How 'open-source' journalism transformed investigations at the BBC - BBC World Service

Thank you, Geeta. And thank you Liliane, for your fierce advocacy for the BBC World Service. Over the next hour or so, we're going to show you some of the BBC World Service investigations that have relied heavily on open-source journalism, sometimes called OSINT. These terms - open-source, OSINT - are bits of jargon that don't do much to illuminate what we're talking about here. But rather than define them, which is always boring, I would like to tell you the story of how and why open-source journalism emerged. Through this story, I think it will become clear what “open-source”

means and why it matters for the BBC World Service. We're going to begin with these two photographs. The first was taken in Baghdad in 2003. The second in Aleppo, not long after the start of the Syrian uprisings in 2011. I've chosen these images because although these wars happened just eight years apart, they lie on opposite sides of a technological watershed that transformed journalism completely. If that sounds like an exaggeration, consider the ways in which these wars were covered. Iraq was reported, much like Vietnam had been 30 years earlier, by correspondents embedded with US troops shooting

analogue images onto tape. By the time we got to the Syrian war, journalism had entered a new era. For one thing, this was a much more dangerous conflict to cover. There was no army within which a reporter could embed. Journalists themselves had become a target. After Marie Colvin was killed in Homs, by the Assad regime in 2012, and James Foley was beheaded on YouTube by ISIS two years later, boots-on-the-ground reporting became all but impossible. Individual reporters went in, of course, and serious citizen journalists did heroic work but incident after incident - from the barrel bombing

of Aleppo, to the chemical attacks on Douma - took place beyond the reach of the TV news cameras. But in the years between Iraq and Syria, something even more fundamental had happened to journalism. Not in the Middle East, but thousands of miles away, in Silicon Valley. The year after the Iraq invasion, Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook. 2005, saw the launch of YouTube and Google Maps. A year later, Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet. Steve Jobs launched the iPhone in 2007 and by 2008, millions of cheap camera-enabled Android phones were being shipped out of China. In 2010,

two or three years after everyone began carrying a camera, Instagram was born. And so we arrived at the photo from the Syrian war. In this boy's hand, is something that simply had not existed in Iraq in 2003. A video camera connected to the Internet. The Syrian and Libyan wars may have been difficult for news crews to access but they were the first conflicts in human history in which everyone - combatants as well as civilians - was carrying a camera and had the means to broadcast images of war without going through the gatekeepers at the BBC

or at CNN. The result was a flood of imagery from the uprisings and conflicts that flared across the Arab world after 2011: thousands of hours of footage, uploaded day after day, in a deluge of unsorted, unverified, unfiltered information. Those videos contained crucial evidence about the progress of these wars, including evidence of war crimes. but it was hard to tell whether it had been filmed or when. Who had shot them? What exactly did they show? How could we trust these sources? Lots of us were watching back then, especially on Twitter, trying to piece these fragments together

into a pattern. But some were watching more closely than others and the guy who seemed to be watching most closely of all well, we didn't know his name back then. He was working or perhaps hiding behind the pseudonym, Brown Moses. This is a story that's been told so many times now that it's starting to take on the quality of a myth but the basic facts remain pretty astonishing. Brown Moses, now known as the founder of Bellingcat, Eliot Higgins, had never been to the Middle East, had no training in journalism, and spoke no Arabic. He was

a semi-employed administrator in his early thirties living in the East Midlands but from this unpromising position Eliot was about to break a series of really major news stories from across the Middle East and beyond. This is one of his first discoveries. It's August 2011, and Libya's uprising has already degenerated into a civil war. Back in Leicester, Eliot is arguing - as he often was about the Middle East - in the comment section of The Guardian. He posted a link to a video in which a Libyan fighter claimed that a coastal town called Brega had been

taken by rebel forces. Another commentator pointed out that this proved nothing. "The video could have been shot absolutely anywhere", he said. "How do you know that this is Brega?" Eliot replayed the video looking for clues. He noted the pattern of the streets as the fighters moved through the town and he sketched that pattern onto a piece of paper. He fired up Google Earth, panning across the suburbs of Brega looking for a match and suddenly, there it was. He went through the video again matching not just a road layout but the buildings, the curb stones, the

angle of the walls. Everything lined up. Eliot had found out, for certain, what the world's press corps gathered in Tripoli did not yet know: that Brega had fallen. Now, this may have been a minor scoop, but it contained a major discovery: the technique of geolocation. In response to that deluge of unsorted, unverified, digital information that I spoke about a moment ago, slowly, by trial and error, a method was emerging. A method of sorting fact from fiction, extracting evidence from chaos, separating truth from lies. By 2013, Eliot was monitoring hundreds of YouTube channels from across Syria,

