

The image is just coming in.

Unfortunately, the Russian-backed separatists

who control the area

continue to block the investigation.

The separatists are removing evidence

from the crash site

all of which begs the question,

what exactly are they trying to hide?

We have to make sure that the truth is out.

[theme music]

Before any official investigation

into the tragedy of flight MH17 is complete

the website of one citizen journalist claims

to have connected the dots.

Bellingcat is run by Eliot Higgins,

a 36-year-old laid-off office worker.

Among Bellingcat's favorite tools

are YouTube and Google Earth.

Something Higgins used to back his claim

that Russia faked satellite images

to blame the Ukrainian army for the MH17 crash.

When I was younger I was super, super shy.

When I was at University,

I couldn't even leave the house, I was so shy.

Terribly nerdy as it sounds,

I was really into computers and gaming.

I was very withdrawn as well, so I got into computers.

It's what that kind of people do.

I used to play these games a lot and I would like join a group.

Inevitably I would end up the leader of the group,

because I would really get into stuff.

I've always been like that.

I have this kind of obsessive tendency

where if I like something

I'll really get into it.

Growing up, my interests were very counter culture.

So, I was very interested

in the way US foreign policy affected the world.

Of course we have things like the first

and second Iraq war,

and you know, all the mess America was making.

When social media became popular in 2007, 2008,

we had smartphones

and those two technologies combined with apps

that allow you to take photographs

and share it immediately with the entire world.

The fact that you could do that was revolutionary.

-[bell dings] -[indistinct announcement]

This is something I've been working on

for a presentation

it's about the white nationalist's violence.

-Whose streets? -Our streets.

-Whose streets? -Our streets.

-Whose streets? -Our streets.

There was this image taken, showing him attacking that guy.

So we wanted to know who this could be.

We looked for all the photographs and videos

of these white nationalists and we found this guy.

Now, he has certain similarities,

for example he has a very similar shirt on.

So, we looked for more images and photographs

and we found this photograph

which appeared to be the same person.

So we compare him

and the one thing that stands out

is the pattern of moles on his neck

is exactly the same.

What we started doing is looking

at the people who stood around him.

Because what happens

is some of these people turn up in tweets

by this account "Yes, You're Racist,"

where they actually name the individuals in question.

They show they have social media accounts.

What we're able to do is go to these social media accounts

and look through the people they follow.

And we come across this guy here.

If we go to his page,

we can look at the photographs he's got

and again you can start seeing matches.

So you can see the moles on his neck

match the pattern of moles there.

So, you know, he appears to have been committing a crime.

So, what we're trying to do

is see if we can ID the people behind these.

And this kind of work

is becoming more and more interesting

to law enforcement.

I originally was going to come here

and talk to you about a revolution

but with the discussion of the post-truth world,

it feels like a counter revolution now.

And it's been a very peaceful and quiet revolution,

thanks to smartphones, thanks to social media...

and thanks to the vast amount of information

now available online to anyone.

And this revolution has allowed a new field to grow.

I like to call this field

"online open source investigation."

We can use it to influence the powerful,

we can use it to challenge the powerful

and we can bring them to accountability as well.

Now, I started Bellingcat

because I wanted to teach people how to do this.

It used to be that the tools of media production

were in the hands of the media.

And with the rise of the internet,

that is no longer true.

With vlogging starting in 2000

and social media starting in 2004

and YouTube, which I think started in 2005,

now the tools for media production

have been given to the people formerly known as the audience.

Historians will look back,

I think, and recognize that this was the time

almost 20 years after the internet emerged

where the kind of realities

of our networked environment became true.

In human history,

when we've had these moments of significant change

whether it was the printing press,

or radio, or television, we've had similar moments of...

[gasps] Oh, my goodness,

what is it going to mean?

And we're there right now, but we do have to recognize

the seriousness of what this means

because ultimately,

this technology is a reflection of humans.

So, for the last five years we've been terrified

about artificial intelligence and robots.

The horrible truth is,

the thing that might bring us down

is technology that simply reflects

our worst aspects back to each other.

[keyboard clanking]

I'd just been looking at Twitter

and I noticed there was a new ISIS video.

And someone said there's James Foley on it.

This is James Wright Foley,

an American citizen of your country.

I just felt like I needed to do something

so that's why I thought I'd see

if I could find out where this had taken place.

The first thing I noticed

was that it was in this dry and arid area

but in the distance you can actually see

a very green and fertile area.

And if you're familiar with the terrain around Raqqa

which is obviously the stronghold at this point

you could see this valley with this river running through it,

and it's very green

but the foothills around it were very dry and arid.

These are obviously very dusty, hilly areas

but you can see, in the distance,

all these individual trees.

So when you look at Raqqa,

this is exactly what you're seeing.

You're seeing this green valley with these hills.

I basically just went through and followed this line,

looking for similar terrain.

You can see here it's very, very rough indeed.

So I thought it was a likely location.

Then I started looking

at all these little background details,

like these trees and the road

and comparing them to imagery

that was visible from that line of sight.

Once I had a possible location,

I published it to kind of see if I could generate a discussion

around where this could have happened.

Then, several months later, that's why I started Bellingcat.

Bellingcat doesn't have institutional support.

They don't have a big building at The Hague or Brussels,

where they do their work.

They actually publish very detailed analyses

and many of them are volunteers living at home.

They don't have security and so what they do

is really risk a great deal to find out the truth

in very complex situations

that include major global players.

[explosion]

[in Russian]

[truck engine rumbles]

[in English] How I got involved in Bellingcat was that

I had been following the Ukraine conflict

pretty much since the beginning.

