Bellingcat

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News

by Eliot Higgins  · 2 Mar 2021  · 277pp  · 70,506 words

common is ‘OSINT’, for open-source intelligence. But that shorthand derives from government intelligence, whose secretive practices diverge from the open and public mission of Bellingcat. A more accurate description is ‘online open-source investigation’. What we do is far more than just internet research, though. We battle the counterfactual forces

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information – who found the fact did not matter greatly, except to flag that person as someone worth following on Twitter. The same principle remains at Bellingcat. Open-source investigation is not about formal qualifications. Your reputation is your results. This was epitomised by my first close collaborator, a gifted online detective

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Moreover, the researcher was identified just as ‘Chris Postal’, without further details or credentials mentioned. That murkiness would frighten away a traditional journalist, but the Bellingcat method is independent verification. We did not need to know about Chris Postal, only whether we could replicate the research. To us, an online claim

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parade ground, with a monumental display in the background of missiles pointing skywards. What he had found was huge, and nerve-racking. When published on Bellingcat, we would be levelling serious allegations against Russia, a major world power whose current leadership displayed both a propensity for information warfare and for violence

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of obsessives online, expanding the network of crowd-sourced expertise, while spreading word of what digital sleuthing could achieve. During our first couple of years, Bellingcat conducted cases from Latin America and the United States, to the Arabian Peninsula and Turkey. A French freelancer, Aliaume Leroy, geolocated Mexican cartel hitmen via

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recommend change password. Best, The Mail Team You may have noticed the uncomfortable phraseology ‘We recommend change password.’ This note – addressed to members of the Bellingcat Investigation Team in mid-2016, a few months after our major report on the 53rd Brigade – contained other suspicious elements. The link to ‘change password

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conspiratorial online publications, referring, for example, to the Holocaust as ‘a brilliant propaganda coup’.8 In April 2016, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused Bellingcat of faking information in cahoots with Ukrainian authorities ‘to create quasi-evidence to blame Russia’ for the downing of MH17. ‘At present, we have information

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us showed these had indeed been produced by people who, identified via Facebook, worked for the Russian Foreign Ministry. What we were witnessing – both at Bellingcat and in society – went beyond Russian disinformation, though. The effort to distort facts in the digital age implicated swarms of passionate amateurs, opportunistic grifters and

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The stakes were high, as became clear during the Covid-19 pandemic, when lies acquired the potential to kill thousands, perhaps millions, of people. At Bellingcat, ‘emergency prepping’ for such information crises had been underway since our inception, as we endured malicious hacking, contended with constant slurs and confronted a thicket

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adversaries had addresses in Russia, our most persistent foes were scattered around the globe, an evidence-denying network that rose like a mirror image of Bellingcat. THE COUNTERFACTUAL COMMUNITY Little illustrates how disturbing the Information Wars had become than attempts to portray volunteer rescuers in the Syrian civil war – people who

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rants that would have condemned a person to obscurity in another era – gained an audience online, reaching a mutually reinforcing community of fact-deniers. While Bellingcat gained traction by networking among like-minded researchers, a similar process was creating this adversary. Like our network, the Counterfactual Community includes news junkies who

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make points. They cite social-media posts. But they are scorned. To rationalise this, the Counterfactual Community employs a circle of illogic: established organisations trust Bellingcat investigations, therefore we must be working with the establishment, therefore anyone who attends to our findings is an accomplice in this conspiracy, and so on

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sources. Everything ought to line up. If we have doubts, we declare them openly, or refrain from publishing. The Counterfactual Community presumes, given how much Bellingcat has discovered, that intelligence agencies must be feeding us stories. This only reveals ignorance about what is possible with online investigation. Verification stands on its

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MH17. And consider what happened five years later, when Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 was shot down outside Tehran, killing all 176 people on board. Bellingcat and other open-source investigators immediately picked through social media, finding evidence that missiles had brought down the flight of 8 January 2020 and geolocating

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wiping out reams of potential evidence. Meantime, Facebook sought partner organisations like ours to provide credibility and quality to its content moderation, preferably for free. Bellingcat was not big enough for such an endeavour, but Facebook pursued its goal elsewhere, persuading a few US organisations, including the Associated Press, Snopes and

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Weapons, or OPCW, was suppressing information that cleared the Syrian government in the Douma chemical attacks of the year before. Conspiracists trumpeted these allegations, but Bellingcat studied the supposed scandal, found it baseless and major news sources took heed. When they ignored the matter, it hardly penetrated the serious information pool

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only trace amounts of chlorine markers had been found. According to one Counterfactual Community narrative, chlorine traces could have derived from household cleaning products. But Bellingcat contributor Tariq Bhatti, a chemist, pointed out that ‘trace’ amounts were exactly what you would expect after such an attack.44 Chlorine gas does not

