Translator: Marta Quirós Alarcón Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
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 counterrevolution 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 new fields to grow,
and 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.
I started Bellingcat two years ago
because I wanted to teach people how to do this.
The word "Bellingcat" comes from an old fable.
It's a fable about a group of mice
who were very frightened of a large and dangerous cat.
So, they got together and they had a meeting,
and they said, "What are we going to do?"
They come up with the idea that the cat should have a bell around its neck,
but they didn't have any plans to actually get it on the cat's neck.
So what we're doing at Bellingcat
is we're teaching people how to "bell the cat."
I'm going to explain to you how this works through a very long case study we did.
We worked on this for over two years.
It's the case of MH17.
On July 17th, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight 17
departed not far from here, heading east.
Several hours later, over Eastern Ukraine, it was shot down.
298 people died.
193 Dutch citizens died on that plane.
Some of you may have known them.
Some of you may have known people affected by the tragedy.
On September 28th, 2016,
the criminal investigation, the Joint Investigation Team,
gave a press conference saying that a missile launcher
had traveled from Russia to Ukraine, shot down MH17, and returned.
But in that two-year period between 2014 and that press conference,
there were rumors, speculations, and attempts to distract from the truth.
But at Bellingcat, we were looking at the evidence
that was being shared online.
There was a vast amount of information being shared online.
Some of it was hidden, some of it was quite easy to find.
I'm going to take you through an example of how we use this information.
This is photograph that was posted online on July 17th, 2014,
after MH17 had been shot down.
What we can see here is a Buk missile launcher
on a truck travelling through a town.
The question was: can we find out exactly where this was taken?
And we can, in fact.
We use something called Geolocation.
With Geolocation, we look at the details in the image,
and we see if there's anything that's available
that can then tell us where this was taken.
In this case, there's a clue in this picture.
There's a name of a shop.
We knew there were only so many shops in the world with the same name.
Fortunately, in this case, not many, and not many in Eastern Ukraine.
We put in the names of the towns it could be in.
We put in the name of the shop.
The first result was actually a Wiki someone had created
with every street of every town in Eastern Ukraine with the shops on them.
We had the name of the street, and the name of the shop.
We put that in, that gave us a court document
where there'd actually been a fight in the shop,
and they gave the full address of the shop.
We searched for that address
and came up with something very interesting.
I'm going to show you a brief video,
and just hold in your mind this yellow shop holding
and also this building with these black and white stripes down the side of it
because, as we were searching, we found this video.
This person has an interesting hobby where he drives around Eastern Ukraine,
filming videos on his dash camera, putting them online.
It just happened he had driven past the same spot in the photograph.
On the left-hand side you can see that black and white striped building.
On the right-hand side, the yellow shop holding.
That confirmed for us the exact location of this shop.
We had a view from a video of the same photograph
that had been taken earlier.
There were other clues in there as well.
We weren't just interested in where it was taken, but when.
How do we know when this was taken?
By the shadows.
The shadows are a sundial that we can use to tell the time this was taken.
This was taken around midday on July 17th, 2014.
Not only that, we found social media posts by people
who'd seen the vehicle travelling through the town
and other additional information.
There are many photographs and videos that were shared online on that day
showing the missile launcher travelling through the town.
By piecing that all together, we were able to recreate
the missile launcher's route on the morning of July 17th,
as it was heading towards the location where it would shoot MH17 down from.
There's obviously two sides to every story.
The Joint Investigation Team happened to agree
with our version of events and our route,
but the Russian government disagreed very strongly.
In fact, on July 21st, 2014, they gave a press conference
where they presented their own evidence of what happened to MH17.
They presented satellite imagery.
So here we have a satellite image supposedly taken on July 14th.
It was showing a Ukrainian military base.
And there was a second image on July 17th.
The Russian Ministry of Defence claimed, a few days after MH17 was shot down,
that this showed that a missile launcher, a Buk missile launcher,
had moved from that base on July 17th.
They didn't say it had shot down MH17, but they strongly implied it was involved.
There's a few things that are interesting about this image,
and we can take a close look at it.
For example, we have this in the top left corner, this area of vegetation,
and there's been a path cut through it.
Because of the amount of information available online,
you can get satellite imagery that's available online.
In fact, you can actually get this satellite image on Google Earth
that's from July 17th, 2014.
The same period as those Russian Ministry of Defense images.
We can look at that vegetation, but where is it?
It's not there.
That first image from the Russian Ministry of Defense was from July 14th, 2014.
Maybe in those three days they demolished all that vegetation,
but there's also imagery from July 2nd and from July 21st
that shows it was never there in the first place.
So how on earth could it be on the imagery from July 14th
that the Russian Ministry of Defense has presented?