And then, when MH17 was shot down, I got curious.

Because passenger planes fly very high.

They fly, or cruise, at altitudes of 10 kilometers.

I hadn't seen weapon systems that could reach that high.

So previously what I'd seen

is these shoulder-launched missiles...

that could only reach a couple of kilometers,

but nothing that could down a passenger airliner.

There were these pictures of all the parts of the aircraft

that were starting to appear on social media.

What I wanted to understand was,

could we actually see any damage on the aircraft parts itself

that could indicate what brought it down?

That's how I got talking to, then, other people.

There was Eliot, there was Aric, then Timmi came along as well.

We sort of naturally started,

I suppose, talking to each other.

Then at some point Eliot

reached out to all of us and said,

"Hey, do you want to actually do something

in a more coordinated fashion?"

That's how we sort of ended up as the core Bellingcat team.

I was at work here in Charlotte at a bank.

My job was to monitor events that were going on

and try to see if there's any danger

or risk to the bankers, employees

or travelers or whatever.

I focused a lot on Ukraine and Russia at work

because I studied Russian literature

in graduate school.

And I did a lot of moderating things to do

with Russia and Ukraine.

And I remember seeing some news

that a plane was shot down over Ukraine.

At first I thought, oh, it's no big deal,

another plane has been shot down.

But soon, obviously, as everyone knows,

we realized it wasn't a Ukrainian plane.

Then I, like everybody else, was wondering what was going on.

And I was looking at the online evidence

around the shoot down.

There were a handful of photographs and videos

that emerged on the day of the shoot down

and then more that would come later on.

When you think about like the Lockerbie bombing,

or the US shoot down of the Iranian plane

you know, all these other disasters,

there's really not much to go on

except for what you see on the news.

But with MH17 it was so different

because there was this huge digital trail.

I remember I was watching social media

and I was watching a few different feeds of news.

I remember I had Rossiya 1,

which is the main Russian state news channel,

and LifeNews.

The LifeNews channel,

I remember, the stream specifically was horrific.

They were showing the bodies, it was awful.

They showed people riffling through.

It was just a horrible, horrible scene.

And, of course you want to know who did this

why did it happen and how can you bring some relief

and, you know, justice to it?

We know the trajectory. We know where it came from.

We know the timing and it was exactly at the time

that this aircraft disappeared from the radar.

We also know from voice identification

that the separatists were bragging

about shooting it down afterwards.

So there's a stacking up of evidence here

What I really wanted to first understand.

What was it shot down with?

Because that then would lead to the "who did it".

A couple of weeks before MH17 was shot down,

there was a report on Voice of Russia

that the rebels in east Ukraine

had taken over this Buk missile base in Donetsk.

Ans when I first thought that, okay, it's conceivable

since Ukraine does also have Buks

and the rebels, if they had access to the Buks,

they could have access to people as well

who could operate those systems.

But it was only then,

after a little while of first learning

that the same missile launcher

had been actually seen in Russia.

That's really when things started clicking together

and the Russian role started becoming apparent.

[light music]

[in German]

[in English] The way citizen journalism investigations

are trusted is different than professional journalism.

In professional journalism,

you have the reputation of the BBC behind you, right?

Uh, and the standards of an institution

are the basis for trust.

In citizen journalism it works differently.

Trust is generated not by the brand name

or the glory of the institution.

It's generated through transparency.

And so, in citizen journalism investigations

what the journalist says is not, "Trust me, I'm with the BBC."

It's, "Don't believe me? Here's the evidence."

[explosion]

Syria's deadly civil war is now even more dangerous

with both the US and Russia launching air strikes,

but supporting different sides.

The core of what I've been doing with Bellingcat,

is human rights activism.

With some of my colleagues, we started a Facebook group

called the Syrian Uprising Information Centre.

In the beginning, 2011,

we were just locating were the peaceful protests

were coming from.

But that turned into pinpointing human rights violations

and that work led, eventually,

working on doing open source analysis with Bellingcat.

So, if we go from the beginning,

you see it's like the first moment of the attack.

You see four rockets going into the market.

We are trying to see if it is a fake video.

Maybe from a different country.

Maybe in Syria, but in a different time.

We have seen this has happened a lot.

[in English] If you remember the director

who filmed a boy that has been killed.

It was just a film that they were doing,

in a different country, even.

But it got a lot of traction when people used it as,

"Look at what's happening in Syria." Right?

But actually it wasn't happening in Syria.

So we really need to make sure

that whatever we're looking at, it's clearly verified.

Uh, it's not just propaganda.

As human beings we are very susceptible to information

that reinforces our world views.

We like to think that people

have a rational relationship to information.

We do not.

We have an emotional relationship to information.

So when we see overt lies or falsehoods

or manipulated video

it's very easy as academics or researchers

or journalists to say,

"Why is this working?"

How can we see foreign governments

put out false information and get away with it?

Because they are successful because humans don't want to do

the necessary checks.

Because if you receive information

that reinforces your world view...

you've got no interest to check it.

[computer beeps]

[explosion]

So, you can see there's four bombs falling

from the sky and then impacting.

Three of them in pretty much the same place

and then the fourth hits a little bit further out.

So there we see the bigger impacts here

and then there's one further down here.

It's hard to say what exactly it is

but I wouldn't exclude either the Syrians

or the Russians from this one.

But in addition to this, it would be really good to see

the actual remnants of the bombs themselves.

Because that then gives you more data

about what exactly the bombs were

and then that can tell you who possibly did the strike.

Veli-Pekka was part of the Finnish military.

Because they are more focused

toward Russia than other nations are,

he has a better understanding of military doctrine,

I suppose you could say.

