Rocket Man

Eliot Higgins, at home in England. He monitors hundreds of videos from Syria a day.Photograph by James Day

As rockets fell in Syria, Eliot Higgins was asleep at his house twenty-three hundred miles away, in Leicester, England. He woke a few hours later, roused his toddler daughter, Ela, and padded downstairs to make her porridge. It was August 21st, and it had been ten months since Higgins was laid off from his job as an administrator at a nonprofit providing housing for asylum seekers. His days now consisted of looking after Ela and writing blog posts. As he made breakfast, he checked Twitter on his phone, and noticed reports of a possible chemical-weapons attack in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. Similar reports had come out of Syria in recent months, but they had been difficult to verify. This time, the casualty estimates were in the hundreds. He opened his laptop and went on YouTube, where witnesses to previous incidents had uploaded video evidence. There were already dozens of videos from Ghouta, and the severity and scale of the destruction shocked Higgins: young children convulsing, their open mouths slick with foam; stiff, unbloodied corpses lined up in rows on hospital floors.

“Immediately, I gathered as much information as possible,” Higgins told me recently. Online, Higgins is known as Brown Moses, and, as Ela played, he assembled videos from Ghouta, preparing to post them on the Brown Moses Blog. Unlike the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, the war in Syria has not produced a huge body of journalism by international reporters on the ground. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Syria is currently the most dangerous dateline in the world; the regime of Bashar al-Assad has effectively banned the international press. More than fifty reporters have been killed while covering the conflict, and dozens more are missing, presumably detained by the authorities. Yet Syrians have managed to access the Internet, and all the factions in the ongoing civil war have uploaded videos onto YouTube. They film their own military offensives and release propagandistic recruitment videos. They document civilian casualties and the ritualized speeches of regime officials who have defected to the opposition. They present evidence of war crimes, including torture, mutilations, and executions. And they show weaponry: rifles, bombs, and rockets.

Although Higgins has never been to Syria, and until recently had no connection to the country, he has become perhaps the foremost expert on the munitions used in the war. On YouTube, he scans as many as three hundred new videos a day, with the patience of an ornithologist. Even when a rocket has largely been destroyed, he can often identify it by whatever scraps survive. When he doesn’t recognize a weapon, he researches it, soliciting information from his many followers on Facebook and Twitter. In June, 2012, he revealed on his blog that the Free Syrian Army, the leading armed opposition group, had obtained anti-aircraft guns. The next month, he presented video evidence that Assad’s regime had deployed cluster bombs. “It’s very incongruous, this high-intensity conflict being monitored by a guy in Leicester,” Stuart Hughes, a BBC News producer in London, told me. “He’s probably broken more stories than most journalists do in a career.”

The Brown Moses Blog began as an eclectic collection of videos from Syria, including everything from explosions to street protests. But Higgins doesn’t speak Arabic, so he focussed on something purely visual: documenting weaponry. When rebel fighters brandished machine guns for the camera, or when members of Assad’s National Defense Force showed off weapons that they had captured from a rebel ammunition dump, he paused the video and scrutinized the armaments. After an attack, he studied the shell casings and spent munitions that littered the ground—the flame-scarred detritus of war. Gradually, the blog developed a following, even though nobody knew who Brown Moses was. It was a curious name, and his avatar—the twisted face of a screaming pope, from a Francis Bacon painting—only deepened the mystery. Kristyan Benedict, the campaign manager of Amnesty International, told me that the organization has staff members monitoring videos from Syria, but said of Higgins, “He just gets there quicker than a lot of established research outlets have been able to.”

By following Brown Moses, you could track the progress of the Syrian rebels, as they improvised weapons, perfected roadside bombs, and eventually captured tanks and anti-aircraft cannons. Likewise, you could observe the gradual tactical escalation of Assad’s forces, which implied a strategic vulnerability that the regime would never confirm otherwise.

