MAXIMUM DISRUPTION

For the past eight years and more, Bellingcat, run by a loose-knit group of citizen journalists, has been scooping the world with its investigative reports. Ambrose Li takes a deep dive into its modus operandi.

Some of the most important news stories of recent years were broken not in a con ict zone, nor in a stateof-the-art broadcast studio, but via a single individual’s laptop, miles from the scene of the action.

And these have been major scoops – the details of the downing of the Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17), the identi cation of highranking Russian military intelligence o cers’ involvement in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal and the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian military. e list goes on.

e people behind these stories are part of Bellingcat, an investigative news collective backed by citizen journalists. Headquartered in the Netherlands, it has grown from a handful of volunteers in 2014 to a 30-strong team, with sta and contributors in more than 20 countries factchecking and verifying sources on issues ranging from war crimes and human rights abuses to the Far Right and corruption.

In the 2018 documentary Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World , Timmi Allen, one of the founder members of the collective, said: “We want to know what events have taken place, what has happened in crisis areas where reporters can’t go, and we want to make it public.” e group’s name derives from the expression “belling the cat”, an idiom describing a group agreeing to perform a fearsomely di cult task. e group’s founder, Briton Eliot Higgins, has frequently averred that its mission is teaching people to “bell the cat”. e adoption of the name in the group’s infancy has perhaps foretold the threats that await its members in ghting disinformation.

Bellingcat’s researchers are some of the leading users of open-source intelligence (OSINT), a term referring to the meticulous analysis and veri cation of publicly available data including social media posts, YouTube videos, satellite images and other online sources. “Di erent sources of information may not mean a lot in isolation, but if you can connect them, maybe you have a story,” explains Dessi LangeDamianova, Bellingcat’s chief operating o cer.

Asked whether he has been threatened in the course of his work, Foeke Postma, Bellingcat’s Netherland-based senior researcher and trainer, replied non-committally: “ ey’re de nitely looking to intimidate: people – certain gures – are very aware of what Bellingcat is. So I’ll leave it at that, if you don’t mind.”

Higgins has also been tracked down by state media Russia Today to Leicester, in central England, where he lives with his family.

However, Lange-Damianova quickly dispels the impression that members of Bellingcat are under constant threat. While risks of attack exist for the few researchers who do very sensitive work, she says the biggest risk the organisation faces is reputational damage. “ ere’s a bigger chance of … [us] publishing information … without having veri ed open sources completely than one of us being attacked on the street.” is independent and often contentious work continues thanks to Bellingcat’s multiple streams of income (see box below). Unlike traditional news outlets, there are no regular editorial meetings that dictate the daily or weekly news agenda.

“We have a lot of liberty to choose our own subjects to work on,” Postma says. “Sometimes you read a story and think, ‘Hey, something’s missing here. Can I ll in this gap?’”

Lange-Damianova elaborates: “We never know what we will discover. Our discoveries are based on a combination of the interests and the expertise of the researcher, and what can be found in open source. Sometimes it’s pure luck.”

Journalism’s changing face

OSINT investigations are not unique to Bellingcat. e recent wave of interest in fact-checking and veri cation work started in the early 2000s with other initiatives including FactCheck.org and Storyful. Professor Masato Kajimoto of the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, whose research focuses on fact-checking, says that the concept of journalism is changing, and Bellingcat exempli es the transition that the industry has undergone in the past decade.

He explains that in traditional journalism, reporters make public previously unknown information, whereas in fact-checking, researchers go after the stories which are already in the public domain. A good example is the downing of MH17 over eastern Ukraine in July 2014; while traditional news outlets might publish a story on the incident with a government statement, the work of factchecking researchers, with the help of OSINT sources, starts after that to uncover details of the incident and to hunt down the missing puzzle pieces.

Masato says that now more than ever journalistic work should focus on veri cation. “ e media’s role of gatekeeping information is completely gone,” he says. “A lack of information was what journalism tried to address. You want to have informed citizens to make better judgments, in a democratic system at least.” With the rise of social media, newsmakers no longer need traditional news outlets to disseminate and verify information. He adds that the result is that people are overwhelmed with vast amounts of new information – true or otherwise – that is cognitively impossible to digest.

Masato says when lies by politicians are reported, they should be called out as well; but he indicates that this presents a whole new challenge to journalism. “How do you

Top Five Stories

CHOSEN BY RESEARCH DIRECTOR ARIC TOLER

1. The Downing of MH17: By far the group’s longest-running and most-covered story, with Bellingcat’s researchers looking into every aspect of the downin of since . heir findin s have been repeatedly cited by the official Dutch-led criminal investigation.

2. Skripal Poisoning: ellin cat s first ma or investigation into Russian poisoning operations led the group to identify the two poisoners (and an additional support officer of double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England, in .

3. Navalny Poisoning: Using techniques from the Skripal investigation, Bellingcat identified the ussian Federal Security Ser ice officers who poisoned Alexei Navalny in Tomsk in August 2020. This investigation was the centrepiece of the Oscar-winning documentary Navalny

4. Frontex Pushbacks: One of Bellingcat’s most impactful investigations is a series of pieces on Frontex, which handles EU border management, and its illegal pushbacks in Greece. This has led to official reprimands of the organisation.

5. Syrian Chemical Attacks: Like the downin of , one of Bellingcat’s longestrunning investigations is into the numerous devastating chemical attacks in Syria.

BELLINGCAT’S FUNDING

33%: Training on the methodology using OSINT

•Trained 6,000+ people in 200+ workshops between and

• Participants: anyone from the general public such as students, academics, lawyers, NGOs, media organisations, government agencies, universities etc

33%: Institutional donations

•Foundations: eg Open Society Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy

• Intergovernmental organisations: eg the United Nations, the European Union (Bellingcat does not accept donations from individual o ernments

33%: Private individual donations stay politically neutral? In many countries, it’s often one side of the political spectrum that lies far more often than the other side.”

