Myths, truth and disinformation busting- The rise of Bellingcat

Book review of «Bellingcat - An intelligence service for the people», by Elliot Higgins.

Over two years after the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine started, societies in the West now have grown accustomed to Putin’s Russia committing acts in Ukraine that until recently were deemed unthinkable. Bombing children’s hospitals, massacres in occupied territories, mistreatment of prisoners of war and environmental crimes – the list goes on and on. Although these facts today are undisputed by the large majority in Western societies, our understanding of facts was substantially different just ten years ago. When Russian forces in 2014 simultaneously took over Crimea while they were denying doing the very same thing, we were more confused than anything else.^[i]

One might argue that it took a very long time to understand the sheer scale of Putin’s belief in the use of violence and massive force as a completely acceptable tool of his foreign policy. After all - did we really sleep through the Crimea and Donbas occupations in 2014 and before that, the short but bloody war against Georgia in 2008? One reason for our complacency in the West was that many were affected by the sheer mass of differing information: Had maybe the Georgians started the war in 2008?^[ii] The green men in Crimea in 2014; could they not be freedom fighters? Could we be sure they are Russian?^[iii]

Maybe we were just too used to thinking of Russia as a partner. It is noteworthy that even NATO’s headquarter was slow to react: A not very well-known fact is that Russian liaison personnel – although being reduced steadily since 2014 - were present and had access to NATO HQ in Brussels until they themselves suspended their mission in 2021^[iv]. 

Disinformation as warfare

As has became clearer with time: The above-mentioned sowing of confusion constitutes an integral part of Russian warfare.^[v] They have effectively been weaponizing the sheer amount of disinformation which is flooding today’s media landscape. This, combined with a very adept way of utilizing a number of grey-zone techniques – has proven to be very efficient in confusing the Western societies and rendering them slow to react to developments on the ground. And nowhere is this as evident as in the Ukrainian war: “[The] Kremlin is working specifically to make the international community’s response to the war and public support for Ukraine more difficult or impossible.”^[vi] In the West we were just as unprepared for the use of disinformation as we were for the level of violence Putin’s Russia is using in order to attempt to reach their desired goals.

But even as we today start to understand how the Russian tools and techniques work, we are still left with a problem: In our open societies with free speech and unlimited access to an overwhelming amount of data and information, both real and fake - how can we know what is true and what is not? How can we assess facts fast enough in our information-overloaded societies where traces of facts seem to be hopelessly intermingled with clickbait, internet junk, bots and trolls? Or have we already entered as state of post-modern abdication from the truth, where we are happy with adopting easy commonplace phrases such as “truth is the first casualty of war”, lulling ourselves into a sense of intellectual laziness while at the same time thinking we are actually critical?

It seems there are ways to escape these quagmires. One of the more notable entities that wrestles its way through the mud of trash data is a grass-root initiative, which stems back to the years of the Arab revolt in 2011. Today an established entity, Bellingcat, an organization exposing myths and assessing facts, started with one single person behind a laptop. Its real claim to fame came with two very well-known events that shook the world: The downing of an airliner over Ukraine and a poison attack in Salisbury

Planes and poison

On 17^th of July 2014, Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over south-eastern Ukraine. Although some pointed towards Russian-supported separatists and even Russian materiel and personnel in the occupied parts of Ukraine, there were substantial amounts of white noise and static in the media. In addition, strong counter-narratives concerning Ukrainian involvement appeared, further diluting the already scant evidence and making the topic sink in public conscience in Western Europe.^[vii] A notable exception was the public interest in the Netherlands, who had lost 193 of its citizens in the very same crash.^[viii]

Four years later, on 4^th of March 2018, Sergei Skripal and his daughter were found poisoned on a bench in Salisbury, narrowly escaping death. The UK government accused Russia, which denied. Again counter-narratives appeared – maybe the nerve agent was of Western origin?^[ix] And weren’t the two suspects only very interested in English gothic church architecture?^[x] This again did help to make the amount of doubt increase just over the threshold where Western societies, with their free media and open societal structures, are not able to define what is right and what is not.