and extracting so much information from these videos that the Brown Moses blog became an indispensable source for journalists and human rights activists all over the world. In the summer of that year, together with a handful of collaborators in the embryonic open-source community, Eliot showed that the Assad regime had used chemical weapons in Eastern Ghouta. This was a bigger scoop because Obama's red line had been crossed. Brown Moses was now being cited as a "weapons expert" in the New York Times and profiled in the New Yorker. A year later, he founded the investigative website Bellingcat. And

that site together with its associated twitter feed became the centre of a loose global network of couch analysts and citizen investigators who were using satellite imagery, social media and other openly available sources of information to identify people, track weapons, follow ships and planes and to expose war crimes. I'm going to show you one more example of an investigation conducted by that early community of Bellingcat volunteers. Again, we're in Libya. It's 2017 and the war is still dragging on. A video emerges online of an atrocity - a mass execution of 18 prisoners - allegedly filmed somewhere

near Benghazi. A warning: the video is distressing. The clip was shot as you can see, to reveal almost nothing about the location, just sand and shrubs. It could have been anywhere - or so the killers thought. The Bellingcat team began by breaking this out into a panorama to extract as much information as possible from the videos and from that they identified three features: these buildings, this wall And this fork in the road. They then spent hours scouring satellite imagery of Benghazi looking for a match and they found one here. Looking at that same satellite imagery

from ground level, they were able to match the vegetation visible on Google Earth, with the vegetation visible in the execution video. And that's not all. Historic satellite imagery is archived online. By searching through the highest resolution imagery they could find, the team discovered that on a particular day, July 17th, dark stains appeared in the sand at this exact location. These marks correspond to the bloodstains left in the sand by the men who died here. In August 2017, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the warlord who executed these prisoners, Mahmoud Al-Werfalli. It was

the first time that the ICC had ever issued an arrest warrant based solely on evidence from social media. By this point, anyone who was paying attention, realised that investigative journalism was being transformed in front of our eyes. Now, I don't want to exaggerate Bellingcat's role in this. Media organisations have been verifying video since the birth of the Internet and the BBC is own UGC teams have been doing it since the early 2000s. This kind of forensic analysis was clearly going to happen with or without the Brown Moses blog. But however we apportion the credit, it

is undeniable that this community of couch analysts, lots of them amateur, many of them anonymous, often emerging not from journalism, but from the obsessive world of online computer gaming had extended the range and possibilities of investigative journalism with devastating effect. The downing of Flight MH17, the Skripal poisonings in Salisbury, the attempted assassination of Alexei Navalny. On story after story, it was Bellingcat and the open-source community that got there first, leaving legacy media organisations scrambling to catch up. And I'm not just saying this because Eliot is here with us in the audience this afternoon. But just

as traditional media had been slow to pick up on open-source, so the open-source community had been slow, I thought, to appreciate the importance of storytelling. That Al-Werfalli investigation from Libya for example, contained evidence good enough for the ICC but almost nobody outside a narrow community on Twitter had seen it. It could have reached a global audience if it had been made into a real film - a film with context and clarity - with revelation with emotional force. And so I thought that we could learn from this method, but also that we could bring to it

the BBC standards of filmmaking and storytelling, and make it accessible to a much wider public. And so in 2017, I hired one of Bellingcat young analysts, Aliaume Leroy and together we began building an open source investigative team inside the BBC World Service. The timing was good. We were just setting up a new documentary programme called BBC Africa Eye, under an editor - Marc Perkins - who understood that this could be important. Over the next few years, our team, just three or four people used these visual forensics to make some fifteen investigative films from across Africa.

We used Facebook live streams to piece together a street-by-street minute- by-minute account of a massacre in the streets of Sudan's capital, Khartoum. We used satellite imagery to show that UAE, Turkey and Egypt were sending drones into Libya's civil war. We analysed hundreds of pieces of social media to expose a squad of Ugandan security forces, who in November 2020 went on a killing spree, shooting unarmed civilians in the streets of Kampala. I know thanks are tedious, but it is just not right to reference these films without crediting the brilliant journalists who made them. In our audience

today Ben Strik, Suzanne Vanhooymissen, Bertie Hill. BBC Africa Eye's investigations, including its undercover work, changed laws, saved lives and shaped public policy in multiple countries. These films reach tens of millions of people. not just in English, but thanks to the World Service in Hausa and Swahili, Yoruba, and Arabic. You only have to glance through the comments on YouTube to see how highly the BBC's audiences in countries like Sudan or Nigeria, Libya, or Uganda value serious public service journalism like this. But nothing we produced at BBC Africa Eye had more impact than the investigation Aliaume is

going to show you now. It was one of our first stories and it contributed it to the conviction and imprisonment of child killers. Aliaume. Thank you, Dan. I hadn't been in the job with BBC Africa Eye long when in the summer of 2018, one morning, I walked into the office, got my cup of French coffee, sat at my desk, opened my laptop, went on Twitter and saw this video I warn you is, it's distressing. At the end of this video, the women and the little girl are blindfolded, forced to the ground and shot 22 times.

