Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Bellingcat Is the Super Sleuth of the Internet, Exposing Governments, Extremist Movements, and Insurrectionists Around the World
March 10, 2021
Eliot Higgins is the founder and chief editor of the Internet sleuthing site Bellingcat (Ars Electronica)
By Bill Berkowitz
Welcome to the world of 21st century digital detectives! Citizen journalism is a thing: It is being used to identify perpetrators of human rights crimes and hate crimes, and to identify participants in the January 6th Capitol insurrection. (Sometimes Internet sleuthing has been used to troll and threaten people, but that’s a story for another time). An organization called Bellingcat, founded in 2014 by Eliot Higgins, which now has 18 staff members and scores of volunteers across the globe, has picked-apart conspiracy theories, investigated war crimes and hate crimes, uncovered evidence that Syria’s government used chemical weapons on its own people, and more, all by using clues gathered from a myriad of Internet sources, including social media and free satellite maps.
In 2018, Bellingcat uncovered the real identities of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, the two GRU assassins who went to Salisbury, England to snuff out Sergei Skripal. Most recently, Bellingcat identified the twenty-two year-old woman alleged to have stolen Nancy Pelosi’s laptop during the Capitol invasion, and found that she was a longtime neo-Nazi sympathizer. By piecing together numerous clues from an assortment of sources, Bellingcat was able to identify the woman, even though her face and eyes were covered in photos from the Capitol by piecing together multiple sources.
In 2018, Hans Pool directed a film called Bellingcat: Truth In A Post-Truth World, which explores how Bellingcat uses open source materials to expose events and crimes that were unsolvable for law enforcement and government officials. According to the film’s promotional materials, “In cases ranging from the MH17 disaster to the poisoning of a Russian spy in the United Kingdom, the Bellingcat team’s quest for truth will shed light on the fight for journalistic integrity in the era of fake news and alternative facts.”
In her introduction to a recent Fresh Air interview with Eliot Higgins, Terry Gross stated that Bellingcat has exposed how “extremists use websites to divert people to extremist sites that sell neo-Nazi merchandise and ask for donations to continue doing their work. The clues used by Bellingcat come from openly available sources like social media posts, leaked databases, and free satellite maps.”
Higgins, who has co-authored a new book titled We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News – with the novelist and journalist Tom Rachman. Higgins started out as a blogger, using the handle Brown Moses, named after a Frank Zappa song. As a media studies dropout, ardent gamer, and an office worker in Leicester, England, he used his laptop to scour the Internet, focusing on intriguing stories and participating in chat groups, where he expressed his opinions and ideas.
In 2011, before Higgins founded Bellingcat, he told Fresh Air that he was “basically just spending his time arguing with people on the Internet.” He was, and “average Internet user,” but “very interested in what was happening in Libya [and] spent my time on forums and websites like The Guardian newspaper’s Middle East live blog, arguing with people about what was happening there, you know stuff was being posted online and some people were saying, oh that’s fake that can’t be true. And other people would say there’s this that shows its true. There was no real approach to verifying this kind of stuff. I found it very frustrating because I was interested in seeing what was actually happening, [instead of] politically biased aspects of what was happening in the conflict.
Higgins found a video that “showed rebels claimed to be in this town call Tige (?).” People questioned whether that was true so Higgins had the idea “to go to satellite imagery and see if he could find it.” In satellite imagery he discovered small features of the town, roads, utility posts, etc. He found “exactly where [the video] was filmed and shared it rather smugly” on the Internet. “That was my first realization that you could actually look at these videos and figure out exactly where they were filmed and get a much more accurate and verifiable view on the conflict, and that really set me off doing what I now do as my career.”
Despite Bellingcat’s glowing reviews, not everyone is enthralled with its work. Thomas Scripps, writing for World Socialist Web Site argues that Bellingcat’s work aids the “ratcheting up of diplomatic, economic and military tensions against Russia.” Scripps writes: “Eliot Higgins, [is] a senior fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and Future Europe Initiative. The Atlantic Council is a leading US geopolitical strategy think tank. Higgins was one of five authors of an Atlantic Council report released in 2016, “Distract, Deceive, Destroy,” on Russia’s role in Syria, which concluded by calling for US missile strikes. According to Bellingcat’s own articles, Higgins and the rest of the site’s staff work closely with their ‘colleagues at the Atlantic Council.’”
“War Propaganda Firm Bellingcat Continues Lying About Syria,” reads the headline of an April 2018 Medium story posted by Caitlin Johnstone. Johnstone charged that “Bellingcat churns out such tripe constantly, and there’s a new article published yesterday that has all the usual warmongers salivating with particular enthusiasm.”
Current headlines on Bellingcat’s website are indicative of the breadth of its coverage: “Woman Accused of Stealing Nancy Pelosi’s Laptop Appears in Video Making Nazi Salute”; “Bodycam Footage Shows Far-Right Figure Alan Swinney Preparing for Portland Violence”; “The Websites Sustaining Britain’s Far-Right Influencers”; and, “The QAnon Timeline: Four Years, 5,000 Drops and Countless Failed Prophecies.”
As Luke Harding noted in his February 2021 Guardian review of We Are Bellingcat, its “rise reveals something new about our digitally mediated times: spying is no longer the preserve of nation states – anyone with an internet connection can do it. The balance between open and secret intelligence is shifting. The most useful stuff is often public. Bellingcat, you suspect, knows more than the suits of MI6; certainly, it’s nimbler. “An intelligence agency for the people,” as Higgins’s subtitle puts it.
Harding, whose latest book is titled Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West, finds that “The Bellingcat approach goes well beyond traditional journalism. Its volunteers have compiled an archive from the decade-long war in Syria, featuring 3.5m pieces of digital content. This has been preserved to assist future war crimes prosecutions. Dates and metadata are carefully recorded. Bellingcat has assisted Dutch prosecutors, who have charged several Russians with murdering those on board MH17. Higgins thinks traditional news outlets need to establish their own open source investigation teams or miss out. He’s right. Several have done so. The New York Times has recruited ex-Bellingcat staff. Higgins approves of this. In his view, rivalry between media titles is a thing of the past. The future is collaboration, the hunt for evidence a shared endeavor, the truth out there if we wish to discover it.”
Higgins is also optimistic about the future of the Internet. While many complain, and rightfully so, that an unregulated Internet leads to the spread of alternative facts, fake news, and out-and-out lies -- like Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the election being stolen – Higgins maintains that the internet is an “extraordinary gift,” that can still separate facts from fiction, truth from lies.
In a 2015 interview with Columbia Journalism’s Review Christopher Massioe, Higgins said that he hoped to see “a huge global network of investigators exploring a wide range of topics, from conflict to corruption, with transferable skills and tools that can be quickly brought to bear, regardless of where a story is occurring in the world.”
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