What you are about to read is the story of a counter-investigation carried out by human rights activists. One of us was threatened and, as happens between brothers and sisters, all the others gathered around him to protect him. This is the first big lesson for us: no one is alone, no one protects himself.

You have to love each other, and these comrades love Don Mattia and Mediterranea very much, to be able to love a dream, a common struggle, like the one for a world that is fairer for all and less terrible for innocent people.

To them, to these sisters and brothers who have wasted so many nights and days to reveal the identity of an arrogant at the service of those who harm women, men and children, our gratitude goes.

Because their action reminds us of what we often forget: our strength is to be together, to share, to 'break bread'. Even when we face dark and powerful forces that are used to impunity.

The prosecution now has a name and a surname, a history, proven links to investigate. It must be said that if it had been the judge who wanted to hush up this case, which is one of thousands concerning human rights violations committed by states and governments, there would be no name and the only one in the dock would be the victim, in this case a priest "who does not know his place".

But today we give to Caesar what is Caesar's: there were other judges who did not want to cover up, cover up, cover up. So we have given Caesar the name and surname of this character who acts by trying to cover his tracks. Let those who believe in equal justice for all make good use of it. Do not stop at appearances, at the profile of the mythomaniac you see before you: often those who act against humanity with all their might use these characters precisely to attribute to their folly the 'banality of evil'.

But this story teaches us how important it is not to delegate to anyone the protection of our threatened companions. Or the 'discovery' of truths inconvenient to power. Creating counter-information networks, training ourselves in the offensive use of the law as a tool to fight against abuses and crimes committed 'in the name of the law', is a fundamental part of our journey.

Mr Robert has the same name and surname as someone who works for Frontex and is paid to analyse confidential data.

We ask the public prosecutor to check if this is the same person who is doing propaganda for the Libyan militias who call themselves the 'coastguard' and who are already being investigated by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

We call on the public prosecutor to investigate the links between Mr Robert and the Italian secret service, Aise, operating in Libya, which has proven links to traffickers wanted for crimes against humanity. Seizures at sea and deportations of women, men and children to Libyan prisons are not 'rescue'. The threats against Don Mattia are part of a systematic and planned campaign against witnesses, those who, both at sea and on land, tell the world what states and governments would prefer to keep hidden or tell otherwise.

Mr Robert can now be summoned and questioned. Those in charge of Frontex can now clarify what kind of relationship they have with him, if it is the same person who is listed as their collaborator. The fact that Mr Robert has a rather strange profile does not surprise us: those who work undercover are often considered idiots. Useful, though.

Here we report on the JLProject survey.

Rgowans made a mistake and was identified: he was selling vintage lamps using the same email he used to write to Frontex.

There are almost fifty of us in the JL Project and we are growing every day since we were adopted by Mediterranea Saving Humans. Fifty ordinary people who dedicate their free time to pro bono forensic investigations for lawyers who, again pro bono, defend the rights of all. Amateurs, they call us. And that makes us happy, because it is a definition that does not repel those who want to join us, and it makes us smile, because in reality there is no official course of study for those who oppose the gigantic system of illegal detentions and deportations to Libyan lagers that we have chosen to attack. Self-education is the only possible training: we study, we learn, we teach.

In tantǝ we learn best, and the 'Hermione' sub-group of the JL project does just that: it studies. One of the things it has been studying for some time now is the Migrant Rescue Watch Twitter account: Rgowans.

What is Rgowans

It is a Twitter account that, since 2017, has systematically distorted the reality of what is happening in Libya and the Mediterranean, spreading the false narrative of a good Libyan coastguard rescuing people and bad NGOs in cahoots with traffickers. It receives live footage from all the Libyan militias and coastguards. It often publishes photos and videos by altering their content, for example by deleting images of so-called Libyan coastguards sinking a dinghy with gunfire and editing only the part where terrified passengers are rescued from the water.

The account also publishes sensitive and confidential European material, including aerial photographs taken by Frontex drones and documents from the Italian coastguard. There has been a parliamentary question about this.