One of the women, still has the baby strapped to her back. It was obvious that this was a war crime. As the video began to circulate online, it sparked a dispute about who was responsible. Some said it took place in Mali, others claim it was Cameroon. In response, Cameroon's Minister of Communication dismissed it as “fake news”, saying these were not Cameroonian soldiers. So, who was right? If the world was going to find out who was responsible for these atrocities, the first step was to establish where they had been committed. I knew that there were enough

visual clues in the clip, to have a go at establishing a location. But I also knew I couldn't do it alone. Open-source has always been a collaborative, crowdsource enterprise. And I could see on Twitter that others were also looking for answers. So I convened a private group on Twitter that included some journalists, some people from Bellingcat, experts from Amnesty International, as well as couch analysts working from anonymous Twitter handles. Together, over about a month, this is what we found. This looks like the kind of dusty, anonymous track, that could be anywhere in the Sahel. But

the first 40 seconds of the film, capture a mountain range with a distinctive profile. We spent hours trying to match this range to the topography of northern Cameroon and then in late July, we received a tip off from a Cameroonian source. Have you looked at the area near Zelevet? Close to the town of Zelevet, we found a match for the ridge line. It places the scene on a dirt road just outside a village called Krawa Mafa. A few hundred metres away is the border with Nigeria. The video also reveals other details that can be matched

precisely to what we see on the satellite imagery. This track, these buildings, and these trees. Putting all this evidence together, we can say with certainty that the killings took place here. So, now we knew where the killings happened. We were one step closer to establishing who was responsible for the atrocities. But to get to it, we first needed to establish when the killings happened. Again, the clues were all in the video. Exactly when the killings took place is at first sight harder to say. But again, the video contains clues. This building is visible in satellite

imagery but only until February 2016. The murders must have happened before that date. Satellite images also captured this structure. The walls surrounding it are present in imagery dated March 2015, but had not yet been built in November 2014, giving us an earliest possible date for the atrocity. The video also reveals this footpath, a path that only appears in the hot dry season, between January and April. There are other less obvious clues in the video. As they lead these women away, the soldiers, like moving sundials, cast shadows on the track. A simple mathematical formula tells us

the angle of the sun in comparison to the horizon. We can also see what direction the light is coming from. When we add this data to our location, we can get a precise timeframe for this event. The killings happened between March 20th and April 5th, 2015. Eventually, we were able to establish not only where and when the killings happened but also, who had committed these atrocities. Here are the names and the faces of the three men who actually pulled the trigger. Sergeant Cyriaque Bityala, Private Barnabas Donossou and Lance Corporal Tsanga. Our story dropped in September

2018, and went completely viral with admiration for the investigative work and outrage about the crimes from journalists, celebrities and politicians. Way over 10 million people have now watched this film. And at least another 15 million have followed it as a Twitter thread online. Months after the story came out, the US terminated $17m USD dollars aid to Cameroon citing growing concerns over human rights violations. And in September 2020, exactly two years after our investigation, a military court in Yaounde, convicted and sentenced four of the soldiers involved in the killings to 10 years in prison. They're still

there today. In the years since, this film and the Twitter thread have been widely emulated across the industry. Anatomy of a Killing has become a standard teaching resource in workshops all over the world to show students from Google workshops to Princeton seminars, the power and potential of open-source journalism. Dan mentioned earlier our hopes of matching Bellingcat style techniques to BBC levels of storytelling. And it was the storytelling, as well as the investigation, that marked this piece as something special. Instead of just showing people the conclusions, we show them exactly how we found this stuff out.

