We Are Bellingcat

'Tells the story of the most innovative practitioners of open-source intelligence and online journalism in the world' Anne Applebaum

'It is impossible to exaggerate the urgency and power of Bellingcat's work' James O'Brien

'The gripping story of how Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat exposed some of the gravest state crimes of our era' Bill Browder, bestselling author of Red Notice

How did a collective of self-taught internet sleuths end up solving some of the biggest crimes of our time?

Bellingcat, the home-grown investigative unit, is redefining the way we think about news, politics and the digital future. Here, their founder – a high-school dropout on a kitchen laptop – tells the story of how they created a whole new category of information-gathering, galvanising citizen journalists across the globe to expose war crimes and pick apart disinformation, using just their computers.

From the downing of Malaysia Flight 17 over the Ukraine to the sourcing of weapons in the Syrian Civil War and the identification of the Salisbury poisoners, We Are Bellingcat digs deep into some of Bellingcat's most successful investigations. It explores the most cutting-edge tools for analysing data, from virtual-reality software that can build photorealistic 3D models of a crime scene, to apps that can identify exactly what time of day a photograph was taken.

In our age of uncertain truths, Bellingcat is what the world needs right now – an intelligence agency by the people, for the people.

About the Author

Eliot Higgins is the founder of Bellingcat, an independent 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. A senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, 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.