I went to a super interesting event last night at SOAS – Open Source Intelligence in Syria with Eliot Higgins. If you don’t know, Eliot Higgens (aka Brown Moses) is the founder of Bellingcat, a website which which applies the use of open source investigation to a range of topics. Eliot’s work on Syria focuses on the authentication of weapons and planes, including the monitoring of the use of barrel bombs and chemical weapons. Through Bellingcat, he was involved in documenting the most recent chemical attacks in Syria and the geo-tracking of airstrike targets and sources.
Eliot’s presentation was absolutely eye-opening. It is really astounding the amount of open-source information that exists out there, and how you can use it to verify (and disprove) events on the ground. He showed the process he’s used to verify videos and pictures, and how to disprove the propaganda that seems to be coming from Russia who use a similar type of open-source rhetoric, but actually are obfuscating or blatantly lying about their facts.
I highly recommend watching the event if you have time. Click here to access the facebook livestream of the event.
Also, definitely follow Eliot Higgins on Twitter, and check out the Bellingcat website!
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