The day of the Ghouta attack, Higgins found several photographs of the munitions that had purportedly delivered the chemical agent. Rockets with explosive payloads usually detonate on contact, but the Ghouta rockets had landed more or less intact before, presumably, dispersing a deadly gas. He noticed several photographs of a narrow cylinder whose tail was ringed by knife-like fins. In one image, the munition jutted out of a rutted field at an angle. The strange-looking weapon was unknown to munitions experts, but Higgins had seen it before. In January, it had made a “first appearance,” in Daraya, a suburb southwest of Damascus. Higgins had posted a clip of it sticking out of the ground. The remains of a similar rocket had been filmed in Adra, a neighborhood in the northeast of Damascus, where multiple chemical attacks had allegedly occurred. Higgins had blogged about the weapon and had posted a video from Adra of a dog lying on a dusty street, its hind legs twitching uncontrollably. When Higgins realized that the same weapon had been deployed in Ghouta, he announced his finding on his blog: “In all cases, these are munitions that the opposition has claimed the government has used.” He didn’t know what the rocket’s payload was, or how it was launched. But, he wrote, identifying the weapon might be a key to understanding the alleged chemical attacks.

When I visited Higgins recently at his home, he intercepted me at the front door before I could ring the bell. “My daughter’s just fallen asleep,” he whispered. He ushered me into the small front room, which doubles as his daughter’s playroom and his office, and sat down on a beige couch, where he does most of his blogging. The lace curtains had a tulip pattern. Toys were stacked against one wall. A gold foil balloon, a remnant from Ela’s birthday, floated on the ceiling.

“My background was in finance and admin,” Higgins told me. “I’m completely self-taught, really.” He is thirty-four years old, and has a schoolboyish face, a thatch of fluffy brown hair, and rectangular glasses. His wife, Nuray, a slender, dark-haired woman, got ready to leave for her job at the post office. “It’s just something I sort of fell into,” Higgins said, opening his laptop to show me videos that he had studied that morning.

Nuray is from Turkey, and after their daughter was born, in October, 2011, they took a family vacation to Istanbul, so that Ela could spend some time with her grandparents. While in Turkey, Higgins decided to start a blog. For a decade, he had worked dull administrative jobs, and couldn’t mask his boredom. “Until recently, I was extremely shy,” he told me. His mother, Elizabeth, recalled that Higgins, even as a child, found it hard to concentrate on things he wasn’t passionate about. “But when he developed an interest, nothing would dissuade him,” she said. He never finished college, dropping out of the Southampton Institute of Higher Education. When I asked what he studied there, he said, “Media . . . I think.” But he had always been active on the Internet. He took an obsessive interest in online role-player games, like World of Warcraft, and after work he played them for five or six hours at a stretch. When he met Nuray, who had come to England as an au pair, Higgins concluded that his gaming habit was not “compatible with marriage,” and quit. But he continued to indulge in another social-yet-antisocial pastime: online commenting. He was an active member of a discussion forum called Something Awful. An admirer of Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein, he generally took a progressive view on foreign policy, and compulsively read the Web site of the Guardian, often being the first to comment on articles relating to politics in the Middle East. He engaged in endless debate with people he knew only as screen names. He linked to videos from Libya and Syria, occasionally inflaming other commenters by posting gruesome footage. When people accused him of heartlessness or prurience, he responded that the crimes of war must be documented and disseminated. He selected his pseudonym more than a decade ago, essentially at random, when a discussion forum requested a handle while he was listening to the Frank Zappa song “Brown Moses.” The screaming-pope avatar was similarly arbitrary, he told me: “But now that’s become my trademark.”

Higgins tends to approach things systematically, and after Ela was born he decided he needed a hobby that he could fit in amid child-care responsibilities. Besides, he told me, “I was posting all this information and having all these debates and arguments with people, but it was an echo chamber. It wasn’t getting out there.” So he started the blog.

“That just never gets old!”

He initially focussed both on the Middle East and on the News Corp. telephone-hacking scandal. He eventually moved his hacking coverage to a separate blog, so that he could devote his energies to Syria. One of the Brown Moses Blog’s first popular posts was “Laughing in the Face of Danger,” a compilation of parody videos made by Syrian activists. The absurdism of war is reflected in the blog, which is punctuated by moments of dark levity. Early on, he posted tutorials on “How Not to Handle” unexploded ordnance, featuring clips of Syrian men treating incendiary devices with suicidal incaution. (“If you find a fully intact unexploded OFAB 250-270 High Explosive Fragmentation Bomb, my first piece of advice is not to use a tractor to drag it.”)