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they took matters into their own hands and breached their obligations to the organization,’ Arias said. ‘Their conclusions are erroneous, uninformed, and wrong.’46 If Bellingcat helps build a firewall against falsehoods, the Counterfactual Community inadvertently strengthens this firewall. When reputable journalists see that the people sharing a theory are those

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even tangentially involved with pro-Russian separatists, including journalists who write favourably about Moscow, placing them on a list of undesirables. This is not the Bellingcat approach. For instance, when looking into a GRU agent implicated in the assassination attempt against the Skripals, we found social-media images of the wedding

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manipulators seek advantage in every news event, even global catastrophes; that the Counterfactual Community churns out fresh conspiracy theories; and that extremists devour it all. Bellingcat is erecting firewalls, but we must maintain them together. Nor is it just huge events that merit attention. Indeed, they already draw wide coverage from

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went outside. Soon, both were slumped on a bench, incapacitated by Novichok. The Skripal case contains so many elements that have marked the story of Bellingcat: a chemical-weapons crime; an authoritarian government apparently lying to the world and expecting impunity; a campaign of online disinformation; the Counterfactual Community piling on

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through Skype handles, seeking variants of their supposed names. Nothing. We scanned Russian news reports for clues and dredged Twitter for insights. Christo led the Bellingcat Investigation Team with Daniel Romein, a key contributor in the MH17 investigations, along with the close collaboration of Roman at The Insider. Aric oversaw their

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be quick.’ BLOWING THEIR COVER In Washington DC it was morning and our newest staff employee, editor Natalia Antonova, was sleepily reading Twitter. Until recently, Bellingcat had only half a dozen employees, supplemented by many volunteer contributors. However, we were on the cusp of a major expansion, converting our investigative hub

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sounding terribly innocent when he called Skripal ‘a scumbag’ and ‘a traitor to the motherland’. Later, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, added his disapproval. ‘Bellingcat is closely connected with the intelligence services, which use it to channel information intended to influence public opinion,’ he said. While the media storm engulfed

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, from attempted murder to the sabotage of nations that failed to align with Moscow. And the same operatives kept turning up. GRU officers appeared in Bellingcat investigations into the annexation of Crimea (2014); the destabilisation of Moldova (2014); an assassination attempt against a Bulgarian arms manufacturer (2015); a failed coup

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an empty boast. But 8chan ‘pranks’ have a way of turning into real bloodshed. In another instance, we were investigating Ukrainian neo-Nazis through the Bellingcat Anti-Equality Monitoring group, which studies fascist movements targeting the LGBT community, feminists and ethnic minorities in Ukraine, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. One of these reports

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job. Much negative behaviour ensued, including substance abuse, sexual problems and inappropriate behaviour at work. To address the problem of vicarious trauma, we published a Bellingcat guide to identifying and preventing it, by an experienced open-source investigator, Hannah Ellis, who noted that personal connections to material intensify your emotional response

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those involved, from acknowledging authorship of source material, to attributing others’ detective work, to conducting risk assessments on who is made vulnerable14 by an investigation. Bellingcat and other open-source sleuths operate in the fast-evolving online world, yet today’s investigations must hold up for years. ‘The pressure will build

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somehow identifying different footage of the same event. This inadvertently created a way to automatically find related videos, which holds immense promise for investigators. At Bellingcat, we often discuss with computer scientists ways to work through massive datasets, such as the hundreds of leaked Russian databases we have downloaded. This could

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permitting investigators and lawyers to better parse conflicting accounts. Immersive virtual memories seem like the start of something incredible. To nurture more cutting-edge techniques, Bellingcat is jointly establishing an innovation lab in Berlin, along with Forensic Architecture, Syrian Archive and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, or ECCHR

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become a centre of development and excellence for open-source techniques, as applied to justice and accountability. The expertise of our four organisations is complementary: Bellingcat in online investigations, Forensic Architecture applying tech tools to visualising and expanding evidence, Syrian Archive preserving digital records to the highest standard, and the ECCHR

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early break with that front-page story of February 2013 on Syrian arms-smuggling – has established a Visual Investigations Team of online-investigative virtuosos, including Bellingcat veterans such as Christiaan Triebert, plus our early contributor Christoph Koettl, previously of Amnesty International, and open-source pioneer Malachy Browne, formerly of Storyful.

