Chronicling the dark arts of dogged internet investigation, this book is a powerful, exhortatory call to arms for citizen journalists fighting for truth in a world where authenticity has become the most elusive of commodities.
We Are Bellingcat is Higgins’s gripping account of how he reinvented reporting for the internet age ... Higgins’s own story is an improbable one, shaped by good timing and grit ... Bellingcat’s rise reveals something new about our digitally mediated times: spying is no longer the preserve of nation states – anyone with an internet connection can do it ... The book – written with the novelist and journalist Tom Rachman – is also a manifesto for optimism in a dark age ... We Are Bellingcat offers a route out of our current epistemological crisis. Higgins’s answer: a bracing restatement of empirical values and good method.
... amazing story of the birth of a new type of journalistic investigation ... jaw-dropping ... Eliot Higgins is a remarkable young man, intelligent and relentless, and his book tells a story that needs to be read, digested, and discussed. 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.
One of the creation myths of the web was the nerd in his spare bedroom who became very rich/famous/powerful simply through the talent that these new technologies could set free and amplify. One such geek – an anonymous Leicester office worker in his early thirties – was Eliot Higgins. A socially awkward computer enthusiast with an interest in the news, he discovered a simple truth: if you searched online in a slightly obsessive way you could discover information that neither the press nor the experts knew. This was, Higgins realized, more fun than playing online video games ... Higgins’s book is a chronology of this journey from bedroom to global enterprise. It reads easily, if at times the author can’t resist diving into the weeds of how he and his team tracked down the tiniest needle in the haystack of data ... Bellingcat shows that the utopian hopes for the internet were not wholly misplaced – and that there is much we can learn from the motivations and methods of its pioneering amateurs.
... most of its chapters read like more polished versions of the reports the organization previously published online. These case studies are characterized by showing the group’s deductive homework—walking the reader through the identification and verification of each tile in a gradually appearing mosaic of proof. Sometimes exhaustive discussion of minutiae is necessary to bolster the credibility of the conclusions asserted—rebuttals to the inevitable question: How can you amateurs, just sitting at computers thousands of miles away, know that? As a result, the book can be dense at times. But at its best, it reads like that moment at the end of Sherlock Holmes stories, when the detective explains to his sidekick, Dr. Watson, how he deduced the solution to a mystery from overlooked and seemingly minor clues.
We Are Bellingcat is a thrilling, if demanding, read ... The argument that without mainstream media coverage of unfolding news, Bellingcat would lack the source material to launch investigations is spurious. They acknowledge their debts. Could such forensic gaze be trained on troll factories and shadowy figures in Ireland? Faith in investigative journalism is key. This is We Are Bellingcat’s story.