Over lunch at a pub near his house, Higgins described the surrealism of observing war through YouTube. “I particularly enjoy over-the-top training sequences,” he said. Jihadist groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra, which is the most organized wing of the armed resistance, often post videos of their men jumping through flaming hoops. “Once they’ve established the caliphate, they’ll have the best circus,” he joked. “These jihadis take themselves so seriously. It’s kind of camp.”

If Higgins sometimes adopts the gallows humor of a combat veteran, it may be because the footage he collects is unremittingly bleak. On May 25, 2012, Syrian government forces massacred residents in the opposition-controlled area of Houla, near Homs. Higgins covered the aftermath of the assault, posting horrific updates from eyewitnesses every few minutes. More than a hundred people were killed in the offensive, including forty-nine children. He is not prone to outrage in his blog posts, or to calls for action, letting the devastating images speak for themselves. But his matter-of-fact captions can assume the blunt force of a hammer. From Houla: “A Pile of Corpses”; “Injured Civilian with a Missing Hand”; “Around a Dozen Dead Small Children with Injuries That Appear to Be from Shrapnel.”

In a speech in September, the U.S. national-security adviser, Susan Rice, described the videos from the Ghouta attack. “As a parent, I cannot look at those pictures—those little children laying on the ground, their eyes glassy, their bodies twitching—and not think of my own two kids,” she said. At the pub, I asked Higgins if it is traumatic to review such footage every day. He said that he finds the audio most upsetting: the pleading of a hostage who is about to die, the wailing of a parent who is clutching a murdered child. “I turn the volume off,” he said. But the footage from Ghouta was unbearable even without sound. When he is blogging, Ela is often sitting nearby, watching Minnie Mouse on TV.

After the Houla massacre, Higgins realized that he could subscribe to every YouTube channel uploading footage from Syria, then aggregate the videos by region and organization on his blog. Originally, he monitored several dozen channels. Now he tracks seven hundred. In January, 2013, Higgins was looking at videos coming out of the Daraya region, close to the Jordanian border, when he noticed several weapons that he had not yet documented in Syria, among them a portable anti-tank rocket and a wheel-mounted recoilless rifle. The weapons appeared in a broadcast on state television, which reported that they had been captured from opposition fighters, and that they were “Israeli made”—a standard accusation of the regime. At the same time, dozens of videos of the weapons were being uploaded from Daraya, all showing that the weapons were being used by the Free Syrian Army.

Higgins often begins his investigations by noting any alphanumeric markings that appear on a weapon and entering them into Google. But munitions that are produced in one country are often copied by manufacturers in another, so it can be difficult to ascertain a weapon’s point of origin. “You’ve got to look at the tiny details,” Higgins told me. “If a handle isn’t where you expect the handle to be, it might be an entirely different weapon.” Through readers who are arms experts, Higgins can often obtain access to declassified government manuals, and to directories, like “Jane’s,” that used to be the exclusive resource of professionals. The weapons in Daraya had not been made in Israel; Higgins determined that they were leftovers from the Balkan wars, and had originated in Croatia.

Though the Brown Moses Blog was only nine months old, Higgins was already being cited as an arms expert. In an interview with NPR, he was described as “an authoritative source” on munitions in Syria. One of his readers was C. J. Chivers, a Times war correspondent and the author of “The Gun,” a history of the AK-47. Chivers noticed Higgins’s posts about the weapons from Croatia, and decided to explore the story further. On February 25th, Chivers and another Times reporter, Eric Schmitt, published a front-page story revealing that the weapons had been bought by the government of Saudi Arabia, then airlifted into Jordan and smuggled into Syria, in an effort to bolster the Free Syrian Army. The Times established that the U.S. was at least aware of, and possibly complicit in, the secret arms shipments, and quoted an unnamed American official describing a “maturing of the logistical pipeline” to the rebels. The article noted that the weapons had been “extensively documented by one blogger, Eliot Higgins, who writes under the name Brown Moses.” According to the Times, the weapons crossed the border into Syria in December—only a few weeks before Higgins spotted them. On a Times blog, At War, Higgins published a post explaining how he had traced the guns to Croatia.

