We Are Bellingcat

December 21, 2020
Higgins, founder of the “online investigative community” Bellingcat, debuts with a brisk and self-congratulatory account of his organization’s founding and contributions to recent high-profile investigations. A college dropout who “took refuge in online video games,” Higgins traces his interest in open-source investigation, or using publicly available data to break news, back to the Arab Spring, which he followed obsessively from his office desk in England, posting insights he gathered from social media and Google Maps to a Guardian live blog. To keep a record of his discoveries, Higgins launched his own blog, where he published evidence that the Syrian army was responsible for a chemical weapons attack in 2013. After getting mainstream media attention and building a network of “established experts and amateur investigators,” Higgins founded Bellingcat in 2014. He offers blow-by-blow rundowns of how the collective identified the people believed to be responsible for poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter in 2018 and shooting down Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014. Higgins’s self-taught skills are impressive, but statements such as “I never worried that a bad actor could infiltrate this project” come across as overweening. Still, fans of Bellingcat and advocates of citizen journalism will be fascinated by the behind-the-scenes details. Agent: Elyse Cheney, the Cheney Agency.

December 15, 2020
A lively account of the rise of "something that has never been before: an intelligence agency for the people." A dozen or so years ago, writes Bellingcat founder Higgins, he "was just another computer enthusiast, an office worker in my early thirties with an unsatisfying job and an interest in the news." Then came a light-bulb moment: It was possible to leverage the internet for facts that had not yet been fully vetted by the putative authorities, judge their truth and/or value, and put them into the service of advocacy at the intersection of journalism, civil rights, and the investigation of crime. In what Higgins dubs OSINT, for "open source intelligence," a sprawling network of fellow researchers--called Bellingcat, after an old folktale in which daring mice hang an alarm bell on the neck of a predator--has both exposed official wrongdoing and helped battle the "ecosystem I call the Counterfactual Community." Its foundational principles, Higgins writes, are "Identify, Verify, Amplify," and the record of his case studies is impressive: Bellingcat activists were able to identify the man who, during the Charlottesville demonstrations of 2017, savagely beat an African American bystander, netting him a four-year prison term. They were able to prove that video footage of Nancy Pelosi slurring her speech as if drunk was a "shallow fake," meaning footage that has been doctored, and proved the involvement of Russian intelligence in countless episodes outside the nation's borders, including several assassinations of dissidents in Britain. As Higgins writes in this compelling study of trolls, stalkers, tech-savvy nationalists whose "nerd flippancy congealed into sadism," and the misguided followers of QAnon and other conspiracy theories, there is an awful lot to be on guard against in cyberspace but also a willing and utterly capable army of defenders against those who would disinform, misinform, and outright lie for political advantage. Those who are not allergic to facts will find this a provocative, even inspirational read.

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