There seems to be a problem there.
It seems that the Russian Ministry of Defence
might not be telling the truth about this image.
In fact, there is more evidence.
Here we can see areas of worn away grass, a very distinct pattern in both images.
We go to the July 17th image, and it's not there.
But we can go back even further in time to May 30th,
where we can see the exact same pattern of worn away grass
as we can see in the Russian imagery.
This and other details confirm
the Russian imagery was not from July 14th and July 17th,
but it was from several weeks earlier.
This is really what the revolution is about.
What we've done is we've taken information
that's just floating around online,
freely available to anyone,
and we've been able to use it to challenge the claims of a major government.
Think about this, this is July 21st,
a few days after hundreds of people have been killed,
and the first reaction of the Russian government
is to come out with fake imagery,
to produce fake evidence.
After MH17 was shot down, we had a lot of people who were online,
they were looking for all kinds of information,
just anything they could find.
People were very interested in Buk missile launchers
because it was then claimed a Buk missile launcher shot it down.
They came across videos like this.
Many videos are of Buk missile launcher convoys in Russia.
What was particularly interesting about this video,
and a number of other videos,
were they showed a convoy in late June, 2014,
a few weeks before MH17 was shot down.
We realized one of the missile launchers that was visible in this convoy
was the same missile launcher we also saw in Ukraine.
We examined this missile launcher carefully, using markings, damage,
details that showed it was exactly the same missile launcher in Russia
that then appeared in Ukraine.
The question was then: how can we find where it came from?
Well, we managed to do that process I've showed you before,
where we took every image and we geolocated them.
We could track this convoy back to the base it came from,
the 53rd Air Defense Brigade.
You might not believe it,
but the 53rd Air Defense Brigade has a social media page,
and all the soldiers follow it.
We just went there and looked at the soldiers' profiles
because we wanted to know who they were, what they were doing,
and they were very helpful in that regard.
This is a photograph one soldier posted
of an attendance sheet with the name of each soldier in the unit.
We pop that into Google, and we get their social media pages.
Helpfully, they tag each other in the photographs.
(Laughter)
They also helpfully take photographs of them in the convoy we were tracking.
In this case, there's a guy fast asleep between his two friends
that was caught on a video of the convoy, sleeping on the bus.
When they got to their camp on the Russian border with Ukraine,
they stood by the local town sign and took photographs.
We even have their wives, girlfriends, on Internet forums like this one,
discussing the movements of their sons, their brothers,
telling us exactly what they were doing.
These are all separate bits of information we piece together,
and that allowed us to reconstruct the entire brigade.
We had the commander at the very top, a public figure,
but we could establish the other members.
We've censored these
because we don't want people hunting them down,
but what we have here are the commanders of each missile launcher in that unit
that was in the convoy transporting the missile launcher that shot down MH17.
This is where this revolution gets really interesting
because we were then able to take all this information,
all this information was public,
and we could share it with the Joint Investigation Team.
We sent them a 120-page report summarizing the information
and then the additional information.
And because this is publicly available information,
this is information that they can go and double-check themselves.
They don't have to take our word for it, they can check it themselves.
When we had the press conference on September 28th,
they used a lot of open-source material, the same material we had used,
and they spoke about 100 suspects.
I'm sure at least one of these guys is in that list of suspects.
Who are we? Who are the people I talk about when I say "we" and "us?"
Well, it's ordinary people.
I started doing this five years ago with no experience in the area,
and I taught myself how to do it over time, and people joined me.
When the Joint Investigation Team interviewed me as a witness
to ask about the work we were doing,
I decided it was time to start a special investigation team.
Now I have a team of five full-time members of staff and 15 volunteers,
where we investigate all kinds of different things,
from the conflicts in Ukraine, MH17, chemical weapon attacks in Syria,
Mexican drug gangs, corruption in Ukraine.
All kinds of subjects
because this kind of investigation can be applied everywhere,
and that's part of the revolution.
We're just a tiny part of this.
There's probably 100 people in the world who might be doing this.
Imagine if there was 1000 people.
Imagine if everyone in this room was doing this.
Because of this, because of the work we've done,
we've been targeted by Russia.
Bellingcat has been targeted by the Fancy Bear hackers,
backed by the Russian government, who did the DNC leaks.
We've been targeted by the Russian media,
the Russian government has criticized us directly,
and that's not going to stop us
because there's so many of us who can do this.
We're going to keep going.
It's because of this new power we have because of this revolution.
It's a peaceful power, but it's also the power of truth.
And in what seems like a post-truth society with Donald Trump
and whatever else is happening in the world,
it seems like it's really time that we need to do this together.
I hope you can join us and be part of this.
Thank you.
(Applause)