Book Reviews
WE ARE BELLINGCAT BY ELIOT HIGGINS / BLOOMSBURY $29.99
Never heard of Bellingcat? You wouldn’t be alone in that. Just who, or what, is Bellingcat? In brief, the oddly named organization is an online collective formed to investigate international, mainly war, crimes. And yes, we can be a part of it. (Visit the website www.bellingcat.com for further information). In 2014, due to Bellingcat’s patient sleuthing, those responsible for the downing of Malaysian Flight 417 over the Ukraine – with 298 passengers aboard – were identified. Four years later in March 2018, Russian defector, Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found slumped on a bench on the verge of death, in the peaceful English city of Salisbury. They had been in contact with the deadly nerve agent, Novichok A234 which had been developed by the Soviet Secret Service. It was thanks to Bellingcat that the ‘kill team’ compromising of three Russian GRU operatives, was tracked down and the decision makers, even to the very top of the Kremlin hierarchy, were identified. 78 | THE IRISH SCENE
Each of these investigations necessitated the dedicated Bellingcat team, paid staff and volunteers, pouring over many thousands of hours of YouTube and Facebook footage, social media posts, and diverse databases. They trawled through magazine archives, news agency contents, chat sites, Google maps and satellite imagery in their meticulous quest to expose the truth. The book explores the cutting edge tools used in data analysis ranging from virtualreality software capable of building photorealistic models of a crime scene, to apps that can identify at exactly where and what time of day a photograph was taken. Amazingly, 90% of intelligence gleaned by Bellingcat came from open sources freely available to all. Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, was a high school dropout who began his rudimentary information gathering on a kitchen laptop in Leicester (England) during the early 2010s. He was initially preoccupied with the wars in Syria and Libya, before formally founding the home-grown investigation unit in 2014, just days before MH17 was hit by a warhead fired from a Russian Buk missile launcher. Now financed through crowd funding, with donations from Google’s Digital News Initiative Fund, Bellingcat’s credo is ‘Identify, Verify, Amplify’. Higgins’ book is a real life thriller about a collective of internet detectives who helped solve some of the biggest crimes of our time. As Toomas Hendrik Ilves (former President of Estonia) remarked, ‘If there were a Nobel Prize in uncovering war crimes, Bellingcat would receive it’. – Reviewed by John Hagan
