and burn in south africa, people with disabilities more likely to lose their jobs independent, make black lives matter. shine a spotlight on racially motivated police violence, same sex marriage is being legalized in more and more country discrimination, inequality or part of everyday life. for many, we ask why? because life is diversity. make up your own mind. d. w. need for mines. if you really want to know about war, who's murdering and torturing, who's giving the orders and which weapons are being used? much of it is out there on the internet. and eliot higgins british founder of the group belling cat, has been mining that raw data and incriminating the brutal and powerful in ukraine . his investigators are pouring over evidence of russian war crimes. but he's not

averse to looking at western actions elsewhere. we have written about, you know, us air strikes in syria, that's kill civilians with written, bath canister and, and other topics where the u. s. and of the western states are involved. it's just rushes up to a lot really bad stuff. higgins doesn't flinch from naming names, but he fights on an information battlefield. where facts, however detailed, are routinely contested and dismissed as fake news is truth already a d value currency. ah, elliot higgins, welcome to conflict zone. thanks. have me on naming kilo's going after war criminals. you've poked some extremely powerful bears in painful places. do you worry about what kind of danger they might post to you? why something is always the constant concern both to myself and belling has an organization really since 2015 on which we've been talked in various ways. first,

starting with this information campaigns from the russian media, then cyber attacks have really been a constant feature of our lives really at belling cats. and of course now as we're looking more, more into the behavior of the russian intelligence services, this increasing security issues that we have to be concerned about. in july, the russian prosecutor general designated you as an undesirable organization, presenting what they called a threat to russia is constitutional order and security. did you treat that as a warning you suddenly got under the skin? or do you see that as a badge of honor? and really both, the real concern is that we continue to be kind of escalated from really just a trouble maker in the eyes of the russian federation to the survey stakes is where, where he actually does next. is a terrorist organization because that has a huge impact on, not just us, but also those people who woke up is,

and supporters. so, you know, they're really happy in an escalation over the years from russia starting with, you know, just just information all the way. now it's being declared undesirable. you wrote in your book the whilst you can do little to stop and attack our opponents. you said can do nothing to stop what we're becoming. what are you becoming? well, i mean, we're growing in a whole range of different ways. we're doing an increasing amount of work on justice and accountability, really examining how the console investigation can be used in legal processes. and that's something we've been very successful with at the moment, especially with the conflicts and ukraine. i want to come on through ukraine a little later if i may, but the information world as such, has become a pretty nasty place, not least in the court, hasn't it? one of putin closest allies of gainey, pre gordon, sued you for defamation of a claims that he was the boss of the mercenary group wagner. but the lawsuit was

dropped. you though, went off to his british lawyers and filed a complaint against them with regulators in the u. k. and said what they done had been possibly an abuse of process. why? well, and you have, we have lots of issues with slap cases. so flap is strategic lawsuit against public participation effectively. yeah, so this was a very clear case of that. i mean, we now know that he's admitted he was behind baltimore, long like he pulled his mask off of his face behind it all the time that we really knew that and is effectively admitted that the legal cases are to attack his critics. all the press and muzzle of the press. this was the yeah. and was actually reporting in the set based of emails that were hats that belong to russian boys where they were communications back and forth between the boys in russia, avenue k ad there. it was very clear that the reason he went after me was because i

was cited in the paperwork relating to sanctions against them. so it's a reaction to that trans where attackers undermine our work, m. rudy undermined the sanctions against him. so how important was it to win this battle? well, i mean, there was, i went away one by default because his boys pulled out the case and then he didn't really respond correctly to the court. have you actually got his act together? it could've cost us hundreds of thousands of pounds and you know, bending has no massive organizations that kind of budget. and i was very lucky that funding count was paying my legal bills because you're often going have to balance . he went to me personally basic this and tweets i put out linking to articles that he said had defamatory content in it. keep in mind he had to get sanctions release relief in the u. k. to be able to pay lawyers to sue me for saying the thing that he was sanctioned for. so i found myself in this very bizarre situation where

effectively the treasury was giving him permission to sue me for the thing he was sanctioned for. so i, it was a very difficult situation for me. i just talk about ukraine, if we may, you've, you've had an office in the hague for some time, and you assist the international criminal court in shining whatever lights you can on war crimes. and those who commit them how that work going in ukraine. well, if you crane, we're currently using a process we've developed recently examining saudi strikes and yemen to investigate conflicts, incidents using open source evidence. i, when i started doing this work and i found that by the can see 1014, i thought of the team of people would do that, that they figure out the processes. but what we've actually found is we've actually been leading those processes. so we've been working, been national lawyers and every organizations to develop this really robust processor investigation. and the fact that this means we can create case falls that we can pass on various bodies. for example, an icpc or something like that. i'd like to talk about