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media, human-rights activism, humanitarian law and beyond – still do not realise what is possible. In order to seed these powers among the younger generation, Bellingcat has launched a pilot training programme for university students in the Netherlands, attempting to build a grassroots movement among those studying journalism, data science and

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what is possible, and will know to expect verification from their information sources. For anyone curious about testing how this works, we maintain a free Bellingcat Online Investigation Toolkit, including links to everything from satellite maps to video verification to company registries to flight trackers. You could seek digital clues to

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the best investigations in one location replicated in others. Social media offered refuge to the disenchanted and frustrated, and this benefited some; you could consider Bellingcat a product of this development. But destructive online communities formed, too, spreading lies, provoking violence and dividing societies. Local investigative projects could show citizens

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community does not share that mindset. However, investigators are routinely attacked online by the Counterfactual Community, and abuse can be particularly aggressive towards women. Natalia, Bellingcat’s former editor, cites this atmosphere as a reason why open-source investigation attracted far more men in the early days. Also, the online misogyny

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specific project, such as when identifying photos that could lead to the arrest of child abusers. Our ambition is to integrate more citizen volunteers into Bellingcat work each year. Other organisations have taken impressive steps in this direction, notably Amnesty International, which has both a Digital Verification Corps – in which

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encourage participants to take what they learn and pursue their own inquiries, publishing in their own right or bringing their findings back to us. Today, Bellingcat finds itself in an unusual position. We are not exactly journalists, nor human-rights activists, nor computer scientists, nor archivists, nor academic researchers, nor

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criminal investigators, but at the nexus of all those disciplines. The Bellingcat method has expanded far beyond the foundational principles of ‘Identify, Verify, Amplify’, encompassing an ethic, a social mission and a drive for accountability. We will

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news/mena/2019/12/12/chlorines-unique-fingerprints-the-april-7-2018-douma-incident-through-a-chemistry-lens/ 45 www.rt.com/news/476137-newsweek-bellingcat-opcw-leak-reuters/ 46 www.opcw.org/media-centre/news/2020/02/opcw-independent-investigation-possible-breaches-confidentiality-report 47 twitter.com/zdroberts/status/896519908795854848

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190315152715528.html 66 www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/03/15/with-strobe-lights-guns-bearing-neo-nazi-slogans-new-zealand-gunman-plotted-massacre/ 67 www.bellingcat.com/news/rest-of-world/2019/03/15/shitposting-inspirational-terrorism-and-the-christchurch-mosque-massacre/ 68 www.cjr.org/analysis/christchurch-shooting-media-coverage

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mosque-attack-video-just-don-t-e7d30c7ca96a 34 dartcenter.org/media/advice-dealing-vicarious-trauma 35 dartcenter.org/content/working-with-traumatic-imagery 36 www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2018/10/18/prevent-identify-address-vicarious-trauma-conducting-open-source-investigations-middle-east/dartcenter.org/media/advice-dealing-vicarious-trauma

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stories-behind-photos-killed-detainees 7 www.spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-reporting-supports-accounts-of-torture-and-execution-in-syria-a-945760.html www.bellingcat.com/resources/case-studies/2015/03/18/3062/ 8 www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/craigsilverman/facebook-graph-search-war-crimes?__twitter_impression=true www.janes.com

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking  · 15 Mar 2018

his unusual methods grew, Higgins launched a crowdfunding campaign for a new kind of online project dedicated to “citizen investigative journalists.” The organization was dubbed Bellingcat. The name was taken from the old fable in which a group of mice conspire to place a bell around a cat’s neck, so

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that they might always be warned of its approach. Bellingcat had barely launched when flight MH17 fell from the sky. The first cat had come stalking. One day after the tragedy, with international media awash

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in speculation and finger-pointing, Bellingcat published its first report. It was a straightforward summary of social media evidence to date, focused on sightings of a Russian Buk surface-to-air

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the intact plane, tracing the pattern of shrapnel damage. He drew no firm conclusions, pushing back against sketchy accounts posted by both Russians and Ukrainians. Bellingcat would only report the facts, as the digital bread crumbs revealed them. It took a certain kind of person to excel in this work. Social

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to the Chipotle next door. His in-laws thought he was wasting his time online. They didn’t realize Toler was investigating war crimes. The Bellingcat team soon tracked down multiple images and videos that showed a Buk missile launcher in the vicinity of MH17’s flight path on the day

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mud and dirt. Because each vehicle has its own particular driving history, each rubber skirt has a unique pattern of wear and tear. Now the Bellingcat team had the equivalent of a fingerprint to hunt for across every photograph and snippet of video that came out of eastern Ukraine. They soon

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, finding the unit to which the Buk in the convoy belonged: the 2nd Battalion of the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russian army. Bellingcat posted their findings online, mapping out the odyssey of the weapon that had killed 298 people, as well as showing its Russian origin. The weapon

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? Here the answer was provided by the shooters themselves. Searching through Russian soldiers’ profiles on VKontakte, or VK (essentially a Russian version of Facebook), the Bellingcat team found images of military equipment, dour group photographs, and hundreds of angsty selfies. One conscript had even snapped a picture of an attendance sheet

