“Taking on the Kremlin from his couch . . . Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat are fighting Vladimir Putin and his ilk, using little more than computers and smartphones.” (Foreign Policy)

How did a collective of self-taught internet sleuths end up solving some of the biggest crimes of our time – from the downing of Malaysia Flight 17 over Ukraine to the sourcing of weapons in Syria?

Bellingcat, the home-grown investigative unit, is redefining the way we think about news, politics and the digital future. In this livestream event, their founder – a high school dropout on a kitchen laptop – tells the story of how they created a whole new category of information gathering, galvanising citizen journalists across the globe to expose war crimes and pick apart disinformation, using just their computers.

From the downing of Malaysia Flight 17 over the Ukraine to the sourcing of weapons in the Syrian Civil War and the identification of the Salisbury poisoners, Eliot Higgins will dig deep into some of Bellingcat’s most successful investigations. He will explore the most cutting-edge tools for analysing data, from virtual-reality software that can build photorealistic 3D models of a crime scene, to apps that can identify exactly what time of day a photograph was taken.

In our age of uncertain truths, Bellingcat is what the world needs right now – an intelligence agency by the people, for the people.

Praise for Eliot Higgins’ We Are Bellingcat:

‘John le Carré demystified the intelligence services; Higgins has demystified intelligence gathering itself’ Financial Times

‘Uplifting . . . Riveting . . . What will fire people through these pages, gripped, is the focused, and extraordinary investigations that Bellingcat runs . . . Each runs as if the concluding chapter of a Holmesian whodunit’ Telegraph

‘We Are Bellingcat is Higgins’s gripping account of how he reinvented reporting for the internet age . . . A manifesto for optimism in a dark age’ Luke Harding, Observer