I have been listening to the Bellingcat podcast and was delighted to see this book, it basically gives a potted history of the (organic) development of Bellingcat. The story is very interesting and shows how quickly online investigation has developed in recent years.

Higgins started his work from his kitchen table and quickly became an expert in the field. Much of his work has been marred by those who seek to spread disinformation and constantly called his work into question.

Through Bellingcat's work on the Skripal poisonings and the MH17 downing the organisation has developed a reputation for thorough fact checking, emotional distance and letting facts speak for themselves.

This book is very interesting and gripping and I thoroughly recommend it.

I have to admit that whilst I was aware of Bellingcat, my knowledge of it was sketchy at best. This is a detailed history of Bellingcat and its founder, Eliot Higgins, aka blogger Brown Moses, named after a Frank Zappa song. Higgins outlines his background, becoming obsessed with the Arab Spring and the Libyan Civil War, whilst working as a admin worker in Leicester, using his laptop to scour for information on the internet to add small details on twitter, and other sites, such as the comments section on the Guardian-live blog, focusing on developing stories in the Middle East. Such humble beginnings is later to give birth to the global entity, taking on an ever broader range of issues, that is Bellingcat, global truth warriors, a growing community of largely determined and obsessive voluntary contributors, armed only with their laptops, searching the internet, social media and google earth for open source information.

Bellingcat are the digital detectives who tracked down the Russian GRU agents responsible for the 2017 deadly Novichok nerve agent attack in Salisbury, Britain, that targeted Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, an attack that Putin's Russia had denied, a Russia that had previously gone after Alexander Litvinenko. At their heart, Bellingcat, with its collaborative spirit, sets out to take an evidence based approach, to identify, verify and amplify (publicise) the truth in a counterfactual, post truth, era, challenging the powerful, politicians and the criminal, demanding accountability and offering training for those interested in their methodology. Amongst their many successes, they have exposed Assad's use of chemical weapons in Syria, identified ISIS members in Europe, tracked down the Neo-Nazis responsible for violent attacks in Charlottesville, and proved that the Russians downed the Air Malaysia passenger plane in Ukraine. Needless to say, they have made powerful enemies determined to destroy them, you cannot take on the likes of Putin's Russia without consequences.

Bellingcat is the people's intelligence agency at a time when power is in fewer and fewer hands, an organisation that has begun to challenge that old adage that history is written by the victors, now it can be written by the defeated too. It has even charted how people have become radicalised into becoming far right white supremacists, not in itself a new phenomena, by decoding information many had seen but few had understood. It is terrifying just how much information on people is held on the internet, not to mention photographs, and where people can be tracked through family and friends, raising the question whether there is any such thing as privacy. On the other hand, it is Bellingcat's abilities to trawl through this very mass of openly available data that allows it to come up with its ground breaking stories. This is a fascinating and informative read, Higgins provides a mass of intricate details on their biggest operations, including their use of geolocation techniques, and it is written in a riveting and highly readable style. Highly recommended. Many thanks to Bloomsbury for an ARC.

Very interesting book about how Bellingcat started as an organisation that uses open source information so it can openly say what the outcomes were as opposed to MI5 or government agencies that need to remain quiet or risk losing their secrets. Very detailed and a spy type read. I hadn't heard of Bellingcat before this, but there is a link to the blogger Brown Moses too. It also describes the part the mainstream media play. Highly recommend this book.

This is an interesting account of the fight against what the author calls the “Counterfactual Community”, which includes but is not limited to the Russian FSB and assorted multi-national internet extremists. I came to this book having known pretty much what the author, as the blogger “Brown Moses” had been up to regarding Syria a few years ago, and that “Bellingcat”, the offspring of his blog, had tracked down those responsible for the Salisbury Poisonings when the police and MI5 had not (or at least, not so far as we know). Precisely because Bellingcat uses open source information, it is able to publish its successes when traditional national intelligence agencies have to keep quiet or lose their secret sources.