The above examples are two telling examples of Russia how employs disinformation. Russia’s point was not to prove beyond doubt that there were Ukrainian shooting down the plane or that Skripal was subjected to a Western nerve gas. It is completely sufficient to sow the seeds of doubt and mistrust, since this will deter any decisive action. This is the modus operandi of Russian influence operations, and it is highly effective: “Most disinformation campaigns are not designed to yield precise results but to create chaos, doubt, mistrust, and confusion.”^[xi] The above examples are now history, but they are telling that in the time they appeared, they had a huge effect on public opinion in our Western societies.

And this is where Bellingcat made its mark. And tellingly enough, in our age of data overflow, this is exactly where they find their sources. And they sometimes yield spectacular results, in managing to expose the truth about what actually happened in both the downing of the MH17 as well as in the Skripal-case : In the first case, Bellingcat’s investigation and attribution to Russian materiel being involved in shooting down MH-17 actually did contribute to the Dutch court being able to condemn a number of individuals for the crime[xii]. In the case of the Skripal case, they showed beyond any reasonable doubt that the suspects were indeed members of the Russian secret service. ^[xiii]

The laptop as a weapon

The question that poses itself: How can a purely online resource such as Bellingcat be accurate? How can you analyze anything from thousands of miles away and identify weapons, pinpointing locations and even attributing actors to concrete actions using only your laptop? Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, describes some of his – and later his teams and co-worker’s techniques and successes in his book “We are Bellingcat – An intelligence agency for the people”^[xiv]. And the story of Bellingcat’s evolution is intriguing indeed, starting with Higgins’ own lap-top based inquiries made in his kitchen to a large group of researchers and analysts who cut through the noise of the data overload present today and produce well-documented analysis of some of the most sensitive affairs. In his book, Higgins also elaborately describes the work he and his growing group of co-workers unveiled war crimes conducted by the Assad-regime in Syria, tracking child abusers and how they manage to report from inaccessible places such as Yemen, to name a few.

One of the techniques Higgins and later his team by now have perfected is the use of open-source searches (OSINT) fused with geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) and imaginary intelligence (IMINT) techniques. All these three collection disciplines are powerful in their own right and are being extensively used throughout intelligence services. In this regard, it can be noted that open-source intelligence – abbreviated as OSINT- is a rather new collection discipline and has often stirred up some controversy. It has sometimes been dismissed as being too prone to error but is today widely regarded as a reliable collection discipline.^[xv][xvi] It is in this respect impressive that Bellingcat was quite at the forefront of being able to use open-source techniques all the way back to 2011. Less controversial is the collection discipline IMINT, which more or less has been around since the birth of the camera while geospatial intelligence really evolved around the two world wars – and has expanded ever since.^[xvii] Combining collection disciplines is the bread and butter of intelligence work, so this is not by any means new in itself. But Bellingcat is the first time these collection disciplines have been combined in an open and publicly transparent way, further showing how far ahead they are in their field.

Democratization of techniques

Since the book was first published in 2021, Bellingcat’s work has expanded exponentially. Central to Bellingcat’s dissemination is its webpage. Today, it not only offers on-line analysis of current topics such as the war in Ukraine, widespread ransacking in Nagorno-Karabach, tracking the exploding pagers of Hezbollah or geo-locating the site where Hamas leader Yahija Sinwar was killed.^[xviii] It now also features an educational site, where it among others gives everybody who is interested access to the tools they use in their research.^[xix]

In the last few years, Bellingcat has managed to gain a substantial foothold in today’s media landscape. Just as disinformation can thrive on the vast open and half-open spaces of the internet, this is exactly what constitutes Bellingcat’s hunting grounds. And in this endeavor, the democratization of software, which e.g. enables imagery analysis and geo-localization has been instrumental. Bellingcat makes extensive use of the possibilities of employing tools that until recently were the privilege of intelligence and security services. In doing so, they manage to help the public to better distinguish between fact and fiction, and in many cases, malicious influence operations. 