*Bellingcat’s operational budget was 2.8 million euros in 2022.

Masato, who is also the lead researcher and co-editor of the academic paper Information Disorder in Asia and the Paci c, concludes: “In Asia, this one side who tries to mislead the public is often the government. It’s really di cult and challenging for news organisations.”

OSINT versus censorship

In places with lower press freedom, Bellingcat’s methodology is “helpful” due to the lack of other avenues for gathering data, according to Aric Toler, the group’s US-based director of training and research. “In many countries, you can’t exactly send a Freedom of Information Act request, or get useful information on or o the record from government o cials,” he says, citing Bellingcat’s exposure of corruption and electoral fraud in Kyrgyzstan using OSINT and deep-data approaches.

“ ere is typically more information out there than people know,” says Postma, who has a background in con ict analysis, adding that satellite imagery is almost a superpower as it can now be captured more frequently, in higher resolution and at lower costs as the technology develops. “You can’t hide from satellites – satellites map everything on Earth.”

He raises the example that satellite imagery was able to show corpse-lined pavements in Bucha, Ukraine during a massacre when Russian forces were still in the town in March 2022, making it all the more remarkable because one could almost observe the frontline as the situation developed. “So even in a place where you have the littlest of freedoms, now you can visit via satellite and see what’s going on. It’s a major boon for the ability to do research and tell stories from outside of a country,” Postma says.

However, the availability of information alone is not enough: awareness and interest also come into play. Lange-Damianova points out: “ e possibility of information is global, but the attention is hyper-local because people care more about things in their immediate vicinity.” Not all events can garner international attention like wars or global disasters. “For example, it’s very di cult to explain to somebody in e Netherlands why they should read something about what’s happening in a Mongolian village.” People with local knowledge and awareness are needed, who might be risking their safety to draw attention to certain events.

Shedding light on OSINT’s limitations, Toler adds: “[In] stories where you get a ‘dead end’ on digital footprints, this is where the work of more traditional journalism really helps.” He says that Bellingcat partners with outlets such as Insider and Der Spiegel to continue with investigations that are not making progress with just online sleuthing. “You can’t create something out of nothing, and even if you extract every bit of data you can on a subject online, it’s nite.”

Beyond journalism

In August 2017, for the rst time ever, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant based largely on social media posts, accusing Libyan citizen Mahmoud al-Werfalli of 33 murders. It was at this point that Bellingcat realised its work could play a part in justice and accountability. Higgins wrote in his book We Are Bellingcat : “Whether we considered it or not, we dealt in legal evidence now, often the rst in the world to discover it, and the only ones archiving it. Our responsibilities had grown.”

According to Toler, a recent case of people in power coming under scrutiny following Bellingcat’s investigative work is the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex). An explosive report by Bellingcat in October 2020 exposed the assistance provided to the Greek authorities by the agency in illicitly pushing back EUbound migrants from Turkey. A lawsuit has now been led to the EU Court of Justice against the agency, accusing it of complicity in infringing on international protection commitments and fundamental rights in the Aegean Sea.

In pinpointing the di erence between gathering evidence for journalistic work, and that which is admissible in court, Lange-Damianova, who has worked for both the BBC and Al Jazeera, says: “What we try to do is to make a process of methodology that is accepted by accountability mechanisms for ensuring the evidence is accepted in legal proceedings.”

Postma adds: “In both cases, you’re trying to do the same, [to] establish the truth. e thing is that the threshold for upholding something in court is much higher, so it requires a lot more work to verify, to make sure that you’ve explored any outlet that could disprove the case you’re trying to make.”

Bellingcat has also worked hard to make its techniques transparent by organising training around the world, teaching geolocation, social media analysis, transportation tracking and Far Right investigations, among others. LangeDamianova says that it does so because it believes the trust in its work is built not upon the brand name or the glory of the institution, but upon transparency. “If you don’t trust us, here is the evidence, you can check for yourself. We have to show, in a simple way, where we found the evidence and why the evidence is correct.”

In an unpublished story, Bellingcat’s researchers used the same set of tools to track down a vehicle that stole a dog in a village in Britain. “ is is what we aim to achieve. e idea is to learn our methods and apply them in your local situation to solve your problem. It doesn’t always have to be a big political or international humanitarian problem,” Lange-Damianova says, pointing out that rumours at the workplace or at school are also misinformation.

“Misinformation is very dangerous. Wars start based on misinformation. People lose their jobs or even lives over misinformation. Instead of tackling the destructive e ects of misinformation, maybe we can prevent it: maybe we can help show people how to discover misinformation at an earlier stage, not when it’s too late.” n

Trend analysis

TikTok hashtag analysis tool (bellingcat.com/resources/howtos/2022/05/11/this-new-tool-lets-youanalyse-tiktok-hashtags

Developed by Bellingcat, this tool gathers videos with specific hashtags on the popular social media platform which could point to coordinated disinformation or influence campaigns. It has been used to identify the antivaccine movements in Germany.

Location and time verification of photographs

Google Earth (earth.google.com/web

One of Bellingcat’s most frequently used tools; not only can researchers verify where images and videos were taken, its timelapse function can also show how a place has changed over time. This can be used to establish the timeline of how certain events unfolded.

Monitor unfolding situations

Sentinel Hub satellite images (sentinel-hub.com

Updated twice a week, this site provides the latest satellite images of most places worldwide, giving researchers an extra perspective on a developing situation. For example, it helped understand how the Ever Given container ship became stuck in the Suez Canal in March 2021.