We didn't ask them to take anything on trust. We showed them a process and a series of findings that with a bit of patience, they could also verify from their own laptops. We show them how they could get to the truth. In this case, open source investigative techniques took us all the way to the end of the story and sealed the question of accountability. But as we expanded and made more and more films, we soon realised that open-source was not always the end of the investigation. Around three years after Anatomy of a Killing, we met

a journalist called Runako Celina. She also had a story of abuse in Africa. She also needed open-source methods to get started. But for Runako, open-source was just the beginning. Runako. This story starts back in 2020. I'd been living in China for several years studying Chinese and working in Beijing. It became my home but a feeling you get used to as a black woman living in a country with a tiny black population is not always feeling welcome. And I soon realised I wasn't the only one. Members of China's African diaspora shared our experiences of casual racism,

ignorance and sometimes harmless encounters on WeChat groups, and on a platform I created. And it was through this, that I came across this video. In case you didn't get that, or you didn't believe your eyes, what you just saw is a group of kids, somewhere in an African country being made to chant in Mandarin: "I'm a black devil." "My IQ is low." The word they’re using - Hei Gui - is the Chinese equivalent of the n-word. Now, this clip went viral across Chinese social media. Some thought it was funny. But it's important to say that

many across China were offended and dismayed by the video. Who wouldn't be? These kids were being coached to insult themselves in Chinese, by someone who taken care to remain off screen. And what's more, this video wasn't a one off, it formed part of a massive industry of exploitation. In China, over the last few years, it's become a thing to send personalised greeting videos, via social media and messaging apps. Happy birthday, Good luck in your exams. Congrats on your wedding. These videos typically sell for anything between $10 - $70 USD. Often it's kids standing around the

Blackboard shouting these greetings in Chinese. The content can be innocent enough. You might even think they're cute. But lots of these videos are offensive in one way or another And the low IQ video was on a whole other level. Who had taken a bunch of African kids happy, excited little kids and made them chant something so demeaning? As with Anatomy of a Killing, finding out who was responsible, depended on knowing where this was filmed. Now I'm not going to take you through another geo-location. You've got the idea by now. As always, it was painstaking. But

in the end, we pinned the low IQ video to southern Malawi, to a tiny village, in a district called Njewa. Local reporter Henry Mhango went to the village. He saw a Chinese male in his 20s filming kids. The locals said he'd been doing it for years. They called him by a nickname that sounded like the term in Chinese for uncle: “Su Su”. Back home, I was still scrutinising the video evidence for clues to the man's identity. I'd looked at hundreds of blessing videos posted on Chinese social media and noticed at least two different accounts that

were regularly posting videos from this village. The content suggested the accounts belong to the same person. Selfies and blogs gave us a glimpse of their possible owner, a man in his 20s. Among the posts, there was a single photo of a national ID card. We finally had a name to work with.... Lu Ke. I had watched hundreds of these videos looking for clues to the man's identity. And then I remembered, in one of these clips, Lu Ke is talking to a young child And he asked that kid to call him by a nickname, "Su Su".

The man Henry had found in the village, near Njewa. And Lu Ke, the man I had been tracking online, appeared to be the same guy. So essentially, that was about as far as the open-source evidence could take us. So, I flew to Malawi, and teamed up the Chinese undercover reporter who made contact with Lu Ke. We found out via my searching online that his name was Lu Ke. Wearing a secret camera, our reporter poses as a businessman in the market for blessing videos, and found out that Lu Ke was more than happy to talk. And

when our reporter took out his phone and showed him the low IQ video, Lu Ke immediately admitted that he had filmed it. And although he later retracted this admission, we also caught him saying hideous things about black people, that we needed to be treated harshly, that almost all of us were thieves. And interestingly, that the very worst among us, were black people like me, who spoke Chinese. He said all this I might add, while living in Malawi, with unmonitored access to black children. In the villages where he'd worked, we heard allegations that Lu Ke beat

the children and that he made them stand in the hot sun to film videos when they should have been at school. He told our undercover reporter that on just one of his busiest days, he'd earned the equivalent of £8,000 filming with these children. - We saw the video of when you were asking, telling these kids to say: "I am a black devil." Did you make this? - I did not make that one. I didn't make that video. - But it was made in this area. - Ah, it might be... - Tell us who made it

then. - That one has already... - Tell our audience. - He has gone back to China. - Oh, he's gone back? So you didn't say that most black people have no conscience? - I said that the majority of people love Chinese people. - But previously we have already seen it, We have proof, you know? We have evidence so you can tell the truth, That would be better. - I'm telling the truth, I'm telling the truth! - Haven't you said that most black people have no conscience? - I have not said that! - I have not

said that! - Ok, ok. Have you not said there is not one black person that does not steal? - I have not said that. - Have you not said those words? - I have not said that. - Really? - Really. I can confirm it. I have not said it. - Haven't you said that the worst and most dangerous blacks are those that speak Mandarin? - No. - Really? - Definitely not. - So, you don't think those lovely little kids are black devils, right? Do you think I'm a black devil? As you can see, Lu Ke

denied all our allegations, but the evidence of racism and abuse was plain to see. It was there in social media videos. It was there in the undercover filming by our team. When the film Racism for Sale was released in June 2022, there was outrage online, and protests on the streets of the Lilongwe. Malawi's Foreign Minister told the press, "We are disgusted, disrespected, and deeply pained. China's most senior Africa diplomat vowed to crack down on the industry and claimed that China had zero tolerance for racism. But it was too little too late. While we noted that