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before its deployment to Ukraine. It wasn’t just the soldiers who opened the lens to their war, but also their friends and families. The Bellingcat team found particular value in an online forum frequented by Russian soldiers’ wives and mothers. Worried about their loved ones, they traded gossip about the

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deployments of specific units, which also proved an intelligence gold mine. After nearly two years of research, Bellingcat presented its findings to the Dutch tribunal that had been tasked with bringing the killers to justice. It included the names, photographs, and contact information

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was also damning evidence of Russian participation in a war crime. Through their stubborn and breathtakingly focused investigation of the MH17 case, Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat displayed the remarkable new power of what is known as “open-source intelligence” (OSINT). With today’s OSINT, anyone can gather and process intelligence in

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. The manner in which Hitler and Pol Pot were able to kill en masse, unbeknownst to the wider world, is simply not possible today. The Bellingcat team, for instance, would use the very same approach it had brought to detecting war crimes in Ukraine to documenting the use of chemical weapons

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Twitter feed, where he came across a report from an OSINT social media tracker—one of the same sources used by Eliot Higgins and the Bellingcat team. The report revealed that two Turkish soldiers being held captive by ISIS had been burned alive in a gruesome propaganda video. Nissenbaum thought it

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of any news that is harmful to Russia, spinning up false and salacious headlines to crowd out the genuine ones. Recall how Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat pierced the fog of war surrounding the crash of flight MH17, compiling open-source data to show—beyond a reasonable doubt—that Russia had supplied

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being targeted by a Western smear campaign. Mounting evidence of Russia’s involvement in the shootdown proved little deterrent. Shortly after the release of the Bellingcat exposé showing who had shot the missiles, Russian media breathlessly announced that, actually, a newfound satellite image showed the final seconds of MH17. Furthermore, it

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FBI and deported back to Russia, began a second career as a Facebook lingerie model. We posted something even more enticing on Twitter: one of Bellingcat’s reports. Within minutes, an account we’d had no prior link with reached out, inundating us with images disputing the report as “#Bellingcrap.” The

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, and a heart-shaped logo on the restaurant’s website. Working through a crowdsourced “investigation” that was a perverse reflection of the sort conducted by Bellingcat, these far-right sleuths had determined the heart was a secret sign for child predators. It was actually the symbol of a fundraiser for St

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evaluated. Researchers then take all of these clues and marry them up to connect the dots, much as in the Sherlock Holmes–style investigations the Bellingcat team pursues to chronicle war crimes. Although botnets have been used to market everything from dish soap to albums, they’re most common in the

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. On his VK account, one artilleryman bragged, “We pounded Ukraine all night.” This chatter fed a new flurry of OSINT analysis. The investigative team at Bellingcat found the Russian military had awarded more than 10,000 medals for “combat operations” at a time when Russia wasn’t officially fighting anywhere. Across

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, in which an army of volunteers have rushed into the battle. Wikipedia editors fought to preserve the truth of the “Rape Melania” hoax, while unpaid Bellingcat analysts investigated the shootdown of MH17. Indeed, when both the U.S. government and social media firms delayed taking action against Russian bots and sockpuppets

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-old girl had become a new flash point in the Syrian civil war’s ever-evolving information battle. The truth (eventually cobbled together by a Bellingcat investigation) was that Bana was indeed real: a young girl who had found a powerful outlet for her hopes and dreams through her instantly viral

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of a particular person wearing a black shirt. If such a system were unleashed on the open internet, it would be like having 10,000 Bellingcats at one’s fingertips. For the social media giants, an immediate application of this technology is solving their political and business problem—augmenting their overworked

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-for-august-21st.html. 73 published its first report: Eliot Higgins, “Buk Transporter Filmed ‘Heading to Russia’ Sighted in an Earlier Photograph,” Bellingcat, July 18, 2014, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2014/07/18/buk-transporter-filmed-heading-to-russia-sighted-in-an-earlier-photograph/. 73 pattern of shrapnel

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damage: Eliot Higgins, “The Latest Open Source Theories, Speculation and Debunks on Flight MH17,” Bellingcat, July 22, 2014, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2014/07/22/the-latest-open-source-theories-speculation-and-debunks-on-flight-mh17/. 73 “a lot of

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, “Buk Transporter.” 74 the equivalent of: “Origin of the Separatists’ Buk: A Bellingcat Investigation,” Bellingcat, November 8, 2014, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2014/11/08/origin-of-the-separatists-buk-a-bellingcat-investigation/. 74 mapping out the odyssey: Bellingcat interactive map, Mapbox, accessed March 18, 2018, https://www.mapbox.com/labs

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/bellingcat/index.html. 74 even snapped a picture: Toler interview. 74 Worried about their loved ones: “MH17—Potential Suspects and

