“Who is the real Bellingcat?” That was the question asked by journalist Mary Dejevsky in a recent article for UnHerd, and while I hope that the contents of the book We Are Bellingcat would go some way to answer this question, helped by our unusually open online methodology, I would like to tell our story.
In early 2012, I began the Brown Moses Blog, under a pseudonym I used on various forums, borrowed from the title of a Frank Zappa song. In the previous year, I had spent a lot of my free time arguing about the conflict in Libya on the Guardian Middle East Live Blog and posting, somewhat obsessively, the latest news and links on a thread on the Something Awful forums. Having my teenage years bookended by the Gulf War and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, I developed an interest in conflict and the Middle East from what might be described as a leftist Western perspective, devouring books by the likes of Robert Fisk, Noam Chomsky and John Pilger. So, in 2010, I gravitated towards discussions on forums and social media about the Arab Spring.
Several things frustrated me about those discussions. While information, videos and photos were being shared online, they were often the subject of much debate if they showed one particular side in a bad light. Usually the question was “how do you know it’s real?” or “how do you know they’re telling the truth?” These are, of course, reasonable questions. But in early 2011, when rebel forces in Libya shared a video of the town of Tiji, which they claimed had been captured, I stumbled across a way to at least show where videos were being filmed.
By using satellite imagery, freely available on Google Maps, it was possible to match features visible in the Tiji video, such as the dome of a mosque and its position in relation to a major road, to prove the video had been filmed there. I reviewed the footage over and over, looking at smaller and smaller objects, such as trees, walls and utility poles, and matched them to what was visible in the satellite imagery. This process, now a core skill of any online open source investigator, is known as geolocation, and became the basis of much of my initial work.
Because the satellite imagery and video was publicly available, I could demonstrate to those questioning the validity of the video not only the process I went through to locate it, but also the sources of evidence I was using. As I moved from arguing on internet forums to starting a blog in 2012, this transparency of both the process and the evidence became an integral part of my own writing, and what eventually became a common approach for the online open source community.
For some of the older generation of journalists, this form of radical transparency in both sourcing and methodology runs counter to the custom of keeping your methods and scoops to yourself. For me, it came from the understanding that I was no more credible than any other random internet commentator, so I could only demonstrate how I had come to my conclusions step by step, pointing to the evidence I was using, and sharing it as widely as possible.
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