Lu Ke's racism was a direct insult to the many Chinese people who didn't share such views, many viewers shared our observations that this was the exact opposite of the image China seeks to promote in Malawi and across the African continent. Lu Ke fled into Zambia, where he was arrested, jailed, and eventually extradited back to Malawi. There he was tried, convicted and sentenced to 12 months in prison. When he was released, he fled the country. But the impact wasn't limited to Lu Ke. Faced with this kind of scrutiny, the blessing video industry in Malawi, An industry

built on systematic exploitation of children, effectively collapsed. What we've achieved with this story, exposing wrongdoing, holding those responsible to account and bringing about change shows the power of open-source and online investigation combined with on-the-ground reporting. It also shows the astonishing reach and impact of the BBC World Service. Meanwhile, BBC Eye was expanding and investing in open-source investigations all over the world. Some of our colleagues turned their attention to Russia, which had just invaded Ukraine, and there, on Russian social media, my colleague Vicky came across a group of women using open source methods and they were

on a mission. Vicky. Thank you, Runako. So first, let me set the scene. It's March 6th, 2022 in Moscow. Almost two weeks have passed since Russia launched the full scale invasion of Ukraine. Thousands of people have been protesting the war during those weeks and by this point, almost 15,000 have already been detained across the country. On this day, however, the tensions are much more brutal than before. These are 29 young people packed into the same police van. Spirits are high at first, they even swap numbers and set up a group chat and all of them

have been taken to the Bratayevo police station in the southern district of Moscow. They're held there for many hours during which some of them are subjected to beatings and torture, including choking with a plastic bag and techniques similar to waterboarding. The news of torture broke quite fast, thanks to one of the incredibly brave detainees who managed to leak the recordings that she made while keeping her phone in her pocket, while at the station. This is the recording. I will smash your head right now, That will make you understand. Ouch! Yeah, ******** ouch! I will just

******* shoot you right now, and that's it for you! Why are you beating me? Because I want to! What the **** are you looking at? Sit down, immediately. You are not a man, you realise that? Yeah I am, I'm a ******* beast. As you can tell, the recording is quite gut-wrenching - and that's how thousands of people in Russia felt when they first heard it. In the news articles, the man on the audio were described as anonymous, unknown, unrecognised. "The Man in Black", "The man in Beige." The thought that this will be one of many

incidents of Russian police enjoying impunity was a sad reality that no one wanted to come to terms with. And fortunately, we did not. After a bit of hustling and asking fellow Russian activists if the detainees would be willing to talk to me nine of those detained at the Bratayevo police station and I set up our own little group chat. I quickly learned that none of them could be described as ‘broken’, and neither did they lose their humour - they were joking around about the abuses that happened to them and were incredibly determined to hold those

who did it accountable. So, we joined our efforts, and got to work - trying everything we could think of to unmask the men. We searched photos by location: in and around a 5km radius around the police station. We found everyone who had ever mentioned this police station as their workplace on social media and we looked through every name on the official documents that detainees managed to take photos of. Last but not least, one of the girls drew a sketch of the suspect. It was only a few months later, we realised that this was a terrible

sketch, and a completely pointless exercise. We were really working with very limited data here. None of the detainees remembered the men's names; no one had managed to take a clear picture: only a blurry video of one of them The alleged “boss,” who was not beating anyone himself but oversaw everything that was happening at the station. We called him, "The Man in Beige". The only know variables were the location and the faces imprinted on the survivors' brains that they would definitely recognise. So, then we got lucky. In April 2022, the database of Yandex Food, a food

delivery service, was leaked. Just imagine that tomorrow, every address you've ever ordered Uber Eats to get leaked along with your phone number becomes public knowledge. That's exactly what happened. And everyone is Russia was freaking out and checking if their info had leaked as well, anxiously checking their home addresses. The atmosphere in our little group chat, however, was very different. All of us went straight to the Brateyevo, the police station address. and we got nine phone numbers. Phone numbers are like digital footprints. They leave tracks. We followed those tracks to a website showing his was used