He has a good analytical eye.

He picks up the ideas about open source investigation

and verification and geolocation very, very quickly.

He had this persistence and obsessiveness

that is kind of needed in an investigator

and the stability that you also need.

[computer beeps]

The work that Hadi and Bellingcat

have been doing, is critical.

They're grabbing, obviously, large quantities of information

much of which can disappear quite quickly from the internet

and preserving it, so that we have it

for future accountability mechanisms.

One of the things that Hadi

and the Syrian archive have been doing

and we've been really trying to support them in that process

is figuring out how do you code,

label and tag all of these videos

so that if, for example, a legal investigator later says,

"We want to investigate this particular crime,

on a particular date and a particular place"

they can pull up that information quickly,

they can explain how they got it

so it's transparent for a court of law

and can then actually send it on

to the investigators in a way that makes sense.

Hadi and I have been working a lot together on ideas

about how open source information

can be archived and actually be used

and stored in a useful way.

Hadi, you know, he's lived this.

This is his home,

these are his friends and family.

He is part of that community of Syrians

who are living abroad, working on this.

So, he really cares about these issues

and cares about doing it right

especially when it comes to the work

we're doing on justice and accountability.

[church bell dings]

Timmi is helping to understand better

what happened in the impact sites.

So what I'm asking Timmi is if he can create

a 3D structure of this location

so then we can go in detail

and see what happened in each building.

[in German]

[chuckles]

[indistinct chatter]

[in English] I've got an update from Timmi and Hadi

about the location of the bombing.

The big challenge for journalists is just,

if you think about the work that Bellingcat is doing

the amount of time that it takes to go through this.

So we have people on their free time in the evenings.

You know, they're spending hours and hours

going through this.

Uh, I see pressure

with many traditional journalist outfits

is that they're getting so tight on resources

and time these days that it's hard for them

to actually spend enough time to go through all of this

and analyze it in the way that the volunteer groups can.

In the case of Syria itself,

there's more hours of the conflict online

than hours of the conflict itself.

It's the most documented conflict in history.

I don't see big news agencies doing any work like this.

This is the market one month before the attack.

There are more than 60 people who were killed.

It's just a market.

I mean, there is no military airbase.

It's not near the frontline.

It was attacked by an air strike.

Why would you attack civilians? I mean, what is the reason?

[engine rumbles]

The delegations stating unfounded allegations

against my country

are depending on amateur bloggers and videos.

Among one of them is a very famous British citizen

called Eliot Higgins

whose online inputs about the situation in Syria

are intensively yet mistakenly adopted

by many media outlets as well as governments.

According to Wikipedia, and I quote.

Eliot Higgins, in 2012, "when he began bloggin

the Syrian situation"

was an unemployed finance and admin worker

who spent his days taking care of his child at home.

Higgins' analysis of Syrian weapons

began as a hobby,

out of his home in his spare time.

Higgins has no background or training in weapons

and is entirely self-taught.

He said, "Before the Arab spring,

I knew no more about weapons than the average Xbox owner.

I had no knowledge beyond what I had learned

from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo."

Never been to Syria, doesn't speak a word of Arabic

and he conducts his profound research

from the comfort of his armchair in his home.

[water sloshes]

Even at school I was really, crushingly shy.

So how did I get over that?

It's being passionate about something

and then doing stuff that is outside

of your comfort zone.

And partly because of my wife telling me to stop

being shy about stuff all the time,

and that helps.

[baby mumbles]

She came to England to study English

and be an au pair,

then we met and we just started dating.

Uh, also, going to Turkey to propose

to someone was quite a,

for me an amazingly bizarrely brave

and insane thing to do.

So that's when I kind of started to change

and then this came along

and then I had to start doing stuff

that really was outside my comfort zone.

[indistinct chatter]

When I first started coming up with the idea

for the website at the start of 2014

I was trying to think of a clever name.

And I basically failed.

I was saying,

"I'll call it the Open Source or Investigation Online",

crap names.

And they were all taken anyway.

Either way, thank God they were,

because I probably would've picked one.

So, I was stuck and I contacted my friend.

He's a playwright, so I thought. He knows words, so I'll ask him.

Quite quickly he said. "What about Belling the Cat?"

A mouse town was recently visited by a cat.

Since then, all of the mice haven't had any peace.

The mice decided to be rid of this cat.

-No cat. -No cat.

I have an idea.

How about putting a bell around the cat's neck?

How about you bell the cat as you seem to be

the one with the great idea?

[mumbles] Me? No, no, no, I can't.

Even the greatest ideas are nothing

when they can't be done.

So, what we're doing at Bellingcat

is we're teaching people how to bell the cat.

That's all you gonna eat.

It's your favorite, isn't it Ella?

Cashew nuts?

Phase 0, in a way, was how the internet used to be

before social media and smartphones.

To share a photograph with someone

you had to upload it up to a site

and put a link in a forum.

If someone read that forum they would see the photograph.

That's kind of when I started getting involved,

when I was doing my blogging.

And that was the period up until 2014

where NGO's and journalists were becoming interested.

In part because of what I was doing.

Now what's happening is policy makers

are getting a lot more interested in this.

Governments, intelligence, military.

Because we're going out there in this period

and challenging the Russian government directly

with evidence that they can't refute.

We're making them look bad, we're challenging

the narrative they're trying to push.

That moved towards the fourth period, in 2017

where we're now thinking about this

for justice and accountability.

So, Phase 5 is when we'll actually be

in court with this kind of thing.

So, this is the photograph of the Buk that shot down MH17.

This is taken about four hours before the shootdown.

