We Are Bellingcat
The Online Sleuths Solving Global Crimes
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ISBN10: 1635578477
ISBN13: 9781635578478
Paperback
288 Pages
$17.00
CA$23.00
In 2018, Russian exile Sergei Skripal and his daughter were nearly killed in an audacious poisoning attempt in Salisbury, England. Soon, the identity of one of the suspects was revealed: he was a Russian spy. This huge investigative coup wasn't pulled off by an intelligence agency or a traditional news outlet. Instead, the scoop came from Bellingcat, the open-source investigative team that is redefining the way we think about news, politics, and the digital future.
We Are Bellingcat tells the inspiring story of how a college dropout pioneered a new category of reporting and galvanized citizen journalists—working together from their computer screens around the globe—to crack major cases, at a time when fact-based journalism is under assault from authoritarian forces. Founder Eliot Higgins introduces readers to the tools Bellingcat investigators use, tools available to anyone, from software that helps you pinpoint the location of an image, to an app that can nail down the time that photo was taken. This book digs deep into some of Bellingcat's most important investigations—the downing of flight MH17 over Ukraine, Assad's use of chemical weapons in Syria, the identities of alt-right protestors in Charlottesville—with the drama and gripping detail of a spy novel.
Reviews
Praise for We Are Bellingcat
“John le Carré demystified the intelligence services; Higgins has demystified intelligence gathering itself.”—Financial Times
“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.”—Foreign Affairs
“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.”—The Telegraph
"We Are Bellingcat is Higgins's gripping account of how he reinvented reporting for the internet age . . . A manifesto for optimism in a dark age."—Luke Harding, The Observer
“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.”—The Spectator