"Ten years ago, I would consider such a conversation unbearable," says the founder of the BELLINGCAT investigative organization Eliot Higgins. He lives in a lester, but we meet in his spiritual home - the Internet. My screen fills his face, overgrown with a thick brown with a wonder than a beard ("Every time I am going to take it, declare a new locker," he says).
In his youth, Higgins seemed that everyone was following him. He was too nervous and did not decrease to start the conversation, was too shy to go to the pub. Even now, at 42 years old, he hardly selects the words to explain how painful the feeling of his anxiety was "really terrible", "truly tough", "terrible".
Every few months a panic attack happened to him. "I felt dizziness, the heart began to be pounded ... When it becomes an integral part of your life, you do not even realize it as something unusual. I think it braked me very much, "he admits.
Reality was in dangerThe irony is that now Higgins is watching other people - and so that it can make them move even stronger than once he worried himself. For a decade, he and his colleagues apply innovative investigative methods, connecting social media, information from satellites and from secret databases.
This made it possible to achieve stunning results. Among the achievements of Bellingcat is proof that the Syrian authorities used chemical weapons against their citizens. The investigators also exposed employees of the Russian special services, who poisoned Sergey Sriplia and the opposition leader Alexei Navalny. To try to prevent such exposures, Vladimir Putin even changed the law, banning the distribution of personal data of law enforcement officers.
The last decade, which began with the Arab Spring, which did not bring tangible results, and led to the dissemination of Qanon's conspiracy theory in the United States, in many gave rise to despair. But Higgins is an opportunity to look into the dark corners of the Internet allowed himself to find himself. The more he watches the nervous seizures of the West on the screen, the less the alarm is experiencing.
"We are standing at the cliff, for which the age of disinformation; From the informational age to the century of disinformation, "he says quietly, but clearly, he says with perseverance.
We are talking a few days after the crowd of supporters of Donald Trump stormed the Capitol. This event has shown: when people come off from reality, this reality itself is in danger. It also demonstrated how much Higgins is obsessed with facts. He looked through the records until he saw some man's police officer to earth, where he was begged. "It was partially closed with hands and legs of people and almost unnoticed while I did not understand what was happening," explains Higgins.
Bellingcat analyzed posts in Twitter women who killed the police when she tried to break into the hall of the House of Representatives. It turned out that before she supported Barack Obama, and then she was captured by the theories of conspiracies. "We used to watch how people who join ISIL (forbidden in Russia. - VTIMES). A similar process occurs with Trump's supporters. Only they worship not Allah, and the tramp, "explains Higgins.
People's intelligence managementIf John Le Carré removed the cover of secrecy from the work of intelligence services, then Higgins removes it from the very harvest. BELLINGCAT investigations are published on the Internet, everyone can read them and check the information provided. And if Le Carre novels were filled with actual and moral uncertainty, then Higgins publication is less poetic and pessimistic. The premises of the founder of the BELLINGCAT founded in them is that the truth can be identified and confirmed, and the investigation can help avoid the bog, in which politicians are tightened. Navalny called Hristo Groza, one of the BELLINGCAT investigators, "modern Sherlock Holmes".
Higgins calls his non-profit organization "People's Intelligence Management". In the newly published book of Memoirov, he writes: "This is just the beginning." Begin what? Detective online activities? Or something more ominous - for example, chaos, which makes the work of a detective required? Even after the tram's care, powerful autocracy, state disinformation and extremism based on the denial of facts may well continue their existence.
Higgins is one of the good guys of the Internet, a wrestler for the truth in the world of postpartused. Will he be in the minority?
Higgins understood two things that provided Bellingcat success. First, on the Internet you can find the keys to the raystery of even the most secret operations. Secondly, traditional media ignored this potential golden custody.
Journalists appreciated the report from the scene, but to lead it, for example, from Syria was almost impossible. The attitude of the same politicians to online investigation methods was such that, according to Higgins, "with the same success it was possible to carry Abrakadabra in the style of the" Star Path "series. Higgins lived on the Internet. The son of the engineer of the Royal Air Force and Confectioner, he because of his permanent anxiety soon plunged into video games and the first online community.
In the articles that appeared about Higgins, the media patronically represented him as the unemployed father, sitting at home. In fact, he had a job - a system administrator: he just began to work out of the house long before it became cool. He then launched his own blog by financing it at the expense of crowdfunding. "Journalists did not really understand me," says Higgins. They even believed that he was by definition lives in London.
"" I was told that intelligence services often take our work to copy what we do, and to submit as our own to share the results with other countries, which they could not be done with intelligence. " "Geimer prideSince 2011, Higgins began to discuss the events of the Arab Spring on the Internet. Although he was never in Syria and did not speak Arabic, he began to identify such details that eluded themselves from others: which weapon used, who controlled what village. "I was one of the first to understand that you can watch a video, contact Google Earth and find out where it was removed," he says. And at the corner of the shadows, you can accurately determine the time when the photo was made.
Higgins considered video frames of dead Syrian children, trying to find traces of Zarin's applying. Vicarnaya, or replacement, injury, when a person transfers the pain and mountain of people to his own consciousness, is a serious problem in such work, he notes: "But I am quite easy to share these things." It is calm about the Internet Troll - because it has grown on the Internet: "I knew that on the Internet, the crap people treat those whom they do not know."
After in 2014, Malazian Boeing was shot down in the sky over Ukraine, who followed the MH17 flight, Bellingcat analyzed the posts of Russian soldiers in social networks and video of random observers. It helped track the movement of the rocket installation, whose rocket, according to investigators, and was shot down the plane. The negligence of the Russian military fascinates Higgins, who, like any video game player, is proud to leave the opponent in fools.
