Bellingcat

Bellingcat is a Dutch-registered investigations collective, founded in 2014 by Eliot Higgins and constituted as the foundation Stichting Bellingcat. It made its name turning publicly available material — phone footage, satellite imagery, flight-tracking data, social-media posts — into evidence about events that governments preferred to leave murky. Its work on the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 traced the Buk missile launcher back across the Russian border, and was later corroborated by the Dutch-led criminal investigation. Like the Centre for Information Resilience , it sits at the point where journalism, intelligence tradecraft, and software engineering meet.

What distinguishes Bellingcat from a conventional newsroom is that it builds its own tools and publishes them. Its public GitHub hosts an auto-archiver that captures and preserves social-media content at scale before it is deleted, ShadowFinder for working out where an image was shot from the length of a shadow, a search tool that pairs ship-tracking data with Sentinel and Landsat satellite passes, and aircraft-tracking and OpenStreetMap utilities used to geolocate footage. These are the automation layer beneath investigations that still turn on careful human verification.

The group is also notably sober about where automation stops. In a 2023 study its researchers tested mainstream AI chatbots on geolocation tasks and found them unreliable — fabricating metadata, inventing sources, and misreading logos — concluding that handing a full geolocation to a chatbot was inadvisable. That mix of tool-building and tool-skepticism has shaped how a generation of open-source investigators approach the Russia-Ukraine war and conflicts before it, from Syria’s chemical-weapons attacks to the documentation of civilian harm. Higgins moved to a creative-director role in 2022 as the organisation professionalised, while continuing to publish under the Bellingcat name.