Fact cats

Bellingcat is an independent group of exceptionally gifted Leicester-based internet researchers who use information gleaned from open sources to dig up facts that no other team of journalists has been able to discover.

Or, Bellingcat is a sophisticated front used by western intelligence agencies to disseminate stories that would be considered tainted if they came from an official source.

Which is it? The answer matters, not just because Bellingcat’s investigators — a tiny outfit with just 11 staffers and around 60 volunteers around the world — have apparently identified Sergei Skripal’s would-be assassins, pinned the blame for chemical weapons attacks in Syria squarely on the Assad regime and the responsibility for the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17 on the Russian army. It matters because Bellingcat’s methods have transformed the way that news — and intelligence — is gathered.

Bellingcat’s pioneering technique involves cross-referencing social media posts, tweets, news photographs, publicly available databases, Google Street View and maps into a detailed mosaic of apparently irrefutable data. Their information has been judged watertight enough to be used by the official commission investigating the downing of MH-17 and has been cited in the United Nations as proof of Syrian war crimes.

And if Bellingcat truly is a group of dedicated nerds armed with nothing more than an internet connection and a talent for creative Googling, they’ve proved not only more effective than other journalists but they have quite possibly outdone the West’s intelligence agencies too.

‘I’d say they’re way ahead of us on many things,’ admits a senior British security official. Bellingcat’s methods are ‘way too innovative for the great majority of lemmings in government,’ says one former CIA officer. Today’s spooks live in constant fear of enquiries over possible failures. ‘MI5 would just hold them back, almost certainly’ if researchers strayed into illegality, says the source.