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

Higgins, founder of the “online investigative community” Bellingcat, debuts with a brisk and self-congratulatory account of his organization’s founding and contributions to recent high-profile investigations. A college dropout who “took refuge in online video games,” Higgins traces his interest in open-source investigation, or using publicly available data to break news, back to the Arab Spring, which he followed obsessively from his office desk in England, posting insights he gathered from social media and Google Maps to a Guardian live blog. To keep a record of his discoveries, Higgins launched his own blog, where he published evidence that the Syrian army was responsible for a chemical weapons attack in 2013. After getting mainstream media attention and building a network of “established experts and amateur investigators,” Higgins founded Bellingcat in 2014. He offers blow-by-blow rundowns of how the collective identified the people believed to be responsible for poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter in 2018 and shooting down Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014. Higgins’s self-taught skills are impressive, but statements such as “I never worried that a bad actor could infiltrate this project” come across as overweening. Still, fans of Bellingcat and advocates of citizen journalism will be fascinated by the behind-the-scenes details. Agent: Elyse Cheney, the Cheney Agency. (Mar.)