Digital natives need help

Surprisingly enough, the ability to navigate in today’s information landscape is also needed for the younger generation: In a day and age where digital information outlets are ubiquitous, one would expect that especially young people who grew up during the Internet-era – the digital natives, if you will - would be adept at exposing lies and propaganda on the internet. Higgins points out that this is not so. Referring to a Stanford study made in 2016, Higgins points out that “[S]ome 82 per cent of middle-school students could not tell a news story from an advertisement” (Higgins, p.151). In a world like this, Bellingcat has a role to play in helping readers to find the signal hidden in the noise of the different information and propaganda machines that are abound. A further point is that the sheer amount of disinformation can be staggering. Higgins points out that after Bellingcat published their findings on the Skripal assassination attempt, the counter-narrative campaign came to life immediately: “(…) the Kremlin disinformation apparatus kicked into action, with RT and Sputnik pumping out 735 articles in just four weeks, including a staggering 138 contradictory narratives with a range of conspiracy theories” (Higgins, p. 162). Having a navigation yardstick such as Bellingcat can be a good help in such situations.

Intelligent, but is it intelligence?

One minor point of objection might be that Bellingcat’s use of terminology is slightly misleading. When they define themselves as an “intelligence agency for the people” they might be slightly overselling. In order for something to qualify as intelligence, it will need to be able to predict, as this a core facet of what is demanded from the intelligence community: “[T]ell me what is going to happen” is the usual phrase being heard. ^[xx] Bellingcat, on the other hand, focusses on the “post-mortem”, the factual after the fact – and not on what might on what might not happen in the future. Methodologically this makes sense, since to be able to predict, one will need access to the intentions, goals and desired end states of actors. Without these, it will be difficult - although not always impossible – to find out what an actor actually will end up doing– in the future. To exemplify: One can argue that e.g. imaginary intelligence of a troop build-up might be an indicator of an impending attack. But one will not know for sure, as the very same troop build-up might also be 1) a deception (i.e. an attack will occur somewhere else 2) it is actually an exercise  3) a deterrent or 4) something else. This is why intelligence services do rely on a mix of collection disciplines, and the ones well-adapted to uncovering intentions are mostly derived from human sources (HUMINT) or from the interception of electronically transmitted signals (SIGINT). And although Bellingcat might be able to get reports originally derived from these two collection disciplines through their open-source methods, this will often not be sufficient.

Bellingcat vs intelligence services

This above point aside: Bellingcat does indeed offer important correctives of false narratives within the public domain. This is especially the case when Bellingcat teams up with NGO’s or other organizations. Over the years, Higgins and his ever-expanding group of collaborators and adjacent groups have built up a methodology tailor-made to tackle the complexity and the enormous amounts of the data which is available in today’s information domain.  In addition, the fact that everything they publish their findings openly and in full makes it easy for anyone to either improve or even falsify their findings.

The latter is something which national intelligence agencies and security services cannot and will not do. In that sense, Bellingcat and similar outlets can play an important role in our society in years to come although it cannot be strictly labeled an intelligence agency. Bellingcat can however – depending on where you stand – be labelled as a capable open-source sensor, a collecting agency, a journalistic-driven entity or simply as they state themselves on their webpage: “Bellingcat is an independent investigative collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists brought together by a passion for open source research”^[xxi]

Higgin’s book does give a comprehensive and at times entertaining overview of how Bellingcat has developed, their methodology and their achievements until recently. Anyone interested in how to make sense of facts in today’s seemingly fact-free world would do a lot worse than reading this book – and it is also recommended to checking the Bellingcat website regularly.