We Are Bellingcat
Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News
1st Edition
Published on 2. March 2021
272 pages
978-1-63557-731-0 (ISBN)
Description
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
"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, Observer
The page-turning inside story of the global team wielding the internet to fight for facts and combat autocracy-revealing the extraordinary ability of ordinary people to hold the powerful to account.
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.
"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, Observer
The page-turning inside story of the global team wielding the internet to fight for facts and combat autocracy-revealing the extraordinary ability of ordinary people to hold the powerful to account.
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.
More details
Edition
1. Auflage
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
ISBN-13
978-1-63557-731-0 (9781635577310)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
04/2022
Bloomsbury Publishing
€18.50
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Book
03/2021
Bloomsbury USA
€26.50
Shipment within 3-4 weeks
Person
Eliot Higgins is the founder of Bellingcat, an international collective of researchers, investigators, and citizen journalists using open-source and social media investigation to probe some of the world's most pressing stories. Higgins also sits on the technical advisory board of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In 2018 he was a visiting research associate at King's College London and at the University of California, Berkeley. @EliotHiggins
Content
- Cover
- Half-title Page
- Title Page
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Revolution on a Laptop
- The Press Is Dying, Long Live the News
- Syria: The War that Journalists Could Not Cover
- Information Wars and Barrel Bombs
- Front Page of the New York Times
- A Chemical-Weapons Breakthrough
- How Far Can We Take This?
- 2 Becoming Bellingcat
- A Gathering of Strangers
- Deceit vs Evidence
- The Student Who Pointed at Moscow
- 'Fingerprints' of the Murder Weapon
- Sleuthing Around the Globe
- 3 Firewall of Facts
- The Counterfactual Community
- Building the Firewall
- Online Hate Spills Offline
- Disarming the Traps
- Involving the Public
- 4 Mice Catch Cat
- Pushing the Boundaries of Open Source
- Blowing their Cover
- The Third Man
- Unit 29155 and 'The Laboratory'
- The Risks
- 5 Next Steps
- A Blueprint for Future Wars
- The Perils and Opportunities of Artificial Intelligence
- Where We Go From Here
- Afterword
- Notes
- Acknowledgements
- Index
- A Note on the Author
- Copyright Page