a particular case in april. you look to reports of massive human rights violations in the town of butcher, near t f. when it was under russian occupation, the russian said your claims were false. they always say that, but how far were you able to challenge their rebuttals? well, i mean, really, russian disinformation around incidents like has really been quite prophetic. i mean, only last week the russian social media accounts of the various embassies were sharing a video about various denials that were making. and one of those denials was effectively based off the kind of random french guy who made these very kind of exaggerated claims claiming he was that. and he watched the adults battalion place in buildings on the ground. just boss of a journalist. we're watching it happen, which is absolute nonsense. we have drone imagery, satellite imagery, and other sources from before you creating forces and from the town that shows those same bodies in place. the weeks before they arrived, we now have of course,

the work of many organizations you've been on the ground talking to witnesses being able to verify why those bodies were there in the 1st place, you know, execution by russian forces. you know, even one person who was part of a group of men who led away all the shots and he played dads and he was the only survivor that also very crucial witness this cctv petition to the men being that way. and then photograph of the corpses of the men where they were shot. so there really is a huge wealth of evidence for me. what's being really interesting is with the conflict in syria, which is something i felt for a very long time. there was a constant frustration that no matter how well good an investigation did, no matter the evidence. there really wasn't any chance for accountability because obviously the syrian government wasn't gonna look into it some more crimes. but with you, craig, a very different situation because you have the government who wants to investigate the war crimes happening in its own country. and you also have a big global movement, the coalition of organisation supporting that kind of work. so i think in all the

recent more than conflicts, we're looking for accountability for the source of crimes. ukraine really is the best hope of that. and that there isn't any accountability. we really have to look at how asked systems for accountability work because it really is the best possible circumstances for that to happen. on the subject of accountability. to what extent has it been possible to match individual atrocities, to people who carried them out it's, it's difficult work, but fortunately because russian operations research is very, very poor, they use open communication lines. they hacked into their communications. you don't have to hack into them. i mean, they use open radio networks that very are the only conflict. for example, you could go to a website where people are set to live streams of russian radio communications. and you could hear them talking back and forth. you also have the fact that the ukrainian government and the intelligence services and ukraine are mass recording

every possible intercepted call that they can find and see a lot of these calls being published. we have russian soldiers talk to the family. it's home about the situation. so the really, i think they such a huge amounts of evidence that is not an issue of the lack of evidence. it's an issue of being able to piece together cases and prosecutions from the wealth of evidence that exists at the moment. in august, you reported on your efforts to track the killers who mutilated and executed a ukrainian prisoner. you started with 3 horrifying videos on a russian telegram channel, and you ended up with the actual phone number of a suspect. who spoke to you, knowing that you were journalists, but he denied the key accusations. do you think you got the right person here? i think so. yeah, i, when you're doing this kind of work, there are alternative scenarios. you can explore this like, okay, what if this is, you know, if you want,

it appears to be what circumstances could that really come around? and given the information that we had, we knew where they were, we have the same person or another video at the same location. we could see he was wearing the same clothes, the vehicles in the videos that were visible in the years that he feature then it's really hard to imagine any of the scenario literally involves someone else dressing up in all his clothes, where he's saying and jewelry and other details and pretending to be him for the purpose of making this video and also having the collaboration of a rushing to do that. so often with this work you're looking at really the percentage property of something being true. and it becomes vanishingly small at some point, that it could be any other scenario from the bonds that we've explored. you talk about his clothes, you talk about the bracelet that he was wearing the hat he was wearing even down to the skin tones. this is a phenomenal amount of detail, isn't it?

how many hundreds, maybe thousands of eyes went into this. and it wasn't that complex. i mean, the help that we had a very small amount of kind of material to examine. the really tricky part was trying to find a reference material for the site that they were really, you have is very blurry, low quality video. and what we're trying to establish is exactly where this video was filmed. but fortunately, thanks for the kind of group acid that we had pouring through this content, we have to find very small details in the videos. that thing to be matched. over footage that one of the key pieces which each was a youtube video, some people writing, i think if it was dirt bikes for the same area, filming, if they went to go pro cameras, divided lots of really useful footage from the ground where we were able to match very small details to what was in the video shown to me today. she happening. where did the motivation come for you to to do this kind of work. you had a clerical job in the city of last day. you played a lot of computer games. how did you get the motivation that led to the start of

belen cat and to try to hold criminals responsible and accountable for the crimes they commit? how did you get to their is quite gradual. i, when i started doing this, i was really just, you know, so new, spending a lot of time on the internet forums. i had an interest in politics and what was happening with the spring. and i was very much kind of part of online culture where you can, of all the people names and about this not. and i found it a bit frustrating that you had coverage of libya, weight have the mainstream newspapers. right. and what was happening based off their reporters. but you then had this wealth of information that came from sources on the ground people filming stuff, sharing on social media and other platforms. and it was largely being ignored. and really the only people who were taking it seriously were conspiracy ferris to jesus as evidence to support whichever very they have about, you know, the cia being involved to be so that by realize there was somebody you can actually do the actually gave them much deeper understanding and the more granular

