 Moving on to our next session, The End of Secrets, how open source intelligence identified the brigade that shot down MH17 over the Ukraine. Speaker is Eric Toller, he's an editor with Bellingcat, an open source research collective. He previously worked as an intelligence specialist with the Bank of America, Merrill Lynch. At Bellingcat, Eric writes, edits, researches, and translates articles, along with conducting training workshops for journalists in Eastern Europe in open source investigation. Verification and digital forensics. My name's Eric, I just like, thank you for the introduction. I'm with Bellingcat, we're a group of volunteer open source investigators from around the world. And today I'm going to talk about the downing of MH17, which took place during Europe's first war with the ubiquitous presence of the internet. So now with this war, the first one, I mean we have, of course, you have the Syrian war and all that stuff, but with Russia and Ukraine, everyone there, almost everyone has access to the internet, a little bit louder. Hi, can you hear me? Okay, cool, thank you. But almost everyone has access to the internet and a smartphone as well. So people in the war zones can upload videos and photos and witness accounts of what's going on and normal people can analyze and collect it. So what I'm talking about in particular is the MH17 case. So after the downing of MH17, we had a pretty fast within, by the end of the day, we had a pretty good idea of what had happened. A group of pro-Russian separatists had shot down the plane thinking that it was a Ukrainian transport plane. But there's still a few questions that we weren't sure about. There are three, I'm gonna harp on these for the next nine minutes. Exactly which book missile launcher shot it down, because we knew it was a book we used to know where it came from. And of course where it came from, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, who knows. And maybe even we can answer who actually pressed the button who shot it down. So by the end of the day, we had a handful about, we had seven photos and videos of the actual book missile launcher that shot it down. It was transported through Eastern Ukraine on July 17th, 2014, and eventually went to the launch site and shot down MH17. We also had dozens of witness accounts of people who saw the missile launcher go through Donetsk and other cities, and also people who actually saw the missile launch. So our question, and the problem we had with Bellingcat were answering those three questions, using only open source materials. So witness accounts online, photos on Instagram, and contact your Russian social network, YouTube videos, and other sources like that, and Google Maps. Can we find out exactly which book missile launcher shot down the plane, where it came from, and maybe even who actually shot it down. So our starting point with this was to go through about the month before, oops, is it gonna go? Okay, well, not so fancy, but the month before MH17 was shot down and trying to find out, trying to find all the different dash cam videos of the convoys moving through the border and also in Ukraine. So you may know that dash cams are incredibly common in Russia and Ukraine because what happens is you drive to work, you come home from work, you see a bunch of tanks roll by, you go home, you put it on YouTube, you have 5,000 hits near a minor internet celebrity, you see something cool. Well, these are coming up constantly during a Ukrainian conflict. We looked at hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these things and we eventually identified, oh, I don't even know what's going on over there now. We eventually identified, oh, here we go. We found, we were looking for the exact missile launcher that shot down MH17. We have various features on there that we tried to match with every missile launcher we could find in these hundreds and hundreds of videos. And then for example, we have here the number three and then obscured number two. We have a railway code H2200, which is used in Russia and Ukraine and other post-soviet countries for oversized cargo that's transported on rail. You have a very unique damage pattern on the rubber side skirt of the caterpillar track. You have a handful of fairly unique characteristics we were able to match with all these hundreds and hundreds of dash cam videos. And we eventually found the missile launcher that shot down MH17 through all this ubiquitous amount of open source information. And this came from Russia's 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade. From June 23rd to 25th, they transported a full book system, the radar, the missile launcher, the loader, the whole thing from Kursk, Russia, their base to the Ukrainian border. They were deployed at the border June, July, August. And during this time around July 15th or 16th, we don't know the exact day, but we think it's probably over midnight of July 16th, they took this thing over the border in the Ukraine through Krasnodon, Luhansk, Makayevka, Donetsk, that eventually was taken to the long site where it shot down MH17. Okay, we got the first two done. We know which missile launcher shot down MH17, we know it came from Russia. So now the big one is who did it? Who pressed the button? Who actually did it? Well, remember I mentioned the 53rd anti-aircraft brigade, right? Well, these people are mostly just a bunch of kids, 18, 19, 20, 21 year old kids. And they love to put everything about their lives online, right? Some of those things, everything. And so we were able to identify the second battalion, not the first or the first and third were off, doing their back and base, they weren't around, but the second battalion, there were three battalions, the second battalion of this brigade were involved in the transport to the border and they were stationed at the border, not like a few miles, but