The Rgowans account has publicly insulted and threatened Don Mattia Ferrari and the journalist Nello Scavo, and is being investigated by the public prosecutor in Modena. A few weeks ago, a judge recognised the criminal relevance of the threats and ordered new investigations. But there is a problem: the prosecutors are unable to trace the owner of the account.

The JLProject investigation begins

The JL project expresses its solidarity with Don Mattia Ferrari and Nello Scavo. But in addition to solidarity, it decided to offer something more practical: a hundred eyes. Being in the tantǝ, theǝ volunteersǝ of the JLP can read all 16385 tweets published by Rgowans and every word of his countless blogs.

The collective is thus confronted with texts in different languages (English, French, Italian, German...) and a blatantly false name, RobGowans.

Like many journalists, the JL Project initially believed that a group of people of various nationalities was hiding behind Rob Gowans. Anonymous, cautious, untraceable, so much so that even the police cannot locate them. But deeper investigation reveals a common character, an underlying style, always the same, which leads the Hermione group to believe that Rgowans is one person.

Everyone has a story and a past. Cautious people are made, not born. So the collective decides to study the first things Rgowans published and manages to identify two mistakes he made, two traces he left, probably through carelessness.

The first clue: the Polish e-mail

In one of the first blogs, from 2017, Rgowans makes a big mistake: he takes some screenshots of his computer and forgets to delete the top bar, where the most visited sites appear. Among them, a Polish email provider, @o2.pl, always appears.

"What has Poland got to do with this?" wonders the JL project. In addition to the four languages identified (English, French, Italian, German), a fifth now appears: Polish.

"What is in Poland?" asks the JLProject. And the only thing that comes to mind is Frontex. After all, there are a lot of aerial photos taken by Frontex drones posted by Rgowans on Twitter. But maybe this is just a coincidence.

The second track: Protectio Servitium Integritas

The second mistake Rgowans makes is putting a motto in his old blog from 2017: 'Protectio Servitium Integritas' and, as if that were not enough, removing it in the newer blogs confirming the importance of the track.

Protectio Servitium Integritas, besides being Rgowans' motto, is also the motto of the Canada Border Services Agency.

Canada? Another country? Yes.

The JLProject takes note of the two mistakes. Take note of them too, they will be interesting later on.

The night of the turning point

The JL project often works at night because all the volunteers work or study during the day.

For the past month, the group has been reading Frontex documents published by independent journalists from FragDerStaat and the OCCPR (Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project). Only those of interest to the project (Frontex operations in the central Mediterranean) are thousands of pages long. Impossible for one person to read. But fifty people can!

So we read, often at night, and find important things, like the Operation Themis database, which shows that at least 588 rejections in Libyan lagoons were handled by the Italian government and Frontex.

01:46 a.m. A message arrives from Gecko, one of the volunteers of JLProjectǝ, Hermione group. He writes: "I may have found it.

Let's go and see.

Among the Frontex documents he was reading, Gecko found an email sent by Rgowans to Frontex on 11 October 2017. You can read it here

It is a long email (16 pages) in which an anonymous person reports on the Lifeline case, obviously from his anti-NGO point of view. The author claims to be the manager of the blog 'Migrant Rescue Watch'. The document shows the address from which the email was sent and a new pseudonym: Rbsorb.

Gecko searched the web for the email and discovered that the address turned out to belong to Robert, a seller of vintage lamps and art deco memorabilia on Flikr.

Gecko also discovered that Robert wrote on a naval enthusiast blog in 2012, selling old Canadian naval memorabilia.

Remember Canada? Well, Gecko remembers and realises that he is on the right track. So he gets a name and a surname. It's all downhill from there: Facebook profile, Linkedin account, etc.

The night of the discovery of Rowan's identity, no one sleeps.

By 4pm we have found everything and it is shocking.

We don't want to invade Rgowan's privacy here, even though he is a public figure who has voluntarily put his entire life online, complete with photos, phone numbers, date of birth, first and last names of family members. I believe that everyone has a right to privacy, so we will only tell what is important - and disturbing - from a journalistic point of view, and from the point of view of defending the fundamental rights of people on this planet. We will call him Robert BXXXXX.