After Higgins lost his job at the nonprofit, he found a temporary position, but days after the Times piece was published his contract ended, and he was out of work again. This gave him the time to obsessively track the Syrian conflict as it intensified. He checked Twitter while he rode the bus, doing errands. “He talks about his work all the time, constantly,” Nuray told me. “Every time we decide not to talk about his work, somehow we find ourselves discussing it.” When the fighting in Syria grew especially intense, Higgins had trouble sleeping.

He had become an indispensable analyst of the war. “Many people (whether they admit it or not) have been relying on that blog’s daily labor to cull the uncountable videos that circulate from the conflict,” Chivers wrote on his own blog_._ After Higgins discovered videos of cluster bombs being deployed by the regime, he assisted Human Rights Watch in producing a report. He welcomed opportunities to collaborate. He was happy to let the Times expand on his initial finding about the weapons in Daraya, because he lacked the military or diplomatic contacts to elucidate the larger geopolitical picture on his own. Committed to the ethos of open source, he often tried to augment his research with the expertise of others. Higgins was able to enlist support, in part, because he frankly acknowledged his amateur status. “A lot of people who work in this field, they want to give the impression that they’re in the know,” Kristyan Benedict, of Amnesty International, told me. “If Eliot doesn’t know something, he’ll just ask.” He often turns to social media to find answers to questions: “It would be useful if anyone could I.D. the mosque in the video at 1:34”; “Anyone know what the guy in this video is saying?”

Rather than make rivals of other bloggers analyzing Syrian videos, Higgins linked to their work. He used Storyful, an “open newsroom” tool that enables multiple contributors to conduct an investigation based on evidence gleaned from social media, and drew on the knowledge of munitions experts, chemical-weapons inspectors, and civilian opposition activists inside Syria.

Mindful that he’d once been the most reviled creature of the Internet—a commenter—Higgins was even indulgent with angry quacks, many of them Assad sympathizers, who attacked him on Twitter. He painstakingly marshalled his evidence, indifferent to the fact that they were indifferent to reason. “I like arguing with people that way,” he told me, with a shrug. “It’s entertaining.”

Reza Afshar, who until this month ran the Syria team for the U.K.’s Foreign Office, told me that when he joined Twitter, last year, one of the first people he followed was Brown Moses. Jeffrey White, who spent more than three decades at the Defense Intelligence Agency and now monitors Syria at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said, “We used to send reconnaissance units out to hilltops and report back on hostile forces. Now you’ve got people running around taking pictures and posting them.” Higgins, White said, is “basically the standard now for what’s going on in weaponry.”

Amid a growing international furor over whether Assad’s regime had deployed chemical weapons in Ghouta, Higgins culled more photographs and videos of the rocket with the knife-like fins. At least a dozen rockets had fallen on Ghouta in the early hours of August 21st. In the past, snippets of film—the twenty-six seconds shot by Abraham Zapruder, the footage of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon—have assumed an almost talismanic significance, and fuelled decades of analysis, not to mention conspiracy theories. Now that most cell phones have cameras, our mediated perception of significant events is seldom confined to a single point of view. One of the specialties that Higgins developed was open-source geolocation—authenticating that posted footage did indeed capture the place that it purported to document. To pinpoint the location of a rocket that had landed in a field in Ghouta, he gathered five images of the scene, each taken from a different vantage. Because the munition protruded from the earth at an angle, like a sundial, the shadows that the cylinder cast at different times of day varied. He compared background details—the field, a series of low buildings, a distant road—with aerial satellite images. On August 26th, Higgins posted an analysis studded with photographs, video stills, and satellite images. Like a detective in the final chapter of a mystery, he laid out how he had cracked the case. “The munition itself appears to have buckled over on impact, which seems reasonable as the center section of the remaining warhead is a hollow metal tube,” he noted. He concluded that the rocket had likely been fired from the north, “where 6-8km away you’ll find a number of military installations, connected by a 2km road to the 155th Brigade missile base.”

