Eliot Higgins: How Bellingcat Hunts Down the Truth

What It Covers

Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, explains how his 35-person open-source investigation collective uses publicly available data — satellite imagery, social media, phone records, and flight manifests — to expose war crimes, identify Russian assassins, and counter state-sponsored disinformation campaigns across Syria, Ukraine, and beyond.

Key Questions Answered

• •Geolocation as a core skill: Satellite imagery from services like Planet Labs, available via monthly subscription, allows investigators to task satellites to specific locations and receive imagery within days. Cross-referencing this with social media posts enables precise verification of where events occurred — a technique that began with free tools like Google Maps in 2012.
• •Speed window for narrative control: When a contested event occurs — a shooting, an airstrike — investigators have roughly two to three hours before false narratives solidify. Once people form a belief, they rarely revise it. Publishing synchronized, multi-angle video evidence within that window forces governments and media to respond to verified facts rather than speculation.
• •Gray-market data as an investigative tool: In Russia, government databases including passport registration forms, house records, car registrations, and cell tower connection logs are purchasable through informal networks. Bellingcat used this data to map FSB agents' minute-by-minute movements across Europe, directly linking them to the Skripal and Navalny poisoning operations.
• •Community scale multiplies investigative reach: Bellingcat operates with 35 staff, roughly 200 trained volunteers, and a 43,000-member Discord community. The community surfaces leads investigators miss, and training others in open-source methods — including thousands of journalists and activists globally — creates distributed verification capacity that no single organization could replicate alone.
• •Disinformation requires a receptive audience: Russian influence operations targeting English-speaking audiences around Armenian politics generated near-zero engagement because the audience had no emotional investment. Disinformation scales only when it amplifies pre-existing distrust or grievance. Addressing the underlying institutional distrust — not just removing false content — is the necessary intervention for democratic resilience.