Andrew Baker

Andrew Baker is a freelance filmmaker and photographer. His work is focused on documentary, both long-form and short.

His current projects include the feature documentary “Bellwether,” an expansive two-year production following the 2016 presidential election through the eyes of Terre Haute, Indiana — the one county in America that always votes for the winning president — and Beekeeping on Pluto, a 40-minute film exploring creation through the world of a Vermont blacksmith.

As a cinematographer and/or cameraman, he worked on “Severed” (Reuters documentary series, 2018), “Betrayal: The Plot that Won the White House” (MSNCB), Ultimaker product films, SNA Displays (Outsider), an untitled Tim O’Brien documentary (Look Alive films, dir. Aaron Matthews) and Ultimaker product films (Ultimaker). He lives in New York.

Olaf Sundermeyer

Author and journalist Olaf Sundermeyer studied law at the Ruhr-University Bochum and journalism at the University of Dortmund.

He has worked for national editorial offices in print media, such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), on radio and on television. His regular editorial team has been with Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB) since 2012.

His journalistic specialty is internal security issues such as extremism, crime, and violence in football. He is interested in the causes of conflict as well as the motives of violent activists, speaking with extremists in prison to uncover their motives. Sundermeyer is the author of several books; the most recent, “Gauland – The revenge of the old man” follows the transition of Alexander Gauland, AfD party chairman, from conservativist to extremist.

The biography is based on many of Sundermeyer’s conservations with Gauland and other relevant personalities. For his work, he was awarded the “Long Breath” research award in 2016 and 2018 and the German-Polish journalism award in 2014. Sundermeyer lives in Berlin.

Benjamin Strick

Benjamin Strick is an open-source investigator for the BBC and Bellingcat and an instructor and investigator with the EUArms.

He has a background in law and the military, focusing on human rights abuses, conflict, security, and arms. He is best known for his work for BBC Africa Eye on “Anatomy of a Killing” — together with a team of investigators and BBC journalists, Strick discovered where and when the execution of two women and two young children by Cameroon soldiers took place. “Anatomy of a Killing” won The Peabody, Webby and RTS awards.

Even though “Anatomy of killing” is Strick’s most well-known work, his investigations for Bellingcat and EUArms are equally important. He discovered the first Jihadi cryptocurrency crowdsourcing site on the Dark web and wrote about tracing a Jihadi cell, kidnappers and a scammer using blockchain. He also wrote numerous case studies regarding the use of different investigative tools in conflict areas. Finally, he loves dogs.

Frederik Obermaier

Frederik Obermaier is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author who works for Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Obermaier’s work focuses largely on tax havens, corruption, extremism and intelligence services worldwide. He has taken part in numerous award-winning investigations by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and the Forbidden Stories project, among others. 

Obermaier was part of an investigative team that revealed the existence of a video showing the head of Austria’s far-right party FPÖ, Heinz-Christian Strache, promising government contracts to a woman claiming to be a Russian millionaire. The reporting led to the resignation of Austria’s vice chancellor. Together with his colleague Bastian Obermayer, he initiated and coordinated the “Panama Papers” revelations after an anonymous source provided them with 2.6 terabytes of internal data from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. Obermaier co-authored an international bestseller about the project. Before the Panama Papers, he was part of the international team of journalists who revealed the “Offshore Leaks,” “Luxembourg Leaks” and “Swiss Leaks”. 

Obermaier has received numerous honors for his work, including the CNN Award, the Otto Brenner Preis, the Wächterpreis, the Journalistenpreis Informatik, the Helmut Schmidt Journalistenpreis and, together with his colleagues, a Scripps Howard award, the George Polk Award for Business Reporting, the Barlett & Steele Award and the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award (IRE Award). As part of the Panama Papers team, he won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in the category of “Explanatory Reporting”.

Pavla Holcova

Pavla Holcova is the founder of the Czech Center for Investigative Journalism, where she has investigated numerous cases concerning Serbian organised crime figures, Macedonian secret service investments in Prague, money laundering, and offshore companies.

She is a co-recipient of the Global Shining Light Award, which honours investigative journalism in developing and transitioning countries, and an EU Award for Investigative Journalism.

Holcova works closely with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting project on various international projects and investigations.

