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Information is the currency of the modern age, and with traditional news sources and social media information channels owned by multinational corporations, it can be difficult to know who is influencing the stories we read, and the methods used to obtain them.
Journalists had limited access to information on the aftermath of the 2013 Ghouta chemical attack during the Syrian civil war. To address this information gap, amateur blogger Eliot Higgins identified weapons used in the conflict by analysing footage posted on social media. Publishing his findings online under the pseudonym ’Brown Moses,’ Higgins’ novel approach to information gathering helped link the deployment of the nerve agent Sarin to the Syrian government. While the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad claimed the rebels were responsible for the attack, Higgins cross-referenced Russian news reports of a Syrian military operation near Ghouta, challenging the government’s claim that no Syrian military units were within the area.
Higgins’ work gained greater recognition from large news agencies, encouraging citizen journalists to adopt his methods of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). In time, this new collective of journalists coalesced into what would become Bellingcat, an independent news agency built around transparency and open source research.
Higgins describes Bellingcat’s founding mission in his 2021 book ‘We Are Bellingcat’ as dispelling disinformation and promoting transparency in the press. The Russian government has been the subject of numerous Bellingcat investigations. One of Bellingcat’s most prominent cases began in 2018 with the attempted assassination of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the UK using the nerve agent Novichok. While the Kremlin asserted that the two suspects were tourists visiting Salisbury Cathedral, Bellingcat uncovered inconsistencies in the official narrative. By analysing leaked documents and Russian social media profiles, Bellingcat identified the men as GRU operatives Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin. This investigation, which broke key details ahead of other news outlets, helped establish Bellingcat as a credible and influential outlet of open-source intelligence.
Bellingcat relies on its many contributors to provide coverage of human rights abuses that may have not been reported by the mainstream media. To support citizen journalism and fact-checking, the organisation publishes its methodology and training materials on open-source data collection. Guides such as ‘How to Identify Burnt Villages by Satellite Imagery’ or ‘Marine Oil Spill Identification’ allow anyone with access to Google Earth to make a massive difference and fight against censorship that allows war crimes and abuses of human rights to go unpublished and unpunished.
Bellingcat continues to be a vital source of in-depth research on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the conflict in Gaza. Most recently it has both identified a Russian missile striking a Ukrainian children’s hospital and geolocated the site of Hamas Leader Yahya Sinwa’s death. The success of Bellingcat has led to major news organisations such as the New York Times hiring from the wider OSINT community. Driven by their mission of pursuing “truth in a post-truth world,” Bellingcat aims to promote transparency on social media by using it against those who would seek to weaponize it to spread disinformation.
Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons
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