Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News
Ratings7
Average rating4.2
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'John le Carré demystified the intelligence services; Higgins has demystified intelligence gathering itself' Financial Times 'Uplifting . . . Riveting . . . What will fire people through these pages, gripped, is the focused, and extraordinary investigations that Bellingcat runs . . . Each runs as if the concluding chapter of a Holmesian whodunit' Telegraph 'We Are Bellingcat is Higgins's gripping account of how he reinvented reporting for the internet age . . . A manifesto for optimism in a dark age' Luke Harding, Observer 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.
Reviews with the most likes.
Very inspiring. Who doesn't want to be an online sleuth to help solve crime, assist human rights watch initiatives, and combat authoritarian governments and their misinformation-spewing propaganda media houses.
I appreciate the level of detail with with Higgins describes how he and his team of investigative journalists follow crumbs through the social media dataverse to extract useful information. They meticulously browse google-earth to geolocate sites of crimes, calculate the sun-shadow angle in images to verify dates and locations, and sift through tons of Russian dash-cam footage to find the exact id number on a missile in transport. All this with the open-source ethic of transparency.
Inspired.