Lateral Thinking for Every Day

65

A lateral way to expose war crimes

The English journalist and blogger Eliot Higgins became interested in open-source methods in 2011 when he wanted to authenticate video clips from war zones and crime sites. He found that you could use satellite imagery to check the locations of videos, but it needed many pairs of eyes to review all the possible comparisons. In 2012 in his blog Brown Moses, he posted articles with videos from the civil war in Syria. He and his collaborators analysed hundreds of short videos and were able to authenticate their locations using geo-location techniques. He researched the weapons used and was able to show that the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad was using chemical weapons and cluster bombs.

In 2014 he founded ...