The author describes not only the basic open source investigative methods he invented for the Brown Moses blog, but also how these have evolved, through the Bellingcat years, to meet threats, needs and opportunities alike. It is interesting to see how he keeps ahead of the counter-factual community as their own methods change, not necessarily in the directions of either enlightenment or sophistication, but towards a sort of amplified assumed ignorance which they impiously hope will prove contagious. The author sees this as a tendency to deliberately confuse issues rather than explain them and to pretend that there is no such thing as truth. He also sees this is a trait which some people have, rather than a policy that someone invented. In my own view, if anyone in modern times invented the “post-truth world” it was Vladislav Surkov, who is notable amongst those involved in Vladimir Putin’s rise to power by virtue of the fact that he is still alive and he is, if anything, more influential than he once was (everyone else has been sidelined or has had a heart attack). Imagine, if you will, a version of Alistair Campbell who gets his way by throwing thinking fits rather than shouting blood-curdling threats down the phone at editors and ministers alike. The author makes no mention of Surkov and clearly has never investigated him, but should he choose to do so, he might be able to cast even more light into dark corners than he has done already. But the post-truth world is not just a modern invention: “what is truth?” was a popular way to justify falsehood and injustice in the Roman world and we have Pontius Pilate as an example of where treating truth as an illusion will get you.

The author is not a fan of Wikileaks and Julian Assange. The Wikileaks methodology is described as leaking such a huge mass of data at once that it is impossible to verify it all. (Even assuming it is all true, the weapon of the righteous is the sword of truth, not truth’s cluster bomb.) The author does not really explain his reservations about Wikileaks as clearly as he might, certainly not at any length, so here’s my understanding of what he means:

A great mass of largely incomprehensible facts are assembled, in the knowledge that what the mainstream media will do upon their release is to use search engines and other software tools of varying degrees of sophistication to quickly cherry-pick all the “relevant” (in other words: “juicy”) bits. All the malign actor needs is a grudge against someone (Hillary Clinton, in Assange’s case) and they can sow their gigabyte or so of factual but largely incomprehensible data with some really nice-looking cherries, which the journalist’s predictable cherry-picking search terms will be sure to find. But because the data as a whole is so indigestible, the verification process has already been abandoned because the carefully-timed release of the huge mass of data has put competitive journalists under pressure of time as they seek to be first to find the best cherries and publish them. So mostly or even completely true facts, in sufficient concentration, can become a “Weapon of Mass Disinformation.” And Ms Clinton’s reputation has been trashed. Or anybody else’s reputation, on the left, right or even the extreme centre represented by Tony Blair and Immanuel Macron. I do not perceive Ms Clinton to be a martyred innocent, but suggestively shaving some truths to the bone and letting journalists discover them, as if by their own efforts, in the middle of a pile of factual irrelevance is a tool which could convict anyone of anything. The ultimate injustice is to harness truth to evil ends.

The author does not mention the ICIJ, but I’d regard them with some of the same reservations he clearly has about Wikileaks, because they also tend to gleefully pack their truth into cluster bombs.
And although, from the very beginning of his investigative career Eliot Higgins has battled the FSB (which takes considerable courage), the need now is for someone to take the fight to China’s 610 office and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. The FSB is only committing murder, after all, whilst the 610 Office and the XPCC are doing worse than that. They are not working together to commit genocide, so much as working independently to each eliminate a completely separate victim community. The FSB seeks to pick a fight and then win it, which is how Mr Higgins comes to be fighting them (and, touch wood, winning). The 610 Office and the XPCC are currently having their way without any fight at all.

Really interesting take on online sleuthing and citizen journalism.

This book is incredibly detailed and not so much a how-to but rather a history of how the organisation started and how they uncovered some huge misinformation including the Malaysian flight that was shot down and the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury.

The book talks about how the organisation started with Eliot Higgins as an amateur sleuth to the organisation in its present form.

I found it really interesting and different from anything I've read before, but it is incredibly dense and detailed so if this is something you're interested in, I'd recommend this book.

I did not know anything about Bellingcat, not even the name, but I looked up their website and was fascinated by what I found. A people's intelligence investigative agency, or so I understand it to be, based on merit for employees, and what any person with a link to the Internet can find out. A very interesting book.

I had heard of Bellingcat (what a delightful coined phrase that perfectly describes what they do btw) but this book was still an eye opener. I was familiar with many of the crimes and the methods of detection and the use of open source data just blew me away. It reads like the tautest, paciest spy fiction but these are facts and the detectives are cleverer. A fascinating read.

Let me start by saying I have heard of Bellingcat approximately 6 months before seeing this book, and even back then, I greatly admired the work they do and the techniques they use. So Bellingcat wasn’t entirely new for me and I picked up this book with the expectation to learn a bit more about them.
I have learned a lot about them as I was reading this book. I think it is great for everyone - whether you are someone who knows about Bellingcat, or whether you have never heard of them. Whether you are one of the OSINT enthusiasts or have never heard about image reverse searching.
This book talks about the beginnings of Bellingcat, how it all started, about the growth of the organisation, about the biggest cases up to date, but also about techniques used for online investigations. Very interesting reading, very informative, and very well written.