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That is a large scale process of scraping data, validating, geolocating these particular photographs that may appear on twitter or on telegram or on facebook, preserving them in such a way that there is a chain of custody trail because that is what future courts will want to have. many people are doing this sort of gathering evidence and compiling it and preparing briefs but bellingcat has a tradition in testing judicially whether some of this evidence can hold up in court. and in particular we know how to preserve the chain of evidence, and that is what bellingcat is doing somewhat differently. one fascinating example of work you have done, you ve spent a lot of time trying to identify the 30 or more military engineers, i think they are described as, the people who are responsible for the launching of cruise missiles, some of which we know ....
By federal government money. i know you ve stopped taking that money now but would you acknowledge it was a mistake from the very get go to take that us federal money? i would not see that as a mistake. i was not in any executive position at the time, but i still think taking money from any deed to provide training to countries where otherwise the journalists would remain untrained in open source investigations, as long as you have internal rules that but i still think taking money from any deed to provide training to countries where otherwise the journalists would remain untrained in open source investigations, as long as you have internal rules that make you independent from any funder, which bellingcat does have, is not an ethical dilemma at all. you say you re independent. for example, why do you still take money i know you re not the boss of bellingcat but why does bellingcat still take money from the european union, for example? the european union foundations are very transpare ....
Of bellingcat, and then you with bellingcat. bellingcat really first emerged as an investigative force, looking at what was happening in the conflict in syria in the period around 2013, 2014. you focus your attention on russia. why are you with bellingcat and has bellingcat fundamentally shifted its main focus of attention? well, you are right. the founder of bellingcat, eliot. eliot higgins. ..higgins, he did start his blogging platform initially because of his acute interest in the details of open source investigations of the war in yemen and syria but by 2014, when he formalised bellingcat as the bellingcat platform with this particular name, i believe the first project bellingcat looked at as bellingcat was the shooting down of mh i7. ....
The malaysian airliner, over ukraine, in 2014. so in fact there was attention by bellingcat proper to the war in ukraine from the official start of bellingcat. i was blogging independently at the same time, covering the same topics, mostly interested in disinformation and the weaponisation of information because that was part of myjournalism background. and eliot higgins asked me to contribute a couple of articles for bellingcat, which i did, and then i discovered more and more that there was a wide gap in the understanding of what russia s, not only russia s, but in this particular case, russia s security services were doing internationally and only small snippets of this information is made public by intelligence services of the west, but there is much, much more that would be of interest and also in the interest of public safety to be disclosed, so i started digging into that and that resulted in a long sequence of investigations into the clandestine ....
We have been attacked by them. we have published investigations into far right groups operating, for example, in ukraine, the ukrainian government. many people in ukraine are very unhappy with bellingcat for that. so you don t please everybody and that s not. a final thought. as a journalist, ifind fascinating your work and your attempt to provide a different level of information to the general public, and it s all about data and it s all about detective work on an electronic level. but, it seems in recent months you ve coloured a lot of your analysis with opinion. for example, just recently you opined that the bomb attack which killed vladlen tatarsky in st petersburg was, you said, aimed at a legitimate target . if you re seeking the impartiality that comes with data driven analysis, why are you indulging in so much opinion? i think i ve being misquoted here because that was an analytical opinion. ....