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Witnesses from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade,” Bellingcat, 2016, https://www.bellingcat.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/53rd-report-public.pdf. 75 It included the names: Janene Pieters, “Twenty Russians Wanted for Questioning in MH17

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-the-mexico-city-marathon. 76 chemical weapons in Syria: “Open Source Survey of Alleged Chemical Attacks in Douma on 7th April 2018,” Bellingcat, April 11, 2018, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2018/04/11/open-source-survey-alleged-chemical-attacks-douma-7th-april-2018/. 76 indicted Mahmoud Al-Werfalli: “Situation in

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-2014-7#JhJsCOWZzphQ00IG.99. 109 Russian Union of Engineers: Eliot Higgins, “SU-25, MH17 and the Problems with Keeping a Story Straight,” Bellingcat, January 10, 2015, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2015/01/10/su-25-mh17-and-the-problems-with-keeping-a-story-straight/. 110 bad photoshop job

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: Veli-Pekka Vivimäki, “Russian State Television Shares Fake Images of MH17 Being Attacked,” Bellingcat, November 14, 2014, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2014/11/14/russian-state-television-shares-fake-images-of-mh17-being-attacked/. 110 “It came from”: Max Seddon, “Russian

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=.vhnM2Yn2y4#.yvpq59Z5Q6. 110 doctored satellite images: Eliot Higgins, “Russia’s Colin Powell Moment—How the Russian Government’s MH17 Lies Were Exposed,” Bellingcat, July 16, 2015, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2015/07/16/russias-colin-powell-moment-how-the-russian-governments-mh17-lies-were-exposed/. 111 “This is

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), 9. 123 “YouTube cannot contain”: Aric Toler, “‘No Safe Spaces on the Flat Earth’—Emerging Alt-Right Inspires Flat Earth Online Communities,” Bellingcat, June 7, 2017, https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/articles/2017/06/07/flat-earth-online-communities/. 123 The best predictor: We consulted several excellent sources for a primer on

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-is-covertl?utm_term=.tiEGwg5wz7#.vfN1zVLzQa. 205 more than 10,000 medals: “Russia’s War in Ukraine: The Medals and Treacherous Numbers,” Bellingcat, August 31, 2016, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2016/08/31/russias-war-ukraine-medals-treacherous-numbers/. 205 “it was hybrid warfare”: Ivo H. Daalder, “Responding

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/elpais/2017/09/26/inenglish/1506413477_994601.html. 207 assassinate the prime minister: Christo Gorzev, “Balkan Gambit: Part 2. The Montenegro Zugzwang,” Bellingcat, March 25, 2017, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2017/03/25/balkan-gambit-part-2-montenegro-zugzwang/. 207 local police discovered: Gordana Andric, “Serbian PM ‘Moved

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: Ibid. 215 Critics alleged that Bana: Nick Waters, “Finding Bana—Proving the Existence of a 7-Year-Old Girl in Eastern Aleppo,” Bellingcat, December 14, 2016, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2016/12/14/bana-alabed-verification-using-open-source-information/. 215 “This bombs”: Bana Alabed (@AlabedBana), “I am very afraid

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/president-al-assad-interview-the-moderate-opposition-is-a-myth-we-wont-accept-that-terrorists-take-control-of-any-part-of-syria/5549743. 215 a Bellingcat investigation: Waters, “Finding Bana.” 215 her English-literate mother: Ibid. 216 “use force to unify Taiwan”: Ben Blanchard and Faith Hung, “South China Sea? For

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Baskayev, Alan, 112 Bateman, Robert, 126 Becoming Facebook (Hoefflinger), 222 Belarus, 86 Bell, Alexander Graham, 31, 50, 221 Bell Telephone, 31 See also AT&T Bellingcat, 73–77, 109, 115, 205, 214 Ben Ali, Zine el-Abidine, 84 Benjamin, Daniel, 154 Bentham, Jeremy, 57 Berger, J. M., 150 Berners-Lee, Tim

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–16 People’s Daily, 139–40 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 96, 100 Christensen, Thomas, 217 Churchill, Winston, 18, 247 citizen reporters Athar, Sohaib, 53–55 Bellingcat, 73–77 children as, 68, 197–98, 214–16 María del Rosario Fuentes Rubio (“Felina”), 69–70 Mumbai 2008 massacre, 62–63 Rene Silva, 67

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–13 with fake accounts, 227–28 Golden Shield Project, 96–97, 100 with OSINT, 75, 78 requests for, 232 Snowden Files, 231–32 See also Bellingcat; intelligence gathering Swift, Taylor, 165–67 Swifties, 166 Switzerland, 75–76 Syria censorship, 88, 90 civil war, 64–65, 87 deaths in, 153 Raqqa city

