We Are Bellingcat

Reviews

Fascinating ... a powerful, exhortatory call to arms. John le Carré demystified the intelligence services; Higgins has demystified intelligence gathering itself. Higgins traces his improbable journey from college dropout and video-game player to open-source intelligence pioneer … He recounts this unlikely tale with fascinating detail and fervor, making We Are Bellingcat a mix of memoir, manifesto, and police procedural: CSI for the international relations set. Riveting . . . What will fire people through these pages, gripped, is the focused, and extraordinary, investigations that Bellingcat runs . . . Each runs as if the concluding chapter of a Holmesian whodunit. A fascinating book . . . The lesson of this deeply impressive book is that, despite the noise, the propaganda and the lies, the truth is everywhere. You just have to know how to look for it. A David-and-Goliath story for the digital age … straight to the point and thrilling. Recent [open-source] journalism achievements—such as Bellingcat’s investigations … are compelling not just for their findings, but for the openness with which they explain the process of discovery. This is the closest that journalism has come to a scientific method. [A] gripping account of how [Eliot Higgins] reinvented reporting for the internet age . . . A manifesto for optimism. A provocative, even inspirational read. Higgins’s self-taught skills are impressive…fans of Bellingcat and advocates of citizen journalism will be fascinated by the behind-the-scenes details. Jaw-dropping . . . We Are Bellingcat reveals the power within each one of us to pierce the walls of disinformation and learn the truth about what’s happening out there. Optimistic ... and refreshing ... The tools and techniques Bellingcat uses are being shared and taught to groups around the world in hopes of capturing records of human rights abuses and war crimes, but also to ensure that a true accounting of the facts is preserved. In this post-truth era, such accounting is more critical than ever. Offers some hope that ordinary people, as well as the media, can judge events based on documented facts, not just wild assertions. If you don't know what Bellingcat is, this is your chance to learn: We Are Bellingcat tells the story of the most innovative practitioners of open-source intelligence and online journalism in the world. They have told the true stories of the missiles that downed the MH17 airplane in Ukraine and the chemical weapons used by the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. They have identified the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, exposed a Kremlin hit team, found ISIS supporters in Europe. In this book their founder, Eliot Higgins, describes how and why they do it. In a world of disrupters, Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat have turned the world of intelligence gathering on its head and put to shame the intelligence services of the biggest and most powerful countries in the world. We Are Bellingcat tells the gripping story of how the Bellingcat team used innovative investigation techniques to expose some of the gravest state crimes of our era. Their success is a wake-up call to governments who have been asleep at the wheel about what is needed to fight dictators and kleptocrats. Bellingcat has pioneered a new field of investigation that has proven key to understanding the clandestine criminal actions of Russia and other nations both at home and abroad. They have exposed numerous war crimes, human rights violations, and much more. If there were a Nobel Prize in uncovering war crimes, Bellingcat would receive it. No wonder authoritarian and criminal regimes hate them so. Expand reviews