“ ‘Complimentary’ or not, you can’t take ninety million dollars’ worth of mints.”

By coincidence, a team of United Nations weapons inspectors had arrived in Damascus just before the incident in Ghouta, to investigate allegations about other chemical attacks. On August 26th, the inspectors visited Ghouta, and were filmed examining what appeared to be a spent rocket; it had been found in a courtyard after the attack. This was not one of the mystery weapons—it had a more conventional design. With input from readers, Higgins determined that it resembled an M14 artillery rocket from Soviet-era Russia. He obtained a diagram of the weapon and learned that an M14 is a hundred and forty millimetres wide. He could not confirm his theory, though, without measurements of the rocket in the videos. “Fortunately, one of the U.N. inspectors had the same idea,” Higgins wrote, embedding footage of a helmeted inspector holding measuring tape. “Below I’ve taken a screenshot, copied the measuring tape used by the inspector, and rotated slightly to measure the width of the munition. You can see in the full-sized image that the measurement is around 140mm.”

Meanwhile, Higgins was thinking so much about the rocket with the knife-like fins that he gave it a nickname: UMLACA, for Unidentified Munition Linked to Alleged Chemical Attacks. An antiregime activist in Syria introduced him, over Skype, to other activists, and to a doctor who had cared for victims of the attack. Although having contacts on the ground could significantly improve the fidelity of his picture of the war, Higgins was ambivalent about cultivating such sources. “I felt it ruined the purity of what I was doing a bit,” he told me. Video is a particularly transparent medium, and Higgins had always favored a style of argumentation in which he embedded primary-source materials directly in the text, making it easy for others to vet his work. The problem with drawing on offline conversations with sources, he explained, is that “you can’t say, ‘O.K., here’s a link to me talking to this person.’ ” Higgins urged his contacts in Syria to help him find more images. “If you come across any of these munitions, I could do with more photographs of them,” he told the activists.

Based on the symptoms of the Ghouta victims, several observers suggested that sarin had been used in the attack. But nobody knew for sure—and nobody knew how long the chemicals might remain dangerous. By the time videos of the first victims emerged on YouTube, many of the Syrians who had shot that footage were dying from secondary exposure. On August 24th, Higgins connected on Skype with the activists. They were in an apartment outside Ghouta, and they had something to show him. At first, the images were too pixellated for Higgins to see anything; suddenly, the picture became crisp, revealing an UMLACA, twisted and inert, close enough to touch. “They’d dragged the remains of one of the munitions into their apartment to show it to me,” he told me, wincing.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Higgins told them, pleading with them to be careful.

“Don’t worry,” they said. “We’re keeping it on the balcony. It’s fine.”

His contacts sent him scores of detailed photographs of the weapon. I spoke to one of them recently, and he told me that fellow-activists had vouched for Higgins as “a good blogger,” so he was willing to help. (Since June, the Brown Moses Blog has been available in an Arabic edition.)

Higgins posted all the images online. “I’m sure there are some very happy intelligence agencies who saw those posts,” he told me. Ever collegial, he wrote on his blog, “If you have any pieces of the munition you’d like photographed and measured, please let me know.” Higgins determined that the UMLACA was a 330-mm. rocket. One of his readers used the posted measurements to produce a detailed diagram. The UMLACA remains in the apartment of his sources. So far, no one has become sick from it. “They’ve promised to weigh it for me,” he said.

The Brown Moses Blog was now attracting a quarter of a million page views a month. Human Rights Watch had launched its own investigation into the Ghouta attack, and asked Higgins for input. “Eliot would be the first to admit that he’s an obsessive-compulsive person,” Peter Bouckaert, the emergencies director at Human Rights Watch, told me. “He literally e-mailed me and said, ‘I’m going to find somebody who can build one of these things and we’re going to fire it.’ I suggested to him that it might not be the best idea.” On September 10th, Human Rights Watch released a twenty-two-page report characterizing the strike as a sarin attack involving Soviet 140-mm. rockets and 330-mm. surface-to-surface rockets of “a type not listed in standard, specialized, international or declassified reference materials.” The report included a diagram of the UMLACA and photographs from the Brown Moses Blog.

