Book Review: We Are Bellingcat - Eliot Higgins

The problem with autobiographies is that every anecdote ends with "needless to say, I had the last laugh!" This corporate-autobiography is no different - as it details the rise and impact of Bellingcat - a team of investigators and journalists.

I am in awe of Bellingcat - and have seen them give talks on a couple of occasions. This book is a thrilling account of how they perform "open source" investigations; solving crimes with freely available data. But every few pages, I got an uneasy feeling about their methods and motivations. The book is surprisingly incurious about the effectiveness, morality, and legality of what they do.

It is an excellent page-turner. From the origins in the Something Awful forums (!) to a network dedicated to unmasking the shadowy world of international espionage. It is honestly exciting - but strangely voyeuristic.

I don't know how to feel about a sentence like:

Although I spoke no Arabic and had never visited Syria, I became intimately involved in studying its war, observing civilians’ despair worsening every day via YouTube.

It felt a little "White Saviour Industrial Complex" to me. It is impossible to deny just how useful Bellingcat's techniques are, but it feels weird not centring or acknowledging what local people were doing.

I also don't know how to feel about releasing to the public before prosecutors:

For maximum impact, we had timed publication to the day before a report from the Dutch Safety Board, which had been assigned to determine the cause of the downing, although not to identify any culprits.

There are several instances where it seems that chasing headlines (and A/B testing them) was more important than getting evidence into the right hands.

I can't argue against Bellingcat being a force for good but, again, this makes me uneasy:

‘There’s a geolocation challenge for ya,’ I wrote, reposting the Münster photo to the tens of thousands of people who by that stage followed me on Twitter. Resourceful amateurs noted an advertising column in the background, and discovered ...

What's the difference between this and doxxing? Why is it OK for Bellingcat to ask people to help reveal private information about someone? Does it teach the public that this form of journalism is legitimate no matter the target?

It gets murkier:

In the case of the passenger manifest for the Moscow–London flight, we found somebody online with access to the Russian airlines’ booking-data system and paid about €200 for the file. The flight manifest added two crucial datapoints: the suspects’ purported birthdates and passport numbers.

That seems straight-up illegal to me. They bribed someone to breach the privacy of hundreds of travellers because they suspected their target was on board. Again, all for the greater good, right?

A contact at a Russian mobile operator provided us with metadata from a phone number registered under Sergeev’s cover persona, Fedotov. This showed all movements of Sergeev’s phone over the course of two years, from May 2017 to May 2019, including the date of the Skripal attack.

That's not "open source" intelligence. That's closer to industrial espionage.

I found the whole book ethically vague. Their skills are impressive. The crimes they've investigated are horrendous. It is amazing just how easy these data are to obtain. And it is incredible that a small team of loosely-affiliated investigators are able to build up such compelling evidence. But what keeps them honest? How easy would it be for them to turn their ire on someone innocent?

Qui indagatrix inquisitores?