Eliot Higgins, Bellingcat founder and author

TURNS OUT MULDER WAS BETTER THAN RIGHT. During all nine X Files seasons he kept assuring his partner Scully: “The truth is out there.” The Bellingcat website proves that it is—and, better still, everyday folks are the best at digging it out.

Bellingcat is a do-it-yourself independent international collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists in more than 20 countries determined to reveal the real truth of things.

They do it using their own brainpower and no tools more special than open source software and the social media that is open to us all.

Everywhere and everything

Bellingcat researchers are interested in everything and are relentless. For example Bellingcat researchers analysed a dataset of 4,952 so-called “Q drops” to trace Qanon back to its very beginnings.

Their output covers everything from tracking down identities of Capitol rioters to Mexican drug lords; from the war in Syria to crimes against humanity; from tracking the use of chemical weapons to where COVID-19 relief money is going in the USA.

“Paradoxically, in this age of online disinformation, facts are easier to come by than ever,” says Eliot Higgins the founder and CEO of Bellingcat.

Higgins says he was a video game fanatic in his teenage years. But when 9/11 happened he says: “I gained a new obsession: current affairs.”

Making the most of nothing special

The Arab Spring in 2011 was a focus for that obsession. He and his fellow news geeks put social-media photos, videos and posts under forensic scrutiny—especially after the fall of Gadhafi in Libya and the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War.

Their only tools were Twitter, Facebook and obscure databases. However, they became genuine experts in arcane topics like the sources of particular weapons.

The network of amateurs grew, led by a core of skilled professionals. No one had an axe to grind except to determine the facts of an event and publish those facts for the world to judge.

“My focus became valid information,” says Higgins.

Boring in

Validity was in the details, even in the posts of liars. Higgins used Google Maps and Street View to verify image content. A Google Image Search might reveal a photo of a purported atrocity to be recycled from another time and place. More specialized apps could confirm such details as who exactly was speaking at some event.

Within hours of the shooting-down of a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine in 2014, Higgins’s group identified the Russian missile unit that had done it.

Even more dramatically, Bellingcat nailed the Russian agents who went to Salisbury, England in 2018 to poison Sergei Skripal and his daughter with the nerve poison Novichok.

A Bellingcat member monitored the videos posted at the Charlottesville, Virginia protests and identified long chains of neo-Nazis “on the hypothesis that protesters tend to go to rallies with friends.”

Forewarned and forearmed

“Crisis readiness cannot begin only when disaster hits,” Higgins says. “Prepping means awareness that manipulators seek advantage in every news event, even global catastrophes; that the “Counterfactual Community” churns out fresh conspiracy theories; and that extremists devour it all.”

Bellingcat has gone beyond just checking Google Maps, but its methods aren’t trade secrets. It even offers an Online Investigation Toolkit to enable aspiring online sleuths to get into open-source investigation.

Higgins notes that many other volunteer agencies such as Mnemonic, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, Forensic Architecture, and the Global Legal Action Network, are working to find and preserve the truth, using similar methods.

Eliot Higgins and the Bellingcat collective prove again that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Eliot Higgins writes about all this in his new book: We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News. Published by Bloomsbury (2021)

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