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All

by Adrian Hon  · 14 Sep 2022  · 371pp  · 107,141 words

the most impressive and well-organised reporting projects I’ve ever seen; “crowdsourcing” doesn’t even come close to describing its scale. Or there’s Bellingcat, online sleuthing at its best. If you applied ARG skills to investigative journalism, you’d get something like this open-source intelligence group that discovered

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how Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was shot down over Ukraine in 2014. Bellingcat’s volunteers painstakingly pieced together publicly available information to determine MH17 was downed by a Buk missile launcher originating from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile

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Brigade in Kursk, Russia.50 The official Dutch-led international joint investigation team later came to the same conclusion.51 Bellingcat continues to investigate criminal activity and crimes against humanity through its network of staff and contributors in more than twenty countries.52 Conspiracy theories thrive

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to simply restore trust in existing authorities. Rather, I think it’s to restore faith in truth and knowledge itself. The COVID Tracking Project and Bellingcat help reveal truth by crowdsourcing information. They show their work via hypertext and open data, creating a structure upon which higher-level analysis and journalism

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August shooting in El Paso. In October, the Halle synagogue shooting in Germany was also livestreamed on Twitch via a headcam.14 Robert Evans of Bellingcat argues this amounts to the “gamification of terror.” The point is not that video games or first-person shooters lead to violence (there is little

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4,” Six to Start, accessed November 28, 2021, www.sixtostart.com/smokescreen. 50. Veli-Pekka Kivimäki, “Geolocating the MH17 Buk Convoy in Russia,” Bellingcat, September 29, 2014, www.bellingcat.com/resources/case-studies/2014/09/29/geolocating-the-mh17-buk-convoy-in-russia. 51. “The Criminal Investigation | MH17 Incident,” Government of the

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Netherlands, accessed November 28, 2021, www.government.nl/topics/mh17-incident/achieving-justice/the-criminal-investigation. 52. “About—Bellingcat,” Bellingcat, accessed November 28, 2021, www.bellingcat.com/about. 53. Cahal Milmo, “Revealed: How British Empire’s Dirty Secrets Went up in Smoke in the Colonies,” Independent, November 29, 2013

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-plague-inc-the-cure-is-out-now-for-ios-and-android. 12. Robert Evans, “The El Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror,” Bellingcat, August 4, 2019, www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/04/the-el-paso-shooting-and-the-gamification-of-terror. 13. Robert Evans, “Ignore the Poway Synagogue Shooter

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’s Manifesto: Pay Attention to 8chan’s /pol/ Board,” Bellingcat, April 28, 2019, www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/04/28/ignore-the-poway-synagogue-shooters-manifesto-pay-attention-to-8chans-pol-board. 14. Daniel Koehler, “The Halle

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

by Timothy Snyder  · 2 Apr 2018

on Repaired T-34 Museum Tank,” StopFake, May 13, 2014. “1942”: Separatist interview (B). “For Stalin”: “Russia’s 200th Motorized Infantry Brigade in the Donbass,” Bellingcat, Jan. 16, 2016. Soldiers in Crimea: Ekaterina Sergatskova, Artiom Chapai, Vladimir Maksakov, eds., Voina na tri bukvy (Kharkiv: Folio, 2015), 24. Tank and prisoners: Zhurzenko

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,” mapinvestigation.blogspot.com, July 16, 2015; “Origin of Artillery Attacks on Ukrainian Military Positions in Eastern Ukraine Between 14 July 2014 and 8 Aug. 2014,” Bellingcat, Feb. 17, 2015. Armies usually evacuate Elena Racheva, “Pogranichnoe sostoianie,” NG, Aug. 11, 2014. The Russian journalists Ibid. The Ukrainian army could not Natalya Telegina

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; Miller et al., “An Invasion by Any Other Name,” 17–34. One of the numerous The Russian detachment: “Pre-MH17 Photograph of Buk 332 Discovered,” Bellingcat, June 5, 2017; Wacław Radzinowicz, “Donbas, Syria, zestrzelony boeing,” GW, May 31, 2017. At 1:20 p.m. For further supporting detail, see

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Bellingcat Investigation Team, “MH-17,” 3–16, 36–44, sic passim, www.bellingcat.com/​tag/​mh17/; Weiss and Miller, “How We Know.” Girkin’s boast: web.archive.org/​web/​2014071715222’/​http://​vk.com

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Safety Board was seeking information on two men who appeared to be high-ranking Russian military officers. “Russian Colonel General Identified as Key MH17 Figure,” Bellingcat, Dec. 8, 2017. The fictional variations are discussed below. On the very day “Istochnik: ukrainskie siloviki mogli pereputat’ malaiziiskii ‘Boing’ s samoletom Putina,” NTV, July

