Advertisement
PostMag
Life.Culture.Discovery.
Books and literature
PostMagBooks

Review | We are Bellingcat: Eliot Higgins shows that the truth is out there, if you are prepared to look for it

  • Eliot Higgins founded Bellingcat, the fiercely independent information-gathering organisation, to find answers to questions others struggled with
  • The book is written with the same openness Bellingcat claims to bring to its research, leaving others to judge for themselves

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
0
Newspapers are no longer the first rough draft of history – that’s now to be found on social media. Photo: Shutterstock
Peter Neville-Hadley

We are Bellingcat – An Intelligence Agency for the People by Eliot Higgins. Bloomsbury

Newspapers are no longer the first rough draft of history – that’s now to be found on social media.

Such is the view of Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, a fiercely independent information-gathering organisation that has made headlines worldwide by finding answers to questions that neither cash-strapped traditional newsrooms nor deep-pocketed state intelligence operations could discover.

How was flight MH17 brought down over Ukraine? Who used chemical weapons in Syria? Who poisoned Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England? We know the answers because Higgins and his collaborators discovered them, almost exclusively by using information publicly available online.
We are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins. Photo: Handout
We are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins. Photo: Handout

The truth is out there, but as Higgins explains in We are Bellingcat, it’s often been caught unknowingly on a drive-by dashcam or incautious social media post by a soldier. It is found by trawling through hours of uploaded footage, by comparing background images with satellite photography, and by measuring the angles of shadows to confirm the time.

Advertisement