When we look at this,

we can see a few things that are pretty obvious.

Like, we have the Buk right here,

in the back of a white Volvo

with a red low-loader trailer behind it.

Also, we have, here, the Jeep.

If we look at other videos of this convoy,

we can find the same vehicles in each one.

So for example, right here,

this is the white Volvo carrying the Buk.

And here you see the same Jeep that we saw in the photograph

along with a video taken two days prior

accompanying a number of Russian

and separatists' tanks

through eastern Ukraine to Donetsk.

This video was taken

on the day of the MH17 shoot down,

five hours before the shoot down.

You can see one of the most important details.

Is on this Buk we can see

one, two, three, four missiles on the Buk

that shot down MH17.

Five hours before the shoot down.

If we look at a video filmed the next morning

around 5:00 or 6:00 in Luhansk this missile was missing.

There's only three missiles.

We know what happened to that missile.

There are many ways to know exactly

when and where this video was taken.

One reason or one way we know,

is that at the end of this video we see fuel prices.

If we look at historical data

of what the fuel prices were on the day

of the MH17 shoot down and compare

they were the exact same prices that we see right here.

So we know exactly when the video was taken.

Also, there is even a satellite image

showing the same vehicle in Makiyivka.

The satellite image is on Google Earth,

anyone can find it.

It was taken at 11:08 a.m. on the day of the shoot down.

With Google Earth if we just go to Makiyivka

this is the gas station, right here.

Where the Buk passed by.

If we go further on,

we can go and view like a time machine.

We can go back to the day

of the MH17 shoot down in Google Earth

and look at the satellite image that was taken on that day.

July 17th, 2014.

We can look here and see this is the same.

These are the vehicles.

Here. If you zoom in here, very closely

It's hard to see

'cause the resolution isn't very good.

But this video was taken

just about 45 seconds

before this satellite image was taken.

It's a cosmic luck, coincidence that this happened.

You see right here, you see the white cabin

of the Volvo truck carrying the Buk.

This is the Buk right here.

The one way we know is the shadow being cast

by the Buk is quite large and it matches exactly

with what a Buk should look like.

If we go through, we can match every single element in here.

Even back at the gas station

the arrangement of the cars at the gas station.

You see here this white car with the door open.

If you go back here, you can see it here as well.

This is the exact same scene that was filmed in this video,

just 45 seconds later.

A website calling itself a resource

for citizen investigative journalists

is to publish its own findings today.

Anastasia Churkina looks at

what this information is based on.

What does it take to shape public opinion

and be a newsmaker over the conflict in Ukraine.

finding answers and solutions

which eluded even the brightest political minds?

Could a cozy couch and a laptop

with internet access to endless social media posts

be enough to paint the full picture?

RT went to find the man behind Bellingcat

for his side of the story.

When a Russia Today

reporter basically tried to hunt me down in my home town

even though he knew

I wasn't interested in being interviewed by him

and I wasn't going to meet him.

They turned that into a whole thing.

I had a week where I had like five different interviews,

one TV crew in my house every day.

It was like I won the lottery.

Must have been for the neighbors.

And I didn't leave,

so they must've wondered if I murdered someone.

So they came every day, one of them was CNN.

And CNN did a whole piece on it, it was a big deal

but they described me as a stay-at-home Mr. Mom.

Sometimes we use the phrase "accidental journalists"

for somebody who happens to be there

when the plane goes down and takes the photograph.

But this is different because it's not accidental.

It's intentional.

And they are an increasingly important category of the public

and people in professions that touch on this work

should just get used to their existence.

[in Dutch]

[drone whirs]

[beeps]

[drone whirs]

[in English] Christiaan is really brilliant.

I hired him because he has

certain language skills and experience

that other people don't.

He's amazingly good at geolocation.

He's like, supernaturally good at it.

If we ever get stuck, he'll find it in five minutes.

It's like, amazing how he does it.

[in Dutch]

[people clamoring]

[in English] I will present in English

because I just know some words.

Um, but welcome everyone here this morning.

And I'd like to talk about a very new way of investigating.

And this is basically investigating

using only digital,

openly available information

and by looking at the visual clues in the photo.

And this has become known as the Bellingcat method.

Here we have the Russian Ministry of Defense.

Their official Twitter account, as you can see, it's verified.

They say, what they show, "Irrefutable evidence

that US actually are covering ISIS combat units."

That they're supporting ISIS.

Let's see where it comes from.

This is a screenshot from a YouTube video,

which is a game simulator, a Gunship simulator.

The Russian Ministry of Defense took a picture,

a screenshot, from a videogame

and they presented it as evidence.

Which is fascinating,

because why would they present a videogame still as evidence?

Every country has a foreign policy.

Every country has reasons to hope or believe

that certain outcomes

will happen in different countries.

If you think globally, some of them are subtle,

some of these are quite clear.

For Russia, it's in Russia's interest

to destabilize Western-Europe.

It's in Russia's interest for NATO

to no longer exist.

There are many reasons why they would enjoy

the European Union to not exist in the way that it does.

It's on Russia's border.

So if you want to make these countries

even more unstable

you're flooding these communities

with disinformation.

[indistinct chatter]

[in Dutch]

[in English] "A car bomb kills at least eight

in the Baghdad market. Police and medics.

A car bomb parked in a shopping street

of a Shi'ite district of Baghdad

killed at least eight people

and wounded more than 30 others on Sunday

police and medical staff said."

[in Dutch]

[in English] "The latest parked car bomb kills ten

in Baghdad neighborhood."

[in Dutch]

[explosion]

[people clamoring]

[in English] I've been a journalist for 50 years

and I have never known the system of journalism

to be in such a perilous state.

