Chronicling the dark arts of dogged internet investigation, this book is a powerful, exhortatory call to arms for citizen journalists fighting for truth in a world where authenticity has become the most elusive of commodities..

We Are Bellingcat is Higgins’s gripping account of how he reinvented reporting for the internet age.

... amazing story of the birth of a new type of journalistic investigation.

One of the creation myths of the web was the nerd in his spare bedroom who became very rich/famous/powerful simply through the talent that these new technologies could set free and amplify. One such geek – an anonymous Leicester office worker in his early thirties – was Eliot Higgins. A socially awkward computer enthusiast with an interest in the news, he discovered a simple truth: if you searched online in a slightly obsessive way you could discover information that neither the press nor the experts knew. This was, Higgins realized, more fun than playing online video games.

... most of its chapters read like more polished versions of the reports the organization previously published online. These case studies are characterized by showing the group’s deductive homework—walking the reader through the identification and verification of each tile in a gradually appearing mosaic of proof. Sometimes exhaustive discussion of minutiae is necessary to bolster the credibility of the conclusions asserted—rebuttals to the inevitable question: How can you amateurs, just sitting at computers thousands of miles away, know that? As a result, the book can be dense at times. But at its best, it reads like that moment at the end of Sherlock Holmes stories, when the detective explains to his sidekick, Dr. Watson, how he deduced the solution to a mystery from overlooked and seemingly minor clues..

We Are Bellingcat is a thrilling, if demanding, read.