We are thrilled to welcome Aric Toler, Arijeta Lajka, Neil Bedi and Nader Ibrahim to the Video team.
Aric Toler joins Visual Investigations as a video journalist. Previously, he was the director of research and training at Bellingcat, where he oversaw the organization’s investigative work using groundbreaking open-source techniques.
Aric has deep expertise collecting and analyzing digital data and navigating social media platforms. He was part of the Bellingcat team that first identified the Russian missile launcher and military unit that downed Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers and crew onboard. The findings were later confirmed by the Dutch-led criminal investigation and the subsequent criminal trial.
His investigations have revealed Russian espionage activities in Europe and the United States, including his pieces on the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England. His work has exposed online personas operated by Russian military intelligence officers and war crimes carried out by Russian forces in Ukraine.
In his nine years at Bellingcat, Aric helped expand the organization from a small group of volunteers to an entity synonymous with open-source investigations. He also created and led workshops that taught digital sleuthing to hundreds of journalists and researchers across the globe.
This past April, Aric played a crucial role as a freelancer helping drive The Times’s series of investigations revealing the identity of the leaker of classified Pentagon documents onto the online social platform Discord. We detailed how we identified Jack Teixeira before authorities announced his name.
Aric, a fluent Russian speaker, graduated from the University of Kansas in Lawrence with a master’s in Slavic languages and literature.
Credit: Source link