On February 3, 1982, thousands of Syrian troops descended on Hama, a city north of Damascus, to crush an insurgency. The siege lasted three weeks, and much of the city was shelled. When it was over, Bashar al-Assad’s father sent in his security forces to dispose of bodies, and dispatched bulldozers to flatten entire neighborhoods. For decades afterward, it was dangerous in Syria to speak of Hama, and the fog enshrouding the siege obscured the death toll: estimates range from ten thousand to forty thousand. In 2007, Assad banned Facebook and YouTube, but after the current uprising began, in early 2011, and his grasp on the country started to weaken, he lifted the ban. The Internet has since become a potent weapon for opponents of his regime. Many young activists and rebels have posted videos of their peaceful demonstrations, and they have uploaded footage of destruction and casualties as an explicit rebuke to the erasures of Hama. Apart from a desire to document history, clips uploaded to YouTube could serve to galvanize the international community, or to appeal for support from wealthy donors in Arab states. Many neighborhoods have committees that record, edit, and upload videos.

Since June, 2011, the regime has briefly shut down the Internet several times, and government forces have employed sophisticated surveillance techniques to monitor the online activities of the opposition. But, recently, Assad has attempted to counter criticism of his regime through social media: he now has an Instagram page, and his forces release their own propaganda videos. Meanwhile, the Syrian Electronic Army, a consortium of hackers that is sympathetic to (and possibly directed by) the regime, has launched digital attacks on perceived enemies, and on media organizations, from the A.P. to the Onion. The rebels also have grown more sophisticated in their efforts online; many brigades now have satellite phones, so they can upload videos and maintain their YouTube channels without using Syria’s Internet.

Some videos that have gone viral have been deemed probable hoaxes, including a clip purportedly showing a rebel being buried alive. Another clip, uploaded by a Syrian opposition group, showed two men—identified as rebels in the Arabic voiceover—being decapitated with a chainsaw. The beheadings were real, but they took place in Mexico years earlier.

Higgins is cautious about the video that comes to him, and he is conservative in his conclusions. The peculiar democracy of the Web allowed him to establish himself as a war analyst, but if he started to get things wrong his credibility could quickly disappear. “I don’t have a reputation for posting rubbish,” he told me. Indeed, he takes satisfaction in debunking the claims of others. The day before the Ghouta attack, Higgins wrote a post on the misidentification of supposed chemical weapons. In a separate incident, in January, activists in Syria uploaded a video of a sinister-looking cylinder that was imprinted with Chinese characters; it had been recovered from the scene of an attack, and they thought that it was a cluster bomb. This was proof, some claimed, that Chinese-made weapons were being deployed in the conflict. After consulting a Chinese speaker, Higgins discovered the meaning of the printed words: bicycle pump.

No matter how meticulous Higgins is, some people discount him as a partisan of the rebels. This was an especially popular critique after the Ghouta attack, when many Assad supporters claimed that the rebels had gassed themselves, in a “false flag” operation to hoodwink the international community into intervening to remove Assad. But Higgins’s political views are no secret: they are enshrined, in vast quantity, in the comments section of the Guardian. He opposed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was broadly sympathetic with the uprisings in Iran, Egypt, Libya, and Syria, but he’s been extremely conflicted about military intervention in Syria. He loathes Assad and is horrified by the butchery of the regime, but he is shocked by the war crimes of the rebels, worried about the rising influence of jihadist fighters, and generally dismayed by the whole mess. In any case, the Brown Moses Blog does not appear to withhold or adulterate evidence in favor of one side or the other. Many opposition supporters were angry when Higgins revealed the secret pipeline of weapons from Croatia. More recently, Higgins observed on his blog that the weapons supplied to the Free Syrian Army were showing up in photographs of Jabhat al-Nusra—a development suggesting that some of the arms intended for the moderate opposition were ending up with terrorists.

