Jim Frederick
Host
Syria's Distant Witness
Jun 3, 20167 visitors
Eliot Higgins
Cohost
Stage· 46 messages
Jun 3, 2016
Jim Frederick · 1:17 AM
You are the man behind Brown Moses, a blog that has become the go-source for munitions information in the Syrian War. For people who don't know all about it, can you just give us in broad outlines how this project started?
Eliot Higgins · 1:18 AM
Back in March 2012 I started the blog as a hobby to write about things I found interesting, which at the time was the UK phone hacking scandal and the conflict in Syria.
Eliot Higgins · 1:24 AM
I thought there was a lot of information being posted online on various social media sites (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc) that was being completely ignored by the mainstream media, so I wanted to take a look at that.
Eliot Higgins · 1:24 AM
To see if there was anything worth writing about.
Jim Frederick · 1:25 AM
And now, you have become the person that the media, intelligence services and private contractors go to to make sense of who has what weapons, where they come from and when they started using them. How did you develop that level of expertise so quick
Eliot Higgins · 1:25 AM
Early on I was just posting videos that were interesting, but without any real context. Eventually I asked myself the question of what arms the Syrian opposition were using.
Eliot Higgins · 1:25 AM
I went back through all those random videos, and just wrote about what I saw. If I didn't know what something was I researched it online.
Eliot Higgins · 1:26 AM
Then when the Houla Massacre occurred I realised that the people in Houla were posting videos from 4 local channels.
Eliot Higgins · 1:26 AM
So I started a collection of YouTube channels, and started checking them on a daily basis.
Eliot Higgins · 1:27 AM
And from that I began to see more and more interesting and new things that were otherwise being overlooked. For example, the first UXO evidence of cluster bombs.n
Eliot Higgins · 1:27 AM
At the same time I was getting emails from various specialists and building up a network of contacts I could talk to whenever I need a bit of help.n
Eliot Higgins · 1:27 AM
I also developed various skills to authenticate videos, such as geolocation.n
Jim Frederick · 1:27 AM
One question I've long had: Last research I did about you, it said you monitor 300 video channels. Must be more now. But how do you do that? Do you automate in some way? You can't watch every minute of footage personally, can you?
Eliot Higgins · 1:27 AM
At this point I have about 700 channels I've subscribed to on YouTube that I check as the videos are coming in.
Eliot Higgins · 1:28 AM
It's usually pretty easy to spot videos that are going to be interesting from the Google Translated title and preview image.
Eliot Higgins · 1:28 AM
So that cuts down a lot of searching time.
Eliot Higgins · 1:28 AM
After doing this for 18 months I have a pretty good idea of what's new and interesting
Jim Frederick · 1:29 AM
Why do you think you have been able to step into this breach? Isn't this what the media and intel operations are supposed to do? Why are they not doing it. (Well, covert intel might and not telling anyone) but the BBC and CNN have thousands of people
Jim Frederick · 1:29 AM
And you are one man, and you seem to have beaten them at something they think they do
Eliot Higgins · 1:30 AM
I get to speak to a lot of journalists, producers, activists, NGOs, etc, and they are all faced with the same two major problems, one is they don't know how to process these videos, ie verification, putting them into context, etc.
Eliot Higgins · 1:30 AM
The second issue is there's just so many of them, we're talking about around 100-300 new videos a day.
Eliot Higgins · 1:30 AM
I've been told by organisations archiving these videos there's between 250,000 and 500,000 videos from Syria that have been posted online.
Eliot Higgins · 1:31 AM
And no organisation I'm aware of has done anything to turn them into usable information, it's just a mass of unsorted videos.
Eliot Higgins · 1:32 AM
So a lot of organisations are looking into ways to make dealing with those issues a lot more straight forward in the future.
Jim Frederick · 1:32 AM
Let's talk a little about a related matter: Acceptance in the communities you have waded into. Do you find your open source, collaborative nature jives with media, intel and private contractors who are trying to get the same info, or is there competition
Eliot Higgins · 1:33 AM
I've met people from all sorts of organisations, pretty much all the ones you've just mentioned, and they appreciate that this is kind of a new area.
Eliot Higgins · 1:33 AM
Private and government intelligence services have been using open source information for years, but I think the volume coming from Syria has been overwhelming
Eliot Higgins · 1:33 AM
And it's likely that Syria won't be the only conflict that produces this amount of information, so there's a great deal of interest in how to process it.
Eliot Higgins · 1:33 AM
So there's a lot of talk about online collaborative systems to deal with it.
Jim Frederick · 1:34 AM
There's so much I want to get to, but let's bring it back to Syria for at least one question: What's your current assessment on the momentum of things. What trends have you noticed, strengthenings or weakenings? Any assess of things might turn out?
Eliot Higgins · 1:34 AM
I think that the Syrian government forces have really gotten their act together in the past year, but there's still a lot of war left to be fought. Personally I think this could drag on for years.
Eliot Higgins · 1:34 AM
A lot of journalists and analysts I've spoken to agree.
Eliot Higgins · 1:35 AM
I don't think the peace process is going anywhere with groups like ISIS involved either.
Jim Frederick · 1:35 AM
Thanks for that.
Jim Frederick · 1:36 AM
What about the psychological impact of working on a war, day in day out, even from a remove. Do you think that has any effect on your well-being?
Eliot Higgins · 1:36 AM
I speak to a lot of people who work with the sort of graphic videos I see on a daily basis, and there's certain different kinds of people with different ways of coping (or not) with this stuff.
Eliot Higgins · 1:36 AM
For me, I think I'm very good at compartmentalising what I see, so it doesn't effect me so much
Eliot Higgins · 1:36 AM
It's not like I'm in a middle of a warzone though, I can take a break whenever I want, journalists on the ground don't get that option.
Jim Frederick · 1:37 AM
Other than the fact that you may have a platform now to get the venture we have discussing under way, has the spotlight you have received had any other good or ill effects?
Eliot Higgins · 1:38 AM
Well for the good I've been invited to all sorts of events I wouldn't have gone to otherwise.
Eliot Higgins · 1:38 AM
One event I thought was fantastic was Tactical Tech's Info Activism 2013 camp, which I'd recommend to any budding activist types https://camp2013.tacticaltech.org/
Eliot Higgins · 1:38 AM
I was also invited to speak at Google Ideas Conflict in a Connected World summit about my work, and that was a very valuable experience
Eliot Higgins · 1:39 AM
Met lots of very interesting people there, and the speech I gave led to the New Yorker interview, which has been very productive
Eliot Higgins · 1:39 AM
All of these events and various invites have helped build a very broad network of contacts, which is useful for my work.
Jim Frederick · 1:39 AM
And now Tawkers! The pinnacle!
Eliot Higgins · 1:39 AM
Absolutely!