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.