Before founding the Czech Center, she worked for six years at the People in Need humanitarian and human rights organisation as head of the Cuban section, and for Europe’s largest developer of open source tools for news media, Sourcefabric.

Matthew Caruana Galizia

Matthew Caruana Galizia is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and software engineer.

He worked at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) for five years, where he co-founded the organisation’s Data and Research Unit in 2014 and was a lead engineer on six major investigations: Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, Luxembourg Leaks, Fatal Extraction, Panama Papers, and Paradise Papers.

Caruana Galizia left the ICIJ in 2018 to continue working on the case around the assassination of his mother, Daphne Caruana Galizia, an investigative journalist who was killed by a car bomb near her home in Malta in October 2017.

Susanne Reber

Susanne Reber is an award-winning veteran investigative editor, author and executive producer.

She has a knack for innovation and specialises in assembling and managing strong collaborative teams to investigate, create and tell stories on multiple mediums.

She is the co-founder of Reveal and the former executive editor of the Peabody award-winning national investigative radio programme and podcast.

Prior to founding her own consulting practice, Reber worked at the Center for Investigative Reporting, CIR, where she held various senior editorial roles, including Director of Digital Media, responsible for all content in film, audio and digital.

Her investigative projects have garnered her three Peabody Awards, an Emmy and a DuPont award among many others, and were showcased in national and international film festivals.

In 2013, she co-created Reveal to showcase investigative narrative stories, taking the programme from idea to reality. The pilot episode won the team a Peabody award. In 2015, after the programme’s team was fully staffed, Reber moved into the role of Executive Editor, recruiting, cultivating and managing partner relationships. This work took her all over the country and the world.

Prior to joining CIR in 2012, Reber formed and led NPR’s first Investigations Unit, which won multiple Peabody Awards, a Polk award, a Robert F. Kennedy Award and numerous others during her tenure.

Before moving to the US, Reber spent 23 years at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., where she held various editorial leadership roles, including deputy managing editor of National Radio News and executive producer of CBC’s Michener Award-winning Investigative Unit from 2003 to 2009.

Reber is the co-author of Starlight Tour: The Last Lonely Night of Neil Stonechild, and is currently working on a new release of the book with Random House.

Reber also co-wrote and produced Faint Hope, a five-part, non-fiction audio docu-drama that was broadcast nationally and based on the suspicious death of Laurence Stocking. (CBC Radio Drama)

Reber graduated from the University of London with a bachelor’s degree in German and French language and literature. She earned her graduate diploma in broadcast journalism from City, University of London. Reber is based in Washington DC and splits her time between the US, Canada, and Switzerland.

Christiaan Triebert

Christiaan Triebert is a conflict researcher with Bellingcat, a multi-award winning collective that uses online open source information to investigate armed conflicts and corruption.

Among a wide variety of topics, Triebert has especially focused on investigating airstrikes in the Middle East, also in his capacity as geolocation expert for monitoring organisation Airwars.

His digital reconstruction of the Turkish coup d’état attempt won the Innovation Award of the European Press Prize.

Triebert aims to spread Bellingcat’s techniques and tools by giving worldwide digital forensics workshops, including in Iraq, Ukraine, and Colombia.

He holds a Master’s degree in Conflict, Security & Development from King’s College London, and two undergraduate degrees (International Relations, Political Philosophy) from the University of Groningen. Triebert conducted fieldwork in Syria and Iraq, among other countries.

What can journalists and regular citizens do to investigate governments and armed groups who don’t or hardly provide any information about incidents, bombings, tortures or corruption?

A growing number of citizens are pursuing facts themselves.

Bellingcat, an international investigative collective, uses online open source information in combination with digital tools to uncover the facts themselves.

How do they work, and which tools and methods do they use?

In his first presentation, Christiaan Triebert will give a unique insight into Bellingcat, thereby discussing a wide variety of cases showing how the group investigates incidents like the downing of Flight MH17, the failed coup attempt in Turkey, and fact-checking military claims with regards to airstrikes in the Middle East.

Henk van Ess

Henk van Ess is obsessed by finding news in data. 

European media houses, like Axel Springer and Persgroep love his literal and lateral thinking and hire Henk on a regular basis to spill his secrets.

He rarely appears at public conferences, so this is your chance to find out the best tricks in internet research.

Henk is a member of the investigation team at Bellingcat.