There's hardly any money spent on training journalists.

There aren't many journalists with decent jobs these days.

Most of them are working freelance.

It's very difficult to earn a living.

Um, big media organizations

don't spend money on investigative journalism.

They're not sort of properly representing

the communities they serve.

The contribution to democracy of good,

reliable, ethical journalism is diminishing by the day.

Every newspaper that closes,

every radio station that goes down

every newsroom in TV that is further constrained

is making journalism weaker.

There's a very small number of journalists globally

that can do the kind of forensic verification work

on videos and images

which is why it's very effective

to put out something that's false

and it often gets used by mainstream newsrooms

that don't know how to do the checks themselves.

And so, we need independent professional experts

like Bellingcat

who can help audiences navigate this information space.

This is the James Foley execution video being faked.

They've tried quite hard to recreate it.

One thing they've done is they've made sure

they've got wind blowing in.

Do you see how his clothes are moving?

They've tried quite hard to make it look really like

the actual execution video.

They want you to not trust yourself.

In an era of social media, you want to get clicks.

So, having a headline that says,

"You're not going to believe that this beheading isn't true"

will get you many more clicks.

Anybody who is making this is thinking,

"How can I get many people to look at a video

that might undermine trust in anything they see?"

But we do have to acknowledge that many Western countries

have used similar forms of information warfare

in other countries around the world.

So, what we're seeing right now in this focus on Russia

we do have to understand

it gets used by many other countries.

Anybody who is trying to find out

what actually happened

and bring it to the attention of the world,

is doing an important job.

Whether it's their profession or their passion.

And we should appreciate them for what they're doing.

We should also ask questions about

what they're doing so we know whether to trust it.

That's why transparency is the method of trust

for this kind of work.

[all cheer]

At the same time that they're doing their job,

bad actors are doing their job to try to undermine trust

in any kind of journalism, any kind of verification.

There are people in the world

who want all forms of verification to just go away

so they don't have to deal with them.

They want to be able to say anything

and have it believed.

This sleazy guy right over here, from ABC,

he's a sleaze in my book.

The fake media tried to stop us from going to the White House,

but I'm president and they're not.

Right now they're winning.

So we need people fighting against that.

[in Russian]

[in English] We've been targeted

by cyber-attacks from Russia.

We've been targeted by,

you know, various criticism in the media.

People have been sent to track me down

in Leicester by Russia Today.

We had the Russian Foreign Ministry

and the Russian MOD criticize our work and attack us

so there are possible dangers in doing this kind of work.

[in German]

[in English] Over there behind the fence,

that's the former military base were I served from 1998 to 1999.

We actually had the Buk system there.

This is the Buk-M1,

so the missile launcher part of the system.

This is a similar one to the system

we saw now in Ukraine when MH17 was shot down.

Here we have the missile.

This is where the warhead would be.

So this is actually the part that explodes.

This has layers of metal fragments on it

different sized metal fragments that are actually

then the destructive component

that then actually brings down the aircraft.

And so the other parts here,

so there's the guidance part there

that actually guides the missile to the target.

It can maneuvre,

it can actually move in the air if the target is moving.

When the radar is illuminating the target,

then that seeker head

is actually guided to that radar beam.

[whooshes]

[sighs]

First time I'm sitting inside of a Buk,

so that's exciting.

So which one do I push to fire a missile?

[machine whirrs]

Now put yourself in the situation of that crew

that shot down the aircraft.

Based on the information that's out there,

the crew crossed over into Ukraine the previous night.

So, did they get a lot of sleep?

You know, they were travelling to the place.

And sort of that was actually their mental state?

Were they just focused on that they'd get a call

and then they shoot down the first thing

that they pick up on the radar?

-[machine whirrs] -[beeping]

Hard to say. Hard to get inside people's heads.

[whooshes]

We mapped out and found

all the different sightings of this convoy.

It's clear that it left from Kursk to the border.

In Kursk there's only one anti-aircraft brigade,

which is the 53rd anti-aircraft brigade

which made it the most logical answer

for which brigade this Buk belonged to.

Then we went through social media profiles for people

who serve in this military unit in Kursk.

Finding profiles of soldiers is super easy.

You just go to a social media site like Contactia,

which is the Russian Facebook.

There's this filter, you can say,

"only people who list their military service

as this military unit."

You just type in the military unit number

for the 53rd brigade

and say they started service in 2013 or 2014.

Then you have a list of 20, 30, 50 soldiers.

And there you go.

Of those profiles that you go through

a lot of them posted photographs

and videos of being in the convoy

that went from Kursk to the Ukrainian border.

In some of them you can actually see the Buk

that shot down MH17 in the background.

They even posted them standing next to road signs

with the name of the city that they were in.

So you can track them pretty easily,

because, you know, they're 19, 20, 21-year-old kids

who are kind of off on a trip, right?

To the border.

One of the sources of information

is not just from the soldiers themselves

but from the people close to them

who receive information from the soldiers.

Maybe this information is too sensitive,

they feel, to post on their private pages

but, within these trusted communities,

among other wives,

mothers and girlfriends of soldiers

they'll share this information

because they feel like maybe the world isn't watching.

There's lots of these groups.

It's not just like there's one site

but here's one of them,

it's called Mama Soldata, which is "soldier's mother".

And one of these posts that one of the mothers

of one of the soldiers posted was on June 23rd 2014

which was the day that the convoy left from Kursk

on its way to the Ukrainian border.

And she wrote...

