In the middle of December 2019, Eliot W. Higgins (British blogger and journalist, founder of the Bellingcat portal) was interviewed in the “Hard Talk” TV show at the BBC channel. In summer 2014, Higgins had started his “Bellingcat” project, aiming to provide interaction between civil journalists performing investigations of current events using data mining from open sources. The Bellingcat portal gained great popularity in those five years due to scandalous and sensational investigations. Amongst the boldest investigations is the crash of MH17 in Donetsk, artillery shelling of Ukraine from the territory of Russia, chemical weapons’ usage in Syria, the poisoning of Skripals and other subjects. It is a subject of some serious doubt that scrupulous military investigations are being “successfully” performed by a group of civil journalists who claim to use only “open-sourced data”. This “open-sourced” data includes an allegedly real satellite images and videos of missile launches from the territory of Russia towards Ukrainian territory, as well as copies of internal documents of Federal Migration Service of Russia with requests for issuing a passport for Alexander Petrov, who is suspected by the British authorities as one of the perpetrators in the Skripal case. The evidence provided by Bellingcat is not considered as credible by qualified authorities, but nonetheless, occasionally some out-of-context real information makes regular internet users trust Bellingcat. How is it possible for civil journalists to perform such investigations without using tools and methods available only to governmental special services? The answer is in the unlawful obtaining of information that violates the basic human rights for privacy and personal correspondence, as well as broadcasting high-quality fake videos while claiming in “Hard Talk” that they are constantly improving in protecting themselves from fake videos. By the way, about the special services… Higgins does not deny that the U. S. Government as well as non-governmental organizations like the Atlantic Council and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations are the leading providers of funding for Bellingcat. Of course, it is so easy and convenient for the West to use Bellingcat to blame China and Russia for all the problems in the world. By those means, they are creating an image of a formidable “external enemy” to distract the local population from real problems in Western countries.