understanding of the conflict. but it became increasingly clear that i was finding stuff that no one else was finding. and i think it really came to a head in 2000 and because they weren't looking that you found it. i think part of it was that they didn't know how to verify the content on social media that had been some scandals in the past. like in 2012, there was a blocker called gabriel in damascus. he was widely cited in low west media. he turned out to be a white guy in america, just pretending to be that person. and i think a lot people found that very embarrassing and it made it hardest trust social media . but i developed processes for verification of things like the location, something was filmed, and really over the years i built kind of more more methodology is drawing the experience of people into well to really have a, almost a complete suite of investigative methodologies that could produce evidence of a high standard and verifiable standards as well. and i think this really changed dramatically when we started investigating will happen to make 17 in eastern

ukraine the malaysian at atlanta that was shot into us. right. because bank was launched just before i make sure that he was shot down. and at that time banding camp with me just 3 days before was it is 3 days before. yeah, nice south of on several conspiracy fairies about you know, why we're suddenly lost and so interested in it. but so we're looking at a conspiracy theories. do you have any kind of relationship with western security services? this is some of the things that said about you, there's many people who believe we are thought to the cia and my 5 i, 6, everyone on a regular basis were funded by them. and even the russians have made that is ation and i get the feeling they genuinely believe not this point. but that's not true. we take a lot of steps to be transparent in our sources in our evidence. we are trans, panama bonding. we charities away independently all the states, so we try to be as transparent as possible, but always going to have people who, you know, believe in conspiracy theory, that's just the nature of the internet. in several investigations,

you and your partners have identified a number of individual assassins employed by the russian states. you've tracked their movements, their phone calls, their homes, that car registrations are internal documents. even the numbers on the tickets say to say, isn't it? none of these people likely to face trial for what they've done. so what's the best you can hope for? we talked earlier about accountability, you want to put them as individuals out of business, deter other people from doing the same kind of things. that sort of thing. well, who certainly already seen the reporting has made it difficult for certain rough and spice to operate. there was one case we are looking into publish recently about a woman called maria della, who was a socialite in naples. he had a fashion shop, she kind of went to lots of parties, and she was part of a club, the local nato's native bass ram, the lions club. and it turned out she was actually

a russian spy. because what we discovered is russians had been using sequential passport numbers for their fake identity documents for their spies. and she was in one of those sequences of numbers and without pretty sloppy on there. but on, on that part wasn't it. they waited for a long time, so why would they change the way they operate? and we only found the found, especially because russia is cropped from top to bottom. a lot of the work we've done exposing spies is based off using data that we acquire from the data markets in russia and russia. everyone is basically every level of government is on the take in some way or another, and a lot of data. so public on public markets is supposed to be illegal, but nobody cares because you never get cool and you can make, you know, weeks wage and one transaction. so we're buying some like phone records, flight recalls ticket, passport documents, really great information. and the face rushes effectively, a police state, so they collect a huge amount of information on my assistance,

even their own spies. so we get phone records out as to establish not only who they are calling, but thanks for the connection to cell phone towers. their movements and we've done this with this cripple case, the bonding poison, the and many other cases. this is infected, a huge humiliation in a way on the russian state. hasn't it? because you're identifying the people they use to assassinate their political opponents. do you have any idea how this went down with russia, security services? how they reacted to your revelations with which han saw stockings? how, how did they react? well, for the actual people identify, i mean, in many cases they kind of being part of the desktops. now, you know, they can't operate in the field anymore. so you know, it's not just about the spice we publish about, but also the ones who associates with them. they don't know what we know about their spite at the moment. they also, i think, are pretty convinced that we're probably intelligent services because in russia, if an organization like banding existed, looking at the west,

it would definitely be involved the intelligence services. we had the head of the se, offer example, the russian domestic intelligence service, doing an interview where he went out of his way to benny, kept being part of the intelligence services. so they definitely know who we are. i'm sure they're actually convinced that we're working for the housing services. but so far they've not really have much of an effective counter to what we're doing because a lot of our work on identifying the spies is based on the fact that the entire russian system is corrupt. and that will to access data that really isn't possible to access and countries. we've talked a bit about what you are prepared to do. you buy material on the, i suppose you could call it the and internet black market. this is the dock web, isn't it? you do online investigations, is anyone you won't investigate? i mean, for instance, british or american troops that been accusations of war crimes and i've got to stand, for instance, would you investigate those?