Excuse my awful accent, but it means,

"Today I accidentally found out my son didn't tell me,

that our boys weren't sent to the field,

but instead to the Rostov Oblast"

which is on the border, to the border of Ukraine.

So here, she said even though the sons may not be saying

"we're going to the Ukrainian border"

on their Contactia pages,

the mothers, wives and girlfriends, they knew.

They were talking much more openly about this stuff

because it concerned them, obviously, very personally

and they didn't have the same stringent

or expected requirements of secrecy,

like you had in the military.

There aren't going to be any consequences

for them leaking information or whatever.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this press conference

of the Joint Investigation Team, in short, the JIT.

The JIT performs criminal investigation

into the downing of flight MH17

on the 17th of July 2014.

In the JIT, Australia, Belgium, Malaysia,

the Netherlands and Ukraine

work closely together.

Today, we will make a number of specific requests

and we'll give you partial insight

into the progress of the investigation.

We urgently appeal to everyone, anywhere in the world.

Who can give the JIT more information

about the following,

Hello.

[in German]

[in English] So this is a call between two guys,

they're obviously speaking Russian.

And one of them is referred to as Nikolay Fyodorovich.

This other guy with the higher voice

we don't know exactly what his role is with MH17,

but obviously it's something important

if the JIT, Joint Investigation Team

put out a call for witnesses about who these guys were.

So there's a few different ways we can approach it.

Um, we were planning to work with some Russian partners.

Because there's a lot we can do through digital,

open-source research

but a lot of avenues are opened up

when we work with Russian partners

who have access to more information.

We're working with a Russian journalist

who works for The Insider.

He, over a period of weeks,

was phoning up the person in question

saying that he would like to do an interview

for a Russian Ministry of Defense newspaper.

It took him a long time to set this interview up,

and the guy gave him 20 minutes in total.

So we've got a really lengthy session of him talking.

Um, and so that's what we've used

for the analyses.

We have this new theory about the identity

of this one Russian commander

who's codenamed Delfin.

And right now there is audio analyses happening of his voice

to try to match him out

to the audio intercepts that JIT released.

[in Russian]

[in English] The audio lab in Vilnius

is the one we chose

because it's got a very good reputation internationally

plus their familiarity with Russian.

[in Russian]

[clears throat]

[in English] Hello, this is Eliot Higgins.

Hello, this is Vidmadov speaking from Vilnius.

Oh, hi. How are you doing? I'm good, thanks.

So we finished our examination

and our experts came to the conclusion

that in one conversation one speaker

highly probably matches.

Okay.

So it's highly probable that one of them matches.

This is the one that is Delfin?

Probably, yes. Probably, yes.

How sure are you that you have discovered

the identity of Delfin?

We're very certain at this point.

We've done open-source analysis

that pointed us to an individual.

We managed to require a recording of him speaking.

We sent it off to two separate forensic analysis laboratories

who came back and told us it was a match.

But does this prove that Russia was involved?

Involved how?

Well, we can certainly say

that Russia sent the missile launcher

that shot down MH17.

And this is part of a wider effort by Russia

to send military equipment into Ukraine during 2014

to support separatist forces,

something Vladimir Putin has denied repeatedly.

Are you saying this was not a Russian missile?

This was not a Russian army missile?

[in Russian]

[in English] It's in people's interests to argue

that Bellingcat are not trustworthy.

So because of the work they have done

they have been undermined by the Russian government,

but also by others.

And so no surprises there.

If you're trying to discredit somebody

who is pushing out information

that you don't want to be pushed out,

it's in your interest to undermine that as a source.

[beeps]

I'm really interested

in how you apply open-source investigation

to justice and accountability. That's a big, complex topic.

We're looking at one of the biggest

and most significant changes

around justice and accountability

that may have ever occurred.

Because you're talking about a massive amount

of evidence available online.

Um, and lots of questions about how they use it.

So, in the summer of 2017,

the International Criminal Court

published their first arrest warrant

that was based on videos uploaded

to Facebook showing executions.

[in Dutch]

[in Arabic]

[in Dutch]

[gunshots]

[in Arabic]

[in Dutch]

[in English] So one of the reasons

why the Werfalli case is so important historically

in getting legal accountability for these crimes

is that it was one of the first ever arrest warrants

issued by the International Criminal Court

to be based almost solely on information

that was taken from social media.

They of course had other resources

that they were relying upon

but when you read the arrest warrant,

you see that much of it is based on information

from Facebook and Twitter.

So this is sort of a monumental point in time

where we're realizing

that we really need to be grabbing information

from those platforms and preserving it.

Because that information is providing the basis

for legal cases in a way

that quite frankly never has before.

[quirky music]

So what is happening with Werfalli right now?

He doesn't really seem to care about the warrant.

I'm just wondering, after the arrest warrant,

if it doesn't have any direct impact on him

then many others will be doing

the same type of random executions.

I think this is one of the messages

that they wanted to send also

to people like Werfalli.

He's still walking around,

and maybe he will be all the time.

This still does give the message, showing,

okay, this footage can be used in a legal case.

[indistinct chatter]

[in Dutch]

[in English] Werfalli was an interesting case

because he handed himself in to the Libyan authorities.

There were massive protests

by supporters and he was released.

And they posted a video of him on Instagram

having a special release cake.

So that was a bizarre thing to see.

He's currently still wanted by the ICC,

but he's currently not in jail anywhere.

I think there's a good chance

Werfalli could be brought to justice.

I think the video information that we have against him,

is do damning

and it so clearly ties him to the potential crimes

that were alleged have been committed

that it's really hard to turn away

from that video and say,

"Oh, no, he doesn't have any ties

to what's taken place."

