By
Jessica Weiss
To many who saw images from the video
of U.S. journalist James Foley's murder in August, the backdrop looked like a
barren desert landscape. But Eliot Higgins, the British founder of online
journalism site Bellingcat, saw clues waiting to be unlocked and
analyzed.
In late August, Higgins released his
in-depth location analysis of the
video, pinning the location to a point in the hills of Raqqa, an Islamic State
stronghold in north-central Syria. Although there is still no confirmation that
the location is accurate, his process dazzled more than a few admirers on
social media.
“Impressive digital detective work,”
wrote Patrick Meier on Twitter. “Startlingly acute
investigative journalism,” wrote Michael Dwyer.
That Higgins wasn’t previously a
journalist, doesn’t speak Arabic and has no special knowledge or formal
experience with this technology proves the power of open source tools in a
digital age. He makes use of open source, publicly accessible material, such as
online photos, video, open source tools and social media updates to piece
together information and verify details that news organizations might miss.
In 2012, when Higgins began following
the Syrian civil war, he was an unemployed finance and administrative worker
taking care of his child at home, according to a 2013 profile of him in The New Yorker. His Brown Moses blog, named after the Frank Zappa song, began as
an effort to make sense of the vast amount of information being posted online
related to the conflict in Syria.
Initially, it was an eclectic
collection of videos, from explosions to street protests. Then, he began going
deeper, asking questions and sourcing things online and via the crowd when he
couldn’t understand on his own. His audience grew, and before long, Higgins was
being hailed as an expert, by CNN and by major newspapers around the world. The
New Yorker’s eight-page profile described him as “perhaps the foremost expert
on the munitions used in the [Syrian] war.”
According to Australian independent
news site The Conversation, “two overlapping developments
in particular have greatly influenced the growth of open-source intelligence.”
Those are the explosion of social media and the rise of big data, both of which
are clearly expressed in Higgins’ work.
According to some estimates, about 1,200
exabytes of data now exist in the world, and 90 percent of it was created in
just the last two years. Every minute, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.
“This networked society has spawned new
analytical approaches and opportunities,” according to The Conversation. “From
everyday policing to counter-terrorism to civil war, information gleaned from
open sources can provide insights into world events like never before.”
But that doesn’t mean deciphering and
explaining it is easy. And that’s why Higgins’ new venture, Bellingcat, which
launched in July, is dedicated to teaching others how to do what he does.
"By and for investigative journalists," it will unite citizen
investigative journalists to use open source information to report, plus offer tutorials on how best to do it.
“One of the key aims of Bellingcat is
not just to show people what tools and techniques are available for
investigating open source information, but also to engage people with
investigations,” according to a post on the Bellingcat
website that explains how to use the tool Checkdesk.
Bellingcat will also include interviews
with designers of the technology, so people can learn directly from the
developers, according to VICE.
As a citizen journalist, Higgins turned
to Kickstarter for funding for
Bellingcat. In August, Bellingcat surpassed a £47,000 (US$75,700) crowdfunding
goal on Kickstarter, raising about US$82,000, which will cover basic costs.
Jessica Weiss is a Bogotá-based
freelancer.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user _AlanCurran with a Creative
Commons license.
Source: http://ijnet.org/blog
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