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Herszenhorn and Odynova, “Soldiers’ Graves Bear Witness.” At some point in August “Russia’s 200th Motorized Infantry Brigade in the Donbass: The Tell-Tale Tanks,” Bellingcat, July 4, 2016. Evgeny Trundaev On Trundaev and the 200th: “Russia’s 200th Motorized Infantry Brigade in the Donbass: The Hero of Russia

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,” Bellingcat, June 21, 2016. Ilovaisk: “Russia’s 6th Tank Brigade,” Bellingcat, Sept. 22, 2015; Racheva, “Bilet v odin konets”; Miller et al., “An Invasion by Any Other Name,” 7, 26–37

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Ukraine, But We Tracked One There Using His Selfies,” Vice, June 16, 2015. On the 200th: “Russia’s 200th Motorized Infantry Brigade in the Donbass,” Bellingcat, Jan. 16, 2016. Bato Dambaev Barabanov, “V pampasakh Donbassa.” Attitude to propaganda: Elena Kostiuchenko, “My vse znali, na chto idem i chto mozhet byt’,” NG

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a second ceasefire Batomunkuev: Kostiuchenko, “My vse znali.” Units of the Russian army Ruslan Leviev, “Three Graves: Russian Investigation Team Uncovers Spetsnaz Brigade in Ukraine,” Bellingcat, May 22, 2015. This neighbor could contrast Dependence on Russian taxpayer: Konrad Schuller, “Ohne Kohle in Kohlrevier,” FAZ, Nov. 24, 2014. Call from Moscow: Anton

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

by Talia Lavin  · 14 Jul 2020  · 231pp  · 71,299 words

his turn toward the far right. YouTube denied to Roose that its algorithm promotes extreme content, but a study by the online investigative journalistic outfit Bellingcat found that the most frequently cited means to radicalization referenced in far-right chats was YouTube videos.2 From slickly shot rants on the subversive

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’s made of Tarrant’s manifesto, “The Great Replacement,” and tells me he’s printed and distributed hundreds of copies. The open-source intelligence website Bellingcat, which closely tracks the far right in Eastern Europe, had published a few months before an investigation of the translated booklet, documenting numerous selfies of

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. Eventually, after shopping the story to a few different journalists, I start up a conversation with Michael Colborne, who had authored the investigative piece at Bellingcat about the Ukrainian translation of Tarrant’s manifesto, a project David had spearheaded. I tell Colborne I’ve got all the information on one of

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anime series to introduce new cute fuzzy monsters. Only instead of a Pokémon, the video then displays Colborne’s face—“It’s Michael Colborne, beaten Bellingcat faggot,” a computerized voice says. Then the video cuts back to the woods, where a paper target of Colborne’s face has been glued to

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fires a gun and the bottle explodes, Colborne’s face blown to pieces. The process is repeated with more journalists, mainly Colborne’s colleagues at Bellingcat. David has sent it to multiple extremist channels, accompanied by the message, “This video is a kind of instructive response on how to deal with

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,’ [David Kolomiiets] was willing to throw caution to the wind because—well, to put it plainly, because he seemed to think he might get laid.” Bellingcat took what I gave them and offered more: David’s Facebook page. His page on Vkontakte, the biggest social-media site on the Russian-speaking

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story dropped, David balked. He dropped out of public view entirely—but not before pretending to be his own mother on Twitter and email, begging Bellingcat to unpublish the story, and offering monetary bribes to the journalists to take his name out of circulation. He also deleted all his social-media

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/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html. 2 Robert Evans, “From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist Activists Were ‘Red-Pilled,’” Bellingcat (October 11, 2018). https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2018/10/11/memes-infowars-75-fascist-activists-red-pilled/. 3 Laura Smith, “In the Early 1980s, White Supremacist Groups

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

by Andy Greenberg  · 5 Nov 2019  · 363pp  · 105,039 words

called SteadyHost, which was headquartered next door to a known GRU research institute in Moscow. *2 In the spring of 2018, the investigative news outlet Bellingcat and the Russian news site The Insider would also name two GRU officers as responsible for the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, which resulted

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world”: Ibid. In the spring: “MH17—Russian GRU Commander ‘Orion’ Identified as Oleg Kannikov,” Bellingcat, May 25, 2018, www.bellingcat.com; and “Third Suspect in Skripal Poisoning Identified as Denis Sergeev, High Ranking GRU Officer,” Bellingcat, Feb. 24, 2019, bellingcat.com. It was based on a speech: Valery Gerasimov, “The Value of Science Is

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World

by James Ball  · 19 Jul 2023  · 317pp  · 87,048 words

never was’, https://techcrunch.com, 27 January 2017. 41. There’s a good history of some of these accounts in this Bellingcat account: ‘The Making of Qanon: A Crowdsourced Conspiracy’, www.bellingcat.com, 7 January 2021. 42. Office of Environment, Health, Safety and Security, ‘Departmental Personnel Security FAQs’, https://www.energy.gov