Um, so the fact that these videos

are being grabbed,

that they're being preserved

that there are different videos being collected

by the International Criminal Court

from what Eliot and Bellingcat have been grabbing

it creates a much richer environment

for providing the evidence

that will be needed long term.

Now the challenge will be getting him into custody

and actually getting him extradited

so that you can have a trial.

But that's really a political question

and not a technical one.

[bell ringing]

[in Dutch]

[in English] When you know people online

and something happens to them in the real world

and they're suddenly not online

you realize how much of how you reach out to them

is through, you know, directly contacting them online.

You know, sending them a direct message on Twitter

or contacting them on Slack.

Uh, you know, when we phone him up,

there's no answer on his phone.

So we suddenly felt very disconnected from him.

Um, considering the pressure we get

from the Russian government

it's very worrying when someone just disappears.

[in Dutch]

[in English] One of the possibilities that is added

to our list of things that could happen to him

is maybe it has been a State suddenly trying to do something.

And that is kind of worrying.

You just have to look at what happened

in the UK in 2018,

with the Skripal poisoning.

[thunder rumbles]

It is now clear that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were poisoned

with a military-grade nerve agent

of a type developed by Russia.

This is part of a group of nerve agents

known as Novichok.

That's obviously very concerning

when even in the UK things like that are happening.

[beeps]

When you are investigating what powerful people do

whether they are states or companies or billionaires

you are vulnerable in many different ways.

And you could be investigated yourself.

You can be surveilled.

Uh, you can have propaganda campaigns

launched against you.

You can get harassed online.

All of that.

And I think the more important your work is

and the closer it is to power

the closer it gets to figuring out

what power is doing,

the more risk there is.

[in Russian]

[in Dutch]

[in English] Based on these specific features

the JIT was able to retrieve

a type of fingerprint from this Buk-TELAR.

[in Dutch]

[in English] We realize that the investigation

collective Bellingcat

has already concluded the same and published it.

[in Dutch]

[in English] A question for Dutch TV?

-Hi. -Hi.

Gert-Jan Dennekamp from Nieuwsuur.

Um... um...

In fact what we heard today

was what you already investigated

a couple of years back.

Uh, are you happy with this result?

It's nice to see that they agree with us.

If they had presented something completely different,

that would have been a huge problem.

But not only did we have the stuff

that we saw on stage today

but we've had additional material

that further confirms

it's the same missile launcher.

And tomorrow we'll be having our own press conference

about our new report releasing as well.

About something that no one has read about yet,

so that will be big news.

What can we expect tomorrow?

Um, we're not going to say too much at the moment

because it's very sensitive, but it involves more details

about who was responsible

and who was behind what happened with MH17.

-Okay, thank you. -Thank you.

Good luck tomorrow.

[in Dutch]

[in English] I just received a message from Julia,

the daughter of Timmi.

"Unfortunately Timmi cannot talk on the phone at the moment.

He is currently in the hospital.

Should I give him a message from you?"

I answered her, "Thanks, Julia, for the message.

We are very worried.

Can I come to the hospital directly?"

And she wrote back,

"At the moment a visit would not be good.

He is still recovering

from a severe brain inflammation.

He was in a coma for a few days, but he is getting better.

It will take a while, but he will be well soon.

I'm sorry to be the bearer of such bad news."

He's doing well.

I mean, he's lucky and he's doing well.

But it's still very sad news, you know.

[waves crashing]

It's the first time we've ever done

a press conference so everything that is happening here

is the first time I've tried to do anything.

So, yeah, there's a lot of moving parts

that I'm very unfamiliar with,

so yeah, it's stressful.

[indistinct chatter]

Welcome, everyone.

Today, Bellingcat

and The Insider will be releasing details

of a new investigation into the downing of MH17.

One thing that we must make clear is that we cannot, today,

or basically at any time

confirm exactly the role of this person

who goes by the call name Orion.

As published by the Joint Investigation Team

and earlier by the Secret Service of the Ukraine

this person is...

Was, the highest-military ranking officer at the time

in the so-called Luhansk People's Republic.

He represented

the military intelligence of Russia at the time

and he was in direct command and control

of the mercenary, volunteer operations

of military units and militants in eastern Ukraine,

in the Luhansk area of eastern Ukraine.

Oleg Vladimirovich Ivannikov is the full name,

the full legal name that we've identified.

He was born on the 2nd of April 1967

and his nickname is Orion.

[in Dutch]

[in English] Paul Eldering, Telegraaf, Netherlands.

How can you connect

this guy directly to the downing of MH17?

For now, the proof is only circumstantial.

We believe that the JIT has the proof

that they will publish in due course.

At this point our reasons to strongly believe

in the hypothesis he's connected

is based on the fact that two days

before the shooting down

his voice was recorded confirming

that they received the Buk

and that they would start shooting down planes.

That was heard clearly

on a call released on the 18th of July 2014.

From a chain of command perspective,

we do not see a hypothesis in which he's not involved.

Okay, that's everything.

Thank you very much for your time.

We'll be doing one-on-one interviews

in five minutes.

Thank you very much.

[bell dings]

[indistinct chatter]

[crowd applause]

Well, thank you for helping me out.

And yes, well, it's a big surprise, I think.

[giggles]

The 2017 Innovation Award goes to Christiaan Triebert.

[all cheer]

Bellingcat has developed a lot of the talent

that's doing this work now.

And more and more because there's recognition

of the value of Bellingcat's work.

There's more and more people being contacted

who are part of the Bellingcat team saying,

"Do you want to work for this organization or that?"

And they are the best open-source investigators

that I know of. I really want to hire them

but I can't begrudge them if they want to go off

and get a job to pay them a wage rather than volunteering.

