How British computer geekEliot Higgins uncovered war crimes, exposed poisoning plots, and found himself in Russia's crosshairs
Higgins says that his core group of investigators is actually very small. “We have Russian speakers on staff, and although Arabic speakers are less easy to come by, we can reach out to our online community on a case by case basis to fill in whatever skill we require.”
And if patience sounds boring, it’s accompanied by a certain thrill of the chase. “There definitely is a feeling of a hunt about this, of battling against a false narrative. Sometimes investigations like this take a lot of time, but when you find a document proving your case, for example when we showed that the Syrian government was using chemical weapons, it gives a rush.”
As he put it to the Columbia Journalism Review, Higgins wants “the very idea of open-source information existing to put the fear of G-d into the sort of people who have something to hide, because they’ll know there’s a network of people primed to use it to expose what they’re trying to keep hidden.”
With the US election season well underway and Russian meddling a political football, Eliot Higgins rejects the idea that foreign propaganda could influence a US election to decide outcomes. “We’re investigating Russian influencing in 2020, but while it is an issue, it was Breitbart and Fox News that got President Trump elected. The Russians can only dream of having that level of influence.”
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