Who is Robert BXXXXX

Among the information that Robert BXXXXX publishes on the Internet, we see that he is a former Deputy Chief of the Canadian Coast Guard, that he has lived in Germany and is now in Poland, that he was in Malta in 2016, that he spent some time in Italy in 2017 and 2018, and that he speaks 6 languages: English, Italian, German, Polish, French and Sorbian.

These are exactly the five languages identified by the JLP, plus Rowan. BXXXXX is or was a Sorbian activist from Lusatia. The pseudonym 'rbsorb' he chose for the email address he used to write to Frontex and sell old lamps means just that: 'Robert BXXXXX Sorbo'.

BXXXXX publishes old photos: of him as a model on the cover of a magazine, of him in a Canadian Coast Guard uniform and of him in 2004 as an assistant to two MEPs (at the time he used an email address from the Polish operator @o2.pl).

In the summer of 2017, Robert BXXXXX is in Italy, in June he reviews a hotel on Lake Garda on Facebook, and in August he writes that he is a journalist and a former deputy chief of the Canadian Coast Guard.

At the time, BXXXXX was commenting on articles about migration in the Mediterranean on Facebook, even mentioning his own blog.

On the blog 'Migrant Rescue Watch' appears a screenshot taken from a mobile phone in the same summer of 2017, on 21 July, in which the author once again forgets to delete the upper band. You can clearly see the operator: Italian.

The JL project has carried out textual comparison analyses between what Robert BXXXXX writes on Facebook and what 'Rgowans' writes on Twitter and in the blog. It has already identified some recurring phrases in both profiles.

The network of contacts with militias and the so-called Libyan coastguard

On Facebook, BXXXXX likes the content of the so-called Libyan Coast Guard and communicates publicly with its members. His friends have visible friends lists, and it is easy to find Robert BXXXXX among the friendships of all the militiamen and coastguardsmen who have liked or commented on his posts.

BXXXXX's Facebook friends include dozens of Libyan militiamen and coastguards. Many of them are part of the crews of the patrol boats given to Libya by Italy and trained in Italy.

In particular, the JL project observed the posts of the so-called Libyan coastguards of the patrol boat Sabratha 654, trained in Taranto in 2017. On the day of their graduation, Rgowans posted a photo taken from inside the Mariscuola in Taranto. The photo has an 'inside' view. Was Rgowans there that day?

Surely his friends on Facebook were, posting dozens of photos taken in Italian military areas and even one of them posing under the military ship San Giorgio.

Rgowans' tweets about Frontex

JLProject volunteers Luna and Neville have recently been doing an exceptional job analysing the 16385 tweets published by Rgowans from 2017 to the present day, and so far they have already returned some very interesting data.

Out of 16385 tweets, Frontex is mentioned or tagged 5958 times.

Luna and Neville sorted the tweets by day of the week, removing public holidays (Saturday and Sunday) and considering normal working hours. Logically, they did not know when Rgowans were on holiday, but they still highlighted 4076 tweets that could have been written during working hours, of which 2570 mentioned Frontex.

Analysis of the tweets also reveals something else. Rgowans tweets during working hours, but slightly less than in his free time. Plotting the tweets on a graph suggests that he has a steady job with a one-hour lunch break.

Conclusions

As soon as Rgowan's identity was discovered, Mediterranea Saving Humans immediately informed the public prosecutor's office in Modena and provided everything the JL project had found.

According to the GIP, Rgowan's attack on me is an attack on the moral dimension, denigrating my dignity and objectively exposing me to public and general contempt.
I am deeply indignant that this person has, in recent years, published top secret documents of the Italian and European military apparatuses and acts as a spokesman for the Libyan mafia, flaunting and celebrating their criminal activities on a daily basis and humiliating our migrant brothers and sisters.
We are facing a scandal of epochal proportions that must be answered. We call on all institutions and citizens to work for truth and justice. I sincerely thank the activists who made this discovery. And I guarantee that we will go all the way, our visceral passion will see us through to the end.

The JL Project now appeals to all analystsǝ and journalists interested in pursuing this investigation: take it and pursue it! This collective of amateurs is proud to pass the baton to you.