It's an online community of people

that are doing this voluntarily

that are looking into stuff

and challenge bigger actors in this world.

I think this is a really great thing

to see developing

and I hope that this will stimulate it as well.

-Thank you so much. -Thank you.

[crowd applause]

It would suck certainly if Christiaan went off

and worked somewhere else.

But I wouldn't begrudge him

because people have to get paid for the work they're doing.

Okay, where do we start? You've mentioned that company.

Yes, so they've agree

to give me 80,000 euros for the first year

and 80,000 for the second year,

and that could possibly go up to a 100,000 in the second year.

In principle, we would be ready to consider longer contributions

to Bellingcat.

For me it's just a matter of making sure

the next six months are covered.

We do not have any flexibility in the funding

of Bellingcat at the moment.

We're literally at the point

where my bank account is dropping to nearly zero.

[in Dutch]

[in English] The two men wanted in the UK

for the Skripal poisoning

insisted they were civilians on holiday, visiting Salisbury.

But today the real identity of one of the men was revealed

by the investigations team at Bellingcat.

He's not, as he claimed, Ruslan Boshirov,

a fitness instructor

but colonel Anatoliy Chepiga,

a highly-decorated

Russian Military Intelligence officer.

The Skripal case that came up recently

was actually not something we really focused on

until the UK released images

of the suspects along with pseudonyms.

We were in a position to get details

of the ID documents from Russia

for those two people.

And we discovered some interesting things,

for examples, their ID numbers were nearly sequential.

There's only a couple of spaces between them.

And we discovered another GRU officer

who'd been arrested in Montenegro

also had a very similar number

that was only about 25 digits different.

So we discovered this little batch of ID numbers

that seemed to be linked to GRU agents.

Once we published that,

we had a big reaction from the media

lots of coverage in Russia,

a reaction from the Russian government

-Are these people you? -Yeah, that's us.

What were you doing there?

There's the famous Salisbury Cathedral.

Famous not only in Europe, but in the whole world.

It's famous for its 123-metre spire.

They claimed there they got there

and the snow was so deep, they had to turn back.

But it's not a long walk to Salisbury Cathedral,

you can see it from the train station.

And when the police released their photographs,

you had them walking through Gatwick Airport.

People claimed that they were going

through the same gate at the same time

that can reveal...

But again, that just turned out to be nonsense.

We found images of those gates

at Gatwick Airport on Google Streetview

and it could prove

that they were walking side by side.

Not in the same place at the same time,

as people tried to claim they were.

But yeah, the reaction has been absolutely massive.

We've yet again revealed the identity

of another GRU officer.

The first thing to say is presumably

they messed up very badly here.

Somebody that is so senior in Russian Intelligence,

that was a very bad day for him, wasn't it?

Today has probably been the worst day of his life.

But, tell me about his record.

You've been through them, you know what he did.

You know how senior he is.

We've identified that he's been decorated

to the highest degree in Russia.

He's got the award of

"Hero of the Russian Federation".

So this is somebody

who did something outstanding in the eyes of Putin.

And that somebody was sent on a mission

to poison an ex-colleague.

[in Russian]

[calm music]

[in German]

-[doorbell dings] -[mumbles]

-[in English] Come on in. -[all laugh]

Come in.

Hello, Hadi.

Good to see you.

[mumbles]

It's a weird thing

because when you're working online with people

you don't get too much

of their real personality coming through.

So it's kind of strange especially

'cause I've worked with these people for so long

in a purely online space.

And then you meet them in person.

So it's kind of a weird...

It's like you really know them,

but at the same time you don't really know them.

One great reason why people join big organization

like the BBC or The New York Times

is the institution has lawyers,

it has professionals

who can help you if you get sued

or who know what are the safe practice is.

And people operating on their own

don't have that, that's one of the risk.

But you could also say from another point of view

that that's exactly why they're heroes,

that's exactly why they're inspiring

because they do this work 'cause they believe in it

and they don't have a lot of protection

but they do it because it's important.

We used to live in an environment

where we have gatekeepers.

So a certain time of night everybody would sit down

and watch television at the same time.

we had number of newspapers or radio outlets

and there were professional journalist

giving you information that have been fact check

and sourced professionally.

So when into that landscape

you have people flooding it with misinformation

and lies and falsehood.

Then what it leads to is people just saying,

"I'm just gonna step away from the process."

So your gonna have people that are not voting,

your gonna have people turning away

from the mainstream media

and you gonna have people

basically connecting with one another

with other people who feel the same way as them.

So, we are not quite there yet,

but it's not gonna take very long for us

to be in that situation.

I bought Bellingcat T-shirt for everyone.

Yey!

It's definitely not because my wife

told me to get rid of them.

[all laugh]

There are no solution, there's no fix,

there's just endless struggle ahead.

And if you believe in democracy if you think it's important

that political democracy survives

that we have consent of the governed,

that we have open societies,

that we have civil liberties for all.

If you think those things are important

we are entering to a period

where they have to be fought for.

[all laugh]

Okay, so, um, first of all,

a toast to Timmi,

it's great to see that he is better

and he is recovering,

so, uh, a toast to Timmi.

-Toast to Timmi. -Yeah.

Toast.

-Cheers. -Cheers.

The investigative website Bellingcat

has identify the second suspect responsible for poisoning

former Russian spy Sergei Skripal.

Bellingcat says his name is Alexander Yevgenyevich Mishkin.

A military doctor with Russia's Military Intelligence

agency to the GRU.

Bellingcat says he was recruited by GRU

during his medical studies.

[closing theme music]