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theorists into the wilderness’, www.nytimes.com, 11 September 2018. 8. ‘The Greatest LARP’ section of this very good Bellingcat piece is great on this: ‘The Making of QAnon: A Crowdsourced Conspiracy’, www.bellingcat.com, 7 January 2021. 9. ‘Who Is Behind QAnon? Linguistic Detectives Find Fingerprints’, www.nytimes.com, 19 February

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

by Max Fisher  · 5 Sep 2022  · 439pp  · 131,081 words

-feminism videos, then incel-aligned “men’s rights” videos, some of which he contributed himself, then outright neo-Nazi videos. In 2018, an outlet called Bellingcat scoured an archive of private far-right chat rooms that totaled hundreds of thousands of messages. The investigators scanned for instances where users had mentioned

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YouTube Built a Radicalization Machine for the Far-Right,” Kelly Weill, Daily Beast, December 19, 2018. 36 Bellingcat scoured an archive: “From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist Activists Were ‘Red-Pilled,’” Robert Evans, Bellingcat.com, October 11, 2018. 37 “YouTube’s algorithms bounced”: “My Affair with the Intellectual Dark Web,” Meghan

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“Today I had the very difficult”: “How the Insurgent and MAGA Right Are Being Welded Together on the Streets of Washington D.C.,” Robert Evans, Bellingcat.com, January 5, 2021. 91 “I told my Mom goodbye”: Ibid. 92 YouTube- and Reddit-inspired nickname: “What Does ‘Pedes’ Mean?” naterich_stl, Reddit, March

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider

by Michiko Kakutani  · 20 Feb 2024  · 262pp  · 69,328 words

drowned out the Russian propaganda factory’s bot-produced lies. Digital help also arrived from independent sources around the world. The open-source investigative group Bellingcat (which had broken important stories about Russian involvement in the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 and the poisoning of the opposition leader Aleksei

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.com/​news/​magazine/​2022/​03/​08/​ukraine-digital-minister-crypto-cyber-social-media-00014880. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The open-source investigative group Bellingcat: Ben Smith, “How Investigative Journalism Flourished in Hostile Russia,” The New York Times, Feb. 21, 2021, nytimes.com/​2021/​02/​21/​business/​media/​probiv-investigative

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-reporting-russia.html; Scott Pelley, “Bellingcat: The Online Investigators Tracking Alleged Russian War Crimes in Ukraine,” CBS News, May 15, 2022, cbsnews.com/​news/​bellingcat-russia-putin-ukraine-60-minutes-2022-05-15/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “We don

The Dream of Europe: Travels in the Twenty-First Century

by Geert Mak  · 27 Oct 2021  · 722pp  · 223,701 words

a Buk. In short, it was soon clear what had happened, and it was confirmed by meticulous research – especially that of the independent investigating collective Bellingcat and the official Joint Investigation Team (JIT) of the five countries affected. A fierce propaganda battle broke out immediately. Within forty minutes of the disaster

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. Around Greece a start has already been made by Frontex, with ships, planes and 600 guards. But a collaborative effort by journalists, including those of Bellingcat, Der Spiegel and ARD, revealed in the autumn of 2020 that staff of this Operation Poseidon were involved on several occasions with the random sending

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70, 73; 9/11 and 68; poverty in 401; Schengen Treaty and 25; terror attacks in 81, 82, 406, 455. See also individual place name Bellingcat 290, 482 Berg, Frode 6, 478 Berlaymont building, Brussels 91, 121, 122, 127, 128, 129, 130, 254, 275 Berlin, Germany 5, 14, 49, 87, 142

The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

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This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality

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Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following

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Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All

by Laura Bates  · 2 Sep 2020  · 364pp  · 119,398 words

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists

by Julia Ebner  · 20 Feb 2020  · 309pp  · 79,414 words

Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath

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The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime

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American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History

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Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now

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Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

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Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

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The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future

by Geoffrey Cain  · 28 Jun 2021  · 340pp  · 90,674 words

Mbs: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman

by Ben Hubbard  · 10 Mar 2020

Reset

by Ronald J. Deibert  · 14 Aug 2020

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World

by Alan Rusbridger  · 26 Nov 2020  · 371pp  · 109,320 words

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News

by Clint Watts  · 28 May 2018  · 324pp  · 96,491 words

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals

by Oliver Bullough  · 10 Mar 2022  · 257pp  · 80,698 words

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence

by Amy B. Zegart  · 6 Nov 2021

Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again

by Johann Hari  · 25 Jan 2022  · 390pp  · 120,864 words

Who Will Defend Europe?: An Awakened Russia and a Sleeping Continent

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