yeah, absolutely. i mean, we are more interesting issues around accountability, so we wouldn't be looking into celebrities and what they're up to because that's really, you know, just happily nonsense really. but if there's a war crime, some violation, then that's something we look into. and while i think we do have a reputation for really focusing a lot of russia, we have written about us as strikes and syria that killed civilians. we've written back ganna, sand and other topics where the u. s. and of a western states are involved. it's just rushes up to a lot of really bad stuff. so it gives us a lot more to write about. plus, they're very bad information security. so it really opens up a lot of opportunities for investigation in russia, looking ahead you've, you've spoken out against what you call sy, but miserable ism, this tendency to dismiss the internet as a wrecking ball, destroying journalism and politics. and you put it this way, you said the marvels of the internet can still have an impact for the better. but

those marvels being steadily eroded, don't they? this year, freedom house war, the governments were what they called breaking apart the global internet to create more controllable online spaces, global internet freedom. according to freedom houses declined for the 12 consecutive year. this must make the environment in which you operate much more difficult, doesn't on the innocence doesn't. because at the same time, we are actually having more communities coming together who are pushing against that in different ways. if you look at the current conflict in ukraine, for example, from the very early days of the conflict, even before the concert began, had online communities who came together and refracted gathering and processing information is very ad hoc way. so for example, privacy invasion, you had a lot of people who were looking at russian tick tock, accounts, who were filming convoys just because it was an interesting thing that was happening in their lives. but by piecing all the information together, it was very clear that the true build up on the board was not the training excise

the russians claims, but was in fact, previous to the invasion. you then had just property invasion. this information being put out by people evans, and the people's republic that was almost instantaneously been debunked. as soon as it was being published by online communities who would come together. after that, you had no organizations who are working on legal accountability. activism on human rights issues really rapidly coming together and really enabled by the internet and partly by open source evidence being available in a something that anyone could examine. and i think really what we've seen over the past 8 years or so for the existence of banning cat is the groundwork being put in to build the she sees and build these networks. and also help people understand the value of open source evidence when it comes to investigating conflicts. and i think ukraine is really the 1st time i've seen, meet your organizations, n g o, a counselors, you organizations, and all my communities really seen the value of consult investigation. and i think

at this point, if you want using open source evidence to understand what's happening in ukraine, then you don't really understand you're already doing the most that you can understand. the conflict isn't the biggest problem for people like you who deal in evidence and proof that facts too often negated by beliefs. you take donald trump's claim, for instance, joe biden stole his election. not a single fact to prove that, but tens of millions of americans believe that facts of the kind that you offer minute li research with exact names, dates locations attached. that would be valued current fiance, if people don't accept them, it depends how you want to use that evidence. one of the reason why we're focusing on justice and accountability is because, you know, it's one sense. a course of law is the best place you can present this evidence, especially when the other side is preventing this information and kind of alternative facts. but on the other side, you have this kind of community is growing up and developing on line who are kind

of, flea goes in this information. it's not because the people join those communities want this information. they see themselves truth seekers against the mainstream orthodoxy. and often a big motivating factor for those people to find those communities is a distrust in traditional sources of a 40 b. they governments or be a medical profession. alls in the sense of covert and often that comes from a sense of betrayal. now if you look at, for example, the kind of accounts of actual community that's formed around temper weapon use and syria, for example, where they think all the chemical weapon, the tax effects and the west is just trying to find an excuse to invite by syria, a lot of them psych, the invasion of iraq in 2003 is a kind of key moment in their understanding of how the world works. i think in a sense, you have this kind of traumatic mall injury happening, where they're so offended morally by what's happened, that they see the entire world through that lens. and that means the us in the west always has to be the bad guy. and whoever opposes them has to be the good guy. and

you see this pattern repeated time and time again and whole range of different fields and subjects. you know, if you look at corona virus and conspiracy fear phase around that. again, this is deep rooted distrust and government programs, or it might be a distrust and medical professionals. and that's because often they usually, you know, the individuals have had some mol, injury, or trauma. because of that, i think what the internet allows us to do is find like minded people, you effectively kind of reinforce that trauma mold injury and create media ecosystems, where you can feel that you are actually a true seeker, you possibly community that's happening in impact, but really, you'll be giving a false sense of empowerment and we, what we're trying to do with banning can show people actually can have a positive impact. even if you do feel that, you know, the government isn't telling you the truth. there's a way to find that truth, and it's far more effective than just finding people who will just kind of tell you what you want to believe and just think you are powerful because you're upsetting

other people on the internet. all right, it's we could have gone on much longer. thanks very much for being on conflict. so thank you for your time. thank you. ah, ah, with

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told me about hackers and paralyzing the tire societies. computers that outs where you and governments that go crazy for your data. we explain how these technologies work, how they can go, what was in for. and that's how they can also go terribly. watch it now on youtube. ah, this is dw news, and these are our top stories. the ukrainian military says it cannot confirm with a russian forces or retreating from the southern city of her son. moscow announced the pull back on wednesday if ukrainian force has regained control.