July 10, 2018
By Noor Nahas
Information from groups involved in international conflicts has never been as accessible as it is now. Rebel groups run social media accounts, video of missile launches are posted to Twitter, and the production value of propaganda has skyrocketed. For researchers and journalists who do not master the Arabic language, the same problems still exist: how…
July 9, 2018
By Rao Komar
The spread of social media and smartphones throughout the Middle East has created a truly enormous amount of publicly available documentation of conflicts in the region. Whether in the form of videos or photos, from combat footage to potential war crimes — a lot of things are routinely documented and uploaded to various sites like…
July 8, 2018
By Foeke Postma
Polar, a fitness app, is revealing the homes and lives of people exercising in secretive locations, such as intelligence agencies, military bases and airfields, nuclear weapons storage sites, and embassies around the world, a joint investigation of Bellingcat and Dutch journalism platform De Correspondent reveals. In January Nathan Ruser discovered that the fitness app Strava revealed sensitive…
July 4, 2018
Tracing the evolution of communication in the Syrian conflict reveals complex networks of coordination. The lack of direct access is at the core of this evolution—for international actors to provide humanitarian and monitoring support, for regional actors to be included in the decision- making process, and for civilians’ concerns and experiences to be considered. Changing…
June 14, 2018
A small number of new spaces have become available for the following Bellingcat workshops: Amsterdam June 25th – 29th London July 2nd – July 6th London July 9th – July 13th The workshop will be split into two main sections. The first three days will be dedicated to teaching participants a range of open source investigation…
June 8, 2018
By Aric Toler
When browsing through stories on the newly-established media outlet USAReally.com, you may think that you are reading a procedural-generated site that exists entirely from search engine optimization tricks, stealing articles from more established outlets and reposting them as if they were original. However, a closer inspection shows that there are no advertisements on the site…
June 1, 2018
By Aric Toler
On May 29, The Ringer published an investigation into five Twitter accounts that had apparent links to Bryan Colangelo, the President of Basketball Operations of the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers. Colangelo has since confirmed that he does operate one of these accounts — @phila1234567 — but is apparently only used for monitoring news, and does not tweet. The…
May 1, 2018
Due to high demand, Bellingcat will be offering an additional London workshop on the week of July 9th to 13th. In addition, we are currently measuring interest for workshops in Washington, New York, and San Francisco. If you are interested in potentially participating in a 5 day Bellingcat workshop in one of those 3 cities…
April 19, 2018
On 18 April 2018 Syrian Archive and Knack revealed information that Belgium violated EU sanctions against Syria according to the summons of an upcoming lawsuit. The Belgian customs found that without having requested the appropriate export licenses three Flemish companies have exported 96 tonnes of isopropanol in a concentration of 95% or higher to Syria…
March 8, 2018
By Dan Kaszeta
The former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter have been deliberately poisoned, in an apparent act of chemical terrorism. This poisoning occurred in Salisbury, in the UK, on Sunday 4 March 2018. It has recently been disclosed that this particular act involved the use of a “nerve agent”. Already, there are numerous examples…
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