In 2018, Russian exile Sergei Skripal and his daughter were nearly murdered in an audacious poisoning attempt in Salisbury, England. Soon, the identity of one of the suspects was revealed: he was a Russian agent. This investigative coup wasn’t pulled off by an intelligence agency or a traditional news outlet. Instead, the scoop came from Bellingcat, the open-source investigative team that is redefining the way we think about news, politics, and the digital future.

In this Intelligence Squared event, Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, told the dramatic story of how he went from college dropout to pioneering a new category of reporting that has cracked some of the biggest cases in the world. Drawing from his new book We Are Bellingcat, Higgins revealed the tools his investigators use, from software that helps pinpoint the location of an image, to an app that can nail down the time a photo was taken. 

He discussed Bellingcat’s investigations into the downing of flight MH17 over Ukraine, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons, and the recent poisoning of Russian politician Alexei Navalny. The event was hosted by Manveen Rana, senior investigative journalist at The Times and Sunday Times.