Higgins is often accused of working on behalf of a spy agency—M.I.5, M.I.6, the C.I.A., the Mossad. Theories abound. And there is something unlikely about the idea that, twenty months ago, Brown Moses simply materialized as a full-fledged arms expert. Higgins insists that he has never knowingly had contact with intelligence agencies, though he has heard that some follow his blog. But a private intelligence company, Allen Vanguard, once approached him about a job. At the time, Nuray had been urging him to find employment. To me, she observed that it’s all well and good that news organizations and N.G.O.s feature her husband’s work, but none of that pays their mortgage. “It seems unfair,” she said.

Last March, Higgins announced on Twitter, “I’m about to accept a job that precludes me from blogging about Syria.” His followers protested, and someone suggested that he hold an online fund-raiser. Higgins set a modest goal of six thousand pounds, which would allow him to blog full time through the end of the year. Stuart Hughes, of the BBC, volunteered to shoot a promotional video for the fund-raiser, on the condition that Higgins give a seminar on open-source research at BBC headquarters. After a month, Higgins hit his fund-raising target.

“Mom! Dad! Do something!”

Around the time that the Human Rights Watch report was published, several intelligence agencies released assessments of the chemical-weapons attack in Ghouta. “They didn’t match what I said,” Higgins recalled. “They were talking about 122-mm. rockets. I thought, If I’m wrong, I’m going to look really stupid.”

Crowd-sourcing can be astonishingly effective, but it doesn’t always work. In April, immediately after an image of the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing was published, freelance social-media detectives took to Reddit and Twitter and ended up directing suspicion at several innocent people, including a Brown University student who had gone missing a month earlier. (Reddit subsequently apologized for what the company characterized as an online witch hunt.)

On September 16th, the U.N. issued a report from the weapons inspectors who had visited Ghouta. The report identified two types of munitions used in the attack: a 140-mm. M14 artillery rocket and a 330-mm. rocket—the UMLACA. The report analyzed the trajectory of the rockets, and though it did not explicitly blame the regime, the findings concurred with Higgins’s conclusion that the rockets had likely been launched from inside regime-held territory, probably in the vicinity of a major military site. “Based on the orientation of the impact craters, orientation of certain surviving munition components and other damage in the areas, the rockets are believed to have arrived from the northwest,” the report concluded. It featured a diagram of the umlaca. The U.N. inspectors had corroborated, point for point, the open-source investigation that Higgins had conducted from his couch.

Several years ago, a U.S. Army general named Michael Flynn, who had been overseeing intelligence operations for coalition forces in Afghanistan, co-wrote a paper, “Fixing Intel,” in which he argued that the military underestimates open-source information. Flynn quotes a former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Samuel Wilson, saying, “The real intelligence hero is Sherlock Holmes, not James Bond.” Mark Lowenthal, a longtime intelligence official who now runs the Intelligence & Service Academy, told me that, during the Cold War, “eighty per cent of what we wanted to know was classified and twenty per cent was open.” Now, he continued, “it’s often said that only twenty per cent of what we want to know is classified, and eighty per cent is open.”

The biggest challenge with open-source information is sorting through it—and loose networks of dedicated outsiders may sometimes outmatch the professionals. By the time government agencies produce classified intelligence reports about international developments, people like Higgins may have already known about them for a while. Andrew Exum, a prominent blogger who recently spent a year working on Middle East issues in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, told me that it often took days before “the intel products caught up with my Twitter feed.”

Still, there is a danger, particularly in the Syrian context, of reading too much into the narrow stream of visible information that reaches the outside world. Emile Hokayem, a Syria expert at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, told me that, although he follows the Brown Moses Blog and admires Higgins’s work, “we have so little information coming out of Syria that we tend to look at the evidence that does come out through a magnifying lens.” Data sifters can create an illusion of clarity. He warned, “There’s a lot that happens that we never see”—secret accommodations between local communities and regime forces, battlefield atrocities that go unfilmed. The videos coming out of Syria have a rich immediacy, but they hardly tell the whole story.

Higgins agrees. “You wind up in a situation where you can’t believe anything unless there’s a good YouTube video of it,” he said. Then he smiled, and added, “But that’s kind of where I started.” The hunger for incontrovertible evidence, he believes, is a legacy of the way in which citizens were sold misleading intelligence before the Iraq War. Today, many civilians are rightly skeptical when the intelligence establishment—or the press—makes claims about war crimes or weapons of mass destruction. “They don’t want to be told it happened anymore,” Higgins said. “They want to see it.”