to place six classified adverts. One from 2019, is selling a desk chair from Brateyevo police station which when added to the Yandex Food order, is another indication that Ivan works there. That advert doesn't tell us anything more about him. But further down the list, we see something else. A car for sale Less than 10 minutes drive from Brateyevo police station and unlike the last one, this one has a full name. Ivan Ryabov. Once we had a name, a quick search brought up a photo. We'd found him. Ivan Ryabov. That was "The man in black". What

about the other one, "The man in beige"? Well, his phone number wasn't in the leak. But one blurry video and a children's karate competition led us to him. No name, no rank. So who is he? BBC Eye investigations obtained a police report from March 6th It's signed by the police station's acting head A. G. Fedorinov. Searching for that name takes us to a 2012 article about a town's criminal investigations department where it's written in full Alexander Georgievich Fedorinov. There is a photo of him too, which looks like it could be the man in beige only

ten years younger. Facial recognition software leads us to a more recent picture of Fedorinov on VK, Russia's equivalent to Facebook. It was posted by an account that can be linked to user called Alexander Fedorinov And that same account is included in a job vacancies advert for Brateyevo police station. All our evidence leads us to one conclusion. "The man in beige" is the acting head of Brateyevo police station, Alexander Fedorinov. Knowing Russia's context, we knew right at the start of the investigation that we will not get any legal consequences for the men we find within the

country. The current regime in Russia is built to encourage such behaviours and police and special forces have immense power and the promise of impunity. However, investigating in Russia, you learn to accept the fate of almost never triggering immediate change but keeping a very important archive of crimes and atrocities so that they're not forgotten or overseen once the change becomes possible. I do know that us de-anonymising Ivan Ryabov and Aleksander Fedoranov brought closure to thousands of people who first heard those chilling recordings back in March 2022. I also do know that it was incredibly important for

the detainees who collaborated with us: they got to regain their power and agency back, turning from torture survivors to brave investigators capable of bringing accountability. I also do hope that it made Ivan and Alexander's life less easy. It's tricky to find a match on Tinder when your name is forever in headlines with the word "torture" along with it. As for some official consequences, they did happen outside of Russia: on March 8th 2023, the European Union made a special gift for International Women's Day, by sanctioning both of these individuals. Our story is just one example of

the power of open source tools in the hands of ordinary citizens. Meanwhile, an investigation by the BBC Turkish language service was having another remarkable effect. In a remote village in Turkey, a housewife was using their story to teach herself open-source investigation skills. As my colleague Osman is here to explain. It started with a photograph. In 2020, I was covering the story of an earthquake in Turkey and I came across this photo. It troubled me. Why was this building tilted when others around it are standing straight? Our investigation, Anatomy of a Building, showed that it wasn't

just the earthquake that was to blame for the damage. It was illegal alterations to the structure. Now, this may not seem like a big deal to you. But Turkey, which sits in an earthquake zone, is full of these buildings. Our investigation was a wake up call for a lot of people who live in apartments exactly like this. The full importance of the story, though, was revealed through a tragedy. Three years later, another, bigger, earthquake hit Turkey. Over 50,000 people lost their lives, the scale of destruction was unimaginable. And - in the days and weeks that

followed - hundreds of thousands of Turkish people started watching Anatomy of a Building. You can see here how the views of our piece spiked from the moment of the earthquake. People are sharing our video because all over the region, the pattern of the earthquake damage didn't make any sense. One apartment block will be completely undamaged - I mean, not even a broken window - while the building next door was reduced to rubble. Earthquake survivors started reaching out to us asking us to examine what happened to their buildings. One of them was Nurgül. She was a

mother and housewife. She had lost her daughter-in-law, her son, her baby granddaughter, and while most of the neighbourhood was completely unaffected, their building, Ezgi apartment, had collapsed. Nurgül was looking for answers. I found their bodies eight days after the earthquake. My son was a lawyer. Now I'm looking for justice for my son. I want those responsible for his death punished Then, she came to us. “Osman Bey,” she wrote, “I saw your YouTube video and I want you to help me. I lost three lives in this earthquake." Nurgül had watched our Anatomy of a Building video

over and over again - using it to teach herself how to do basic open-source investigation. She had already figured out that her son's building had been altered - and most likely very badly. She got hold of planning designs and before and after photographs. When we spoke on the phone, she was angry and grieving. But she also wanted to get to the bottom of what happened. So she started sharing her evidence with us. Meanwhile, the media in Turkey was already jumping to conclusions and headlines were pointing fingers about who was to blame for the collapse of

