A New Platform Tracks Airstrikes in Yemen

Bellingcat has teamed up with Forensic Architecture, ECCHR and Mnemonic, alongside the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), to create an interactive map examining airstrikes in Yemen. This is an inaugural project by Investigative Commons, the new Berlin-based hub bringing together open source, legal and investigative experts to examine human rights issues....

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How Schoolchildren Became Pawns in Cameroon’s Anglophone Crisis

It was midday on 24 October last year when a group of men on motorcycles wielding machetes and firearms arrived outside Mother Francisca International Bilingual Academy in the Cameroonian town of Kumba. By the time they left, they had murdered seven children and wounded a dozen more. Several more children were injured as they saved themselves by jumping...

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Help Bellingcat Build Tools For Open Source Investigators!

Open source investigations rely on the skills and efforts of human researchers. This will never change. However, tools can help make the research process significantly easier. We at Bellingcat, like many other research organisations and open source enthusiasts, rely primarily on tools that are available for free. On the one hand, this is because we...

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White Boy Summer, Nazi Memes and the Mainstreaming of White Supremacist Violence

The video opens with a tranquil scene of calm lapping waves, accompanied by the song Venice Venture by Big Wild. Before long, however, the mood significantly darkens. Video plays of a 1999 interview with a white supremacist named Benjamin Smith. He tells the interviewer: “If they violate our constitutional rights and say we can’t put out our literature,...

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Tigray Conflict: Videos Provide New Details of Mahbere Dego Massacre

Earlier this year, Bellingcat worked with Newsy and BBC Africa Eye to geolocate five videos showing the execution of civilians by people in military uniform near Mahbere Dego, a town in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. That joint investigation concluded that the massacre likely took place some time in January 2021. The soldiers in the video were speaking...

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Russian Poet Dmitry Bykov Targeted by Navalny Poisoners

In a December 2020 investigation, Bellingcat and its partners identified seven FSB officers who had tailed Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny on more than 35 trips around Russia since early 2017. Three members of this group – which included chemical weapons experts, medical doctors and security operatives – had shadowed Navalny to Novosibirsk...

Jun 2021

US Soldiers Expose Nuclear Weapons Secrets Via Flashcard Apps

For US soldiers tasked with the custody of nuclear weapons in Europe, the stakes are high. Security protocols are lengthy, detailed and need to be known by heart. To simplify this process, some service members have been using publicly visible flashcard learning apps — inadvertently revealing a multitude of sensitive security protocols about US nuclear...

May 2021

Geofenced Searches on Twitter: A Case Study Detailing South Asia’s Covid Crisis

Twitter can be a valuable source of information for open source research, both at the level of individual users, but also for understanding broader trends. In a recent Bellingcat story, the Investigative Tech Team looked at patterns in Twitter data to show the severity and speed of escalation of the coronavirus crisis in India. While Twitter is a common...

May 2021

Unsure When a Video or Photo was Taken? How to Tell by Measuring the Length of Shadows

Establishing the time within a video or image can be a difficult and frustrating task for open source researchers. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a brief glance at a wall-clock or wristwatch — but in most cases you won’t. Measuring shadows, however, can help provide a solution. It’s already well known that it’s possible to use the angle of shadows to...

May 2021

Berlin Group 21, ‘Ivan’s’ Emails and Chemical Weapons Conspiracy Theories

In March this year, a new website for a group set up by two former diplomats and an Ivy League academic concerned about the activities of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) blinked into life. The Berlin Group 21 (BG21), read a “Statement of Concern” that graced the site’s landing page, had “deep concern” about an OPCW investigation...

May 2021