One morning in October, Higgins was invited to a conference held by Google Ideas, the internal think tank of Google. The topic was “Conflict in a Connected World,” and Google had invited dozens of speakers for a two-day summit at a Manhattan hotel. The format mimicked TED talks, and many speakers supplemented their speeches with sleek multimedia presentations. Yasmin Green, who is the principal at Google Ideas, told the audience, “Don’t let the modest exterior of Eliot Higgins fool you,” and called his research “profound.” Higgins, wearing dress slacks and a pressed white shirt with epaulettes, walked stiffly onstage, as a large screen flashed a title, “Armchair Analytics.” The organizers had turned Higgins’s story into shtick, even supplying a plump leather armchair for Higgins to sit in. He seemed happy to play along.

It was only the second time that he had ever spoken publicly, Higgins told me later, adding, “Fortunately, when I’m terrified, I focus.” And it was only his second time in America. (Google had invited him to an earlier meeting, in Washington.) He was disappointed not to have seen more of New York—he had done little besides the conference. Because of jet lag, he had been awake at five in the morning, but someone had warned him that it would not be wise to venture out alone at that hour. Still, Higgins’s life was changing, and he was clearly enjoying it. Yasmin Green told me that she and her colleagues at Google have been “having discussions about how you scale Brown Moses.”

Higgins continued to investigate the question of who had fired the UMLACA. In August, he had found video that predated the Ghouta attack, showing rockets being fired from a truck-mounted launcher by a group of men. The men had on red berets of the sort worn by Assad’s presidential guard and by the military police. But the video appeared on a YouTube channel linked to the opposition. Anybody can wear a red beret. Perhaps it was rebel propaganda. The regime continued to deny responsibility for the chemical attacks.

Shortly after the Google conference, a slick video appeared on the YouTube channel of Assad’s National Defense Force. A soundtrack reminiscent of a Rambo movie played as a group of Syrian soldiers loaded and fired a familiar-looking rocket. Here was a government YouTube channel showing a government video of government troops launching an UMLACA. “I’ve got a feeling the channel that posts the N.D.F. videos—they might not realize what they’re showing,” Higgins said. He chuckled and shook his head. “I’ve been looking all this time, and they put it up themselves!”

The activist with the UMLACA on his balcony told me he’d learned that the world can remain implacable even in the face of irrefutable evidence. “Syria has been forgotten,” he said. He consoled himself that chronicling the wreckage in Syria at least creates a historical record: “It’s as necessary as documenting Hiroshima.”

Higgins is now seeking funds to expand his blog. He has been approached by people who are interested in emulating his work, and he has assembled a stable of writers. They’re also passionate amateurs, and he hopes that his profile will help their work attract notice. One writer is a Nigerian woman who had asked for guidance in conducting open-source investigations, so that she could use similar techniques to cover jihadists in Nigeria. He’s also hoping to rent an office, so that he can get out of the house. Eventually, he’d like to move his family closer to London.

I asked Higgins if his method would be applicable in other contexts. Syria is, in some ways, unique: the country is inhospitable to journalists but generates a huge tide of social media. You can’t glean much insight into North Korea by checking YouTube. I also wondered whether others could succeed the way that Higgins has. Some people have a preternatural ability to do math, or to play the piano. Higgins lived a fairly average life until a year and a half ago, when he stumbled across a highly specific undertaking at which he happens to excel. At one point, when I was talking to Peter Bouckaert, he said that he has come to count on the Brown Moses Blog, because Human Rights Watch doesn’t “have the capacity to monitor that many sources of information.” I pointed out that Human Rights Watch is a global organization, whereas Higgins is an autodidact from Leicester.

Higgins, though, is confident that other bloggers can adopt his forensic methods. He intends to set up online tutorials, so that anyone can learn the techniques of Brown Moses. The key, he said, is to carve out a narrowly bounded area that others have overlooked, and then focus. “I played a lot of role-player games,” he said. “Believe me, there are a lot of obsessive people out there who could probably put their passions to a more productive use.” ♦