this building. Nurgül was also in a rush to pin the guilt on someone. It was understandable, given how much she had lost. But I said to Nurgül that, “As BBC journalists we don’t jump to conclusions, we examine the evidence and that takes time." This is the building we're talking about. It had been reduced to rubble. But Nurgül, having watched our Anatomy of a Building video many times, understood that the evidence was in this rubble. For eight days, she stood guard at the site stopping any attempt to disturb what she knew was a crime scene. I

want to show you just one example of how painstaking our investigation process was. We suspected that an air vent had been illegally added to the ground floor. It wasn't on the official plans. But here in the rubble, we found it. It was a detail, but it mattered: this vent was one of the alterations that had weakened the structure. 37 people died here, including Nurgül's family. Together with Nurgül, we were compiling evidence that multiple parties were responsible. The official report came out in November. It corroborated our findings. There were a lot of structural faults with this

building, and a lot of people to blame. The blame stretched all the way up to the authorities. We published this story in February, for the one year anniversary of the earthquake. The response to Nurgül's determination was overwhelming. This was because this was just more than a story of a building, it was also a story of a mother, a mother who became an open-source detective, but who also trusted us to investigate her findings and share them. We got Nurgül her answers and those responsible are now facing criminal charges. I hope they get the proper punishment for

the sake of the Ezgi Apartment so such things won't happen in the future. I am fighting to set an example. So why did she come to us? She told me many times it wasn't just me she trusted. She trusted the BBC. And look at the comments from the Turkish audience. It's amazing how much they appreciate our work at the BBC. And it's a great example of how the BBC belongs to all of us. Our use of open-source journalism is evolving. It was also becoming a core part of the newsroom. But one thing remained true, vital

information is often out there online sitting in front of us. As my colleague Abdiraheem showed with this next story. One Billion Dollars. Just think of that for a second. It's a lot of money, isn't it? Well, that's how much Israel spent by the year 2021 to upgrade the security along the barrier fence with Gaza. New security features included: an underground wall, modern sensors and new cameras. Officials of the time said the new security system would stop groups such as Hamas from ever getting into Israel. Then, on the 7th of October, the world watched as this

happened. Now, in the weeks and indeed the months that followed, we at the BBC reported on the war. The 1,200 people killed in Israel, the more than 34,000 people killed in Gaza, and the over 100 hostages still missing. But one question remained largely unanswered: How did Hamas do it? Now back in October, I was getting ready to launch a new forensics team at BBC Arabic. With the unfolding events, the launch couldn't wait. We scrambled and alongside our colleagues at BBC verify, we started working within hours. But where to start? The clues were already out there

If you knew where to look. Many of you may be familiar with the messaging service Telegram. It has become popular with armed groups in recent years. They use it a bit like Facebook and Twitter. There, they face less scrutiny and have been less likely to face suspensions. So it wasn't a surprise then that Hamas was using it to get their propaganda and messaging out. And - for us - it proved to be a trove of information. Buried within those Telegram channels, we found videos that proved Hamas had been training for their attack not just for

weeks - as some early reporting has suggested - but in fact, for nearly three years. The videos posted by Hamas ahead of their attack show the militants held four major drills. They trained for various scenarios where they attack Israel by land, sea and air. They practice storming buildings, and taking hostages and destroying barriers. Let me show you one of these videos. What you just saw there was a training video posted in December 2022. Hamas fighters were practising at a mock Israeli town they built. And this training site, in the north of Gaza, was located just

800 metres from the barrier with Israel. It was all happening in plain sight. And this was just one site. We went on to geo-locate 14 training sites in all. They were used over a period of nearly three years. In fact, the last training session took place only 25 days before the 7th of October attack. But that's not all, while the world focused on Hamas, we discovered it wasn't just Hamas that trained for their attack. Ten other militants or ten other militant groups, joined them on their exercises. They included Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Now, these groups come

from a spectrum of ideological backgrounds, ranging from the hardline Islamist to the relatively secular. We visually identified them by their distinctive headbands and insignia and based on our open-source investigation, we published this piece. In it, we reported for the first time that at least five other groups as well as Hamas took part in the attack. Our investigation was picked up and reported around the world. Now, you may ask yourself, why does this all matter? For one: accountability. The 7th of October assault was described in some earlier reporting as a surprise attack by Hamas. We showed