Sometimes black humor helps. Last year, to determine the members of the group, which poisoned Navalny, Bellingcat bought data from their passports, information about flights and places of telephone work - all this can be found in the black market. Navalny called one of his alleged families and, having issued himself for an assistant high-ranking chief, made him confess his actions.
Does BellingCat manage to know what the Western Department does not know? As an example, Higgins leads a "bike killer" - a man accused of killing the former Chechen field commander Zelimkhan Hangoshvili in Berlin in 2019. "We had a clear feeling that the German special services knew nothing about that [that is, the connections of the accused with Russian distributor] that we could dig "," says Higgins.
I ask what happened to the Russian operatives who tried to poison Sergey Skriply in Salisbury. They were killed for failed surgery? No, judging by the research of BellingCat, "they simply sent them to engage in some real garbage."
Does Higgins are interested in the psychology of Assad or Putin? "I just believe that these are the powerful people who want to keep power," he is responsible everyday, as if these are the rules of video games.
Higgins's wife - Turchanka, they met in the online chat. They have two children - daughter eight years old and son - six. "Today I would not let my children in the Internet," he says. - Half children in the UK have smartphones for 10 years. With the same success, in my opinion, you can give them a cant with a foolishness, because it will make the same task in their heads. " Instead, in the Higgins family playing board games, such as "Castles of the Mad King of Ludwig".
Some classmates daughter "have difficulties because of how much time they spend, playing" in Fortnite and Among US. "I think I will solve her to have a smartphone, only when she is a teenager," says Higgins.
Find a few differencesSomeone can compare Higgins with the founder of Wikileaks by Julian Assange, but he does not like such a comparison. He despises the "cult of personality" of Assange. And the BELLINGCAT structure, which employs investigators living in more than 20 countries, made a similar to a charitable organization. "I can dismiss the Supervisory Board; It is unlikely that this is possible with Assange, "he notes. BellingCat also does not want to be similar to WikiLeaks - such a storage of a variety of information that still needs to be rechecked. On the contrary, she wants to teach others. "To a large extent, there is nothing particularly difficult in our analysis. This is the game "Find a few differences" for adults, "explains Higgins.
In 2016, in the internal chat WikiLeaks, who leaked to the press, Bellingcat was accused of being financed by the UK Ministry of Defense. This is not true. In reality, there were no previous sources of income from the organization. To keep her afloat, Higgins even leaned her own money: "It was constantly some nightmare."
Now Bellingcat is mainly funded by European charitable funds and journalistic organizations.
Previously, people surprised that he could investigate something at all. Now some want to know why he does not investigate everything. Higgins explains: they are attracted to those cases where civilians suffered. With war, such as in Syria, "everything is quite understandable: this is the question of who shoots whom." It was more difficult to investigate the bombing of the United States in Syria, because in the territories controlled by ISIL, "social media are not used to the same extent," as in other regions. It is even more difficult to investigate corruption cobweb in many countries.
There are problems with China - due to the lack of contacts. But Russia is a "special case", because there is a black market of official data: "This government does not know how to store secrets." Putin tried to block access to the data, but "when your politicians are corrupt, [a low rank official] is much easier to say: I will take several hundred rubles here or here and make this little thing."
But what did Higgins succeed in reality? His investigations revealed unlawful actions of the subordinates of Rupert Murdok (illegal shell), Bashar Assad, Vladimir Putin. But the power of these people did not suffer from this.
The name BellingCat is taken from Basni (known from the Middle Ages in different countries), in which the mice are trying to make them not ate them. They come up with putting her a bell on her neck - to Bell The Cat, but when the question arises about who will do it, everyone has excuses. Moral Basni is that when evaluating the plan is not only an idea, but also how it can be implemented. Idiome to Bell The Cat means: try or agree to fulfill an incredibly difficult task, take the initiative in a dangerous case, risk for others.
Was the BellingCat "Wash the Cat bell"? For example, will Russia decide again to apply nerve pollutical substances again? "I would have hoped very much that there is no, but I do not think that the international community has already gone to her hands," says Higgins.
But he draws attention to other results. Four Cameroonian soldiers were sentenced to a prison term for the murder of civilians after the BBC investigation using open sources. The EU coast guard is under pressure after Bellingcat and others suggested that her ships repelled boats with refugees.
Higgins dreams of reinstatement of justice. For example, the results of his work in Syria are used in affairs against war criminals. He takes part in the work of the Technological Advisory Council at the International Criminal Court.
Is it possible to completely block the receipt of disinformation? "Sometimes it seems that [generating her] the forces are so huge and so poorly understood that it is very difficult to start solving this problem," says Higgins. It supports the locking of Trump accounts in social networks, but recognizes that it can be a "excessive reaction", pushing the most radical supporters of Trump to contact online with neo-Nazis.
"We cannot limit people's access to the Internet. They are not my children. But a certain degree of control is necessary. It is impossible to simply agree that it is necessary to create communities around insane conspirological theories - this is normal, "he believes.
Higgins comes the threat to deal with it. Autocrats are tested for hostility. At some point, the anger of dissatisfied can spill out from online into reality, as it happened on January 6 in the Capitol. "I think a lot about it," Higgins recognizes. "I don't think I can keep some other life, different from the one that I live now, although in this work and risks are laid. I do not think I can be happy without making it ... I am very pleased with those who are. "
Translated Mikhail Overchenko