like literally at the border throughout July. So we looked into these guys and we looked for over a year and a half every tiny little bit of information on these guys' lives. We know them from back now. It's kind of creepy. So here's a few examples. And if you're in the military, this is what you don't do, tell your people not to do this. Some genius took a picture of a roster of the second battalion, high definition camera photo, put it online for everyone to see. The names, ranks, attendance records, everything. So we get these names. They're the last name, patronymic first name. Put them in the contaction on the Klassniki, which are Russian social networks, like the Russian Facebook or Myspace or whatever. And we find their profiles and they have tons and tons of pictures and videos from the base and from their time in the border. And we found their friends and the friends of their friends. Year and a half later, we pretty much figured the entire command structure of this brigade, which is in public information. We also found it from more traditional sources, right, military parades we see. You know, it's kind of like the old Sovietology, right? You know, you find military parades, you order it, right? And just to show you how much information there is. You see this guy in the back over there who's taking a nap with his head against the window? All right, so this is some picture, some soldier put this picture online. This is a dash cam video, totally separate. There's timestamps wrong, nor the timestamp. That same sleep and soldier is actually, you can see them in the dash cam video. There's so much information out there. You can see the exact same scene from different perspectives sometimes because there's such a ubiquitous amount of information in Russia and Ukraine. And these people didn't hide what they were doing at all, right? Right here, this is Milarev, which is a city around the border of Russia and Ukraine. And this guy proudly poses right in front of it. So thank you. Now we know exactly where you are on June 25th, 2014 because you showed us. And geniuses like that, usually they do that in Ukraine too. Some Russian soldiers in Ukraine pose next to a Ukrainian sign for a town. Well, okay, now we know where you are. You're gonna be fired immediately when you get home. And we got a little bit creative too. So this right here is a message board that's mostly for mothers, soldiers, the soldiers' mothers, wives, and girlfriends. And here these people, this is the mother of a soldier who was in the 53rd Brigade in 2nd Battalion. And if you read Russian, I haven't seen this one exactly, but it's just a good representative example. She's complaining about how her son is off some secret mission on the border and she doesn't know anything about it. And the other wives and the other mothers saying, oh yeah, my son too. And so and so, Commander Sohn, so send him over there. Okay, well thank you. Now I know of the commander of the brigade and the battalion and all that stuff. So we collect all this information, which is totally online free. We're just, I don't have any in three letter, you know, agency clearance and no clearance at all. All this information is online for free. You just gotta know where to look. All right, so we gather this over a year and a half. We go and go and go and we gather and gather and gather. And eventually we found out more or less the entire command structure of this brigade. On the left are the big wigs. You got Putin on top. Shui Gu and some of the others. In the right, you have the actual anti-aircraft missile brigade, right? You got the commander of the entire brigade, the commander of the 2nd Battalion, the battery commanders of the 2nd Battalion and then the commanders of the Buk unit vehicles. Okay, so we think about who, we got the first two guys, right? We know which Buk shut down the plane. We know where it came from. We even have videos of it being transported to Ukraine. So now the big question is who actually shut it down, okay? Well, the crew was either totally separatist, mixed half separatist, half Russian, or totally Russian. And we look at other pieces of military equipment that Russia sends over to Ukraine, right? When they send over junky stuff like the T-64 tanks or the grad rockets, it's like candy. They just send them over. They don't really care. But with the really sophisticated stuff, the stuff that only Russia has, that's really sophisticated and really expensive, like the T-72B3 tanks, we never, ever see those only of separatist commands. They always are sent over with Russian soldiers. So for example, the 5th and 6th Tank Brigades from Siberia took a bunch of these tanks in the Ukraine, like in the Baltsev after the 2nd Minsk Agreement, they killed a bunch of Ukrainians, they take them back from the Russia. So thinking about this and how sophisticated the Buk thing is, the Buk missile launcher, takes months and months and months of training to even know how to use this, let alone operate it correctly, which obviously wasn't used correctly. We think that at least one or two officers were sent over with this Buk crew. You see these 10 guys right down here. We have their names blurring everything, but we sent all this information to the Dutch international investigation. It was uncensored with them. We gave them their addresses, their phone numbers, their relatives, we gave them everything because we spent a year and a half researching this, right? If indeed it was a Russian crew or a partly Russian crew, it was either one of these 10 guys or they know or they picked out the soldier underneath them to go with the Buk to Ukraine. So yes, we think we, assuming it was a full or partially Russian crew, we think we did answer all three questions. Buk 3x2, as we named it because the middle dig is obscured, from Russia and one of these 10 fellows down here. Thank you.