The foundation of this project is what the agency calls a “global authentication project”: collecting, validating and locating videos and other source material from the battlefield and ensuring that they are high enough to use from what Higgins calls “procedures accountability and justice “. ”- war crimes tribunals. The process involves assembling a chaotic network of volunteers on social media and then training them. The result, Higgins says, is a database of up-to-date video evidence that researchers can later search by date and location to locate, prosecute and possibly convict war criminals. Then there are the research of Bellingcat itself, which pushed it to the forefront after its founding eight years ago. Perhaps most unusual of all was the full revelation, in December 2020, just four months after the incident, of the conspiracy to assassinate Alexei Navalny using the same nerve agent, Novichok, that had developed against Skripal. Searching databases of passenger IDs, passports and telephone records, Bellingcat identified agents of Russia’s FSB, KGB’s successor, who had been queuing up with Navalany for months before smearing his underpants with poison. However, this revelation was only the beginning. In a delicious coda, Navalny himself, as soon as he met, was able to call one of them to the kill team, pretending to be his superior, and hold them accountable for what went wrong. Then, when Vladimir Putin rejected the result of the Bellingcat investigation, the agency was able to make public the recording of the prank call with the FSB officer confessing the whole matter. Higgins gives me a silly guide on how Bellingcat does it. “For any investigation we look at the original digital footprint created by this incident,” he says. In many cases, as with the MH17 BUK launcher, the search team must first verify the exact time and place where the photos were taken. This can be done by comparing background landscape details with images available on Google Maps, say, and finding a match. The time of day can often be determined simply by the angle of the sun’s shadow on vertical objects such as lampposts. For atrocities in Ukraine, such as the bombing of the Mariupol maternity hospital, where time and place are undisputed, the team collects as many photos and videos posted on the Internet by those on stage and then crosses them out with satellite images before and after . to get an estimate of the physical damage and location of damaged cars or buildings. Claims and counterclaims follow soon. In Bukha, for example, Russia initially disputed the timing of the massacre, claiming that its forces had withdrawn before the bodies appeared on the street, but later denied that it had happened at all, saying it was directed. In a simple but painstaking process, Higgins collected videos from social media showing corpses on April 1, before the Russian troops withdrew. He also pointed out that Russian conspiracy theorists had manipulated a film to show that a body had “moved”, claiming that it was in fact a “crisis actor”.
