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Inside Out | In battle against fake news, Bellingcat shows how the internet can be a force for good
- Using only internet sources available to everyone, Bellingcat’s investigators uncovered the truth behind the Ukraine MH17 shooting and Syrian chemical killings
- Amid deepening angst over the internet’s dark forces, Bellingcat’s relentless reliance on facts will help foster a culture of verification and transparency
Reading Time:4 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
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I may be a digital dinosaur, but I think I am not alone in harbouring a deep angst over the irresistible force for change that is the internet. For every moment of marvel at the knowledge and global connectivity it has brought to my fingertips, there is a sometimes-crushing anxiety about the darkness it has empowered and the privacy it has erased.