that Hamas and its allies were brazen about their trainings. When we asked the Israeli defence forces about the issues raised in our report, they told us they were focused on "eliminating" Hamas and they would consider our findings at a later stage. It's also worth noting, just about a week ago, the Israeli military intelligence chief had resigned. He said he took responsibility for the security failures that led to the 7th of October attack. Our findings also offer another form of accountability. We now know it wasn't just Hamas that crossed into Israel that day. Hamas, at times,

has said it does not hold all of the hostages. Knowing which other group took part in that attack could offer us clues about their whereabouts and their return remains a key issue in ceasefire talks, and potentially could unlock the end of the war. Our forensics team at BBC Arabic are continuing to investigate this story, as well as Israel's military response. Meanwhile, technology is evolving at a rapid pace and for open-source journalists like us it presents opportunities but also challenges. Dan. Over the last half hour, we've seen how the BBC World Service has used open-source journalism

to hold power to account. This forensic approach lends itself to accountability journalism, because it rests not on opinions or allegations, or even on the testimony of eyewitnesses, but on visual evidence so damning that it cannot be ignored. It's an approach that makes digital eyewitnesses of us all. But anyone using social media over the last few months will have noticed a problem. visual evidence is quickly becoming unreliable. You'll all have seen similar things in your own social feeds, but let me give you a quick reminder of where we're at with AI generated video. If you are

clinging to the hope that you can still just about spot the difference between fake and real, let me sink that life raft for you: within a few years, perhaps within a few months, the fake and the real will be completely indistinguishable. Now, there are already some good examples of how machine learning is being used to support journalism, to make discoveries in satellite imagery or complex datasets, to expose fakes and disinformation. This is a technological weapon that can be wielded not just by those spreading lies, but by those seeking the truth. Still, no matter how optimistic

you are, there's a definite problem here. What we're seeing with those cute puppies playing in the snow, is the disintegration of visual evidence itself. All of the work we’ve shown you this afternoon is predicated on the assumption that if you’ve seen it, you can believe it. So what happens when that link between seeing and believing is severed by AI? What are we going to do? How is the public going to respond - when, for example, we see a video of a hospital bombed in Gaza, and we can't tell if it's real or fake? When a

politician makes a speech saying something that she has never said? When a clip spreads in a troubled part of the world, of one ethnic group burning the homes of another when no such attack has taken place? I have no comprehensive or confident answer to those questions. I hope this afternoon's panel will have some insights, as well as Eliot Higgins, we had have Malachy Browne from the outstanding vision investigations team at the New York Times, and Alison Killing who won a Pulitzer for her open-source work on Xinxiang and now leads the new team at the FT,

as well as Vicky, who you saw earlier from our team. You can see them here in the Radio Theatre, or on the live stream, at 6pm London time. But although I'm unsure how this new technological watershed will disturb our industry, and our society more broadly, I will venture one prediction: in a world where visual evidence is rendered worthless, or at least devalued by AI, a lot of people, in the confusion, will have to outsource the task of separating truth from lies to people they trust. Trust, and the lack of it, has been a major challenge

for the media over the last 10 or 15 years. You just heard my colleague Aliaume, pointing out that when we made that film about the killings in Cameroon, we didn't ask the audience to take anything on trust. The power of open-source journalism derives in large part from the fact that when you have irrefutable visual evidence, trust needn't come into it. But in the age of generative AI, I think the idea of trust might take on a renewed importance. Our viewers are not, for example, going to download every video they see and run it through specialist

software to determine which are real and which are not. They're going to find gatekeepers they trust and let them deal with the increasingly complex task of separating what's real from what's not. That trust, as always, will have to be earned. The news organisations people turn to will be the ones that show a transparent commitment to the truth, to the highest standards of accuracy to the most comprehensive and least partisan coverage of our world. The ones that still have journalists - human eyewitnesses - reporting from the ground. The ones who refuse to be intimidated by authoritarian

states; who investigate corruption and abuse without fear; who tell stories that are revelatory and relevant to people's lives. That's what the BBC World Service has been doing for almost a century. And it has never mattered more than it does now. Over the last decade, with press freedom and retreat, the World Service has stepped forward and built a formidable reputation for investigative journalism. And I hope we've shown you this afternoon that we've been at the forefront of developing an approach that is fit for purpose in the 21st century. The kind of journalism we've shown you today

is time consuming and expensive. But its value, at a time when the truth is so contested, must be obvious to any fair-minded observer. I know I speak for all the brilliant investigators who have told you their stories this afternoon and for all my colleagues, when I say that we are proud to work for the World Service. that it is a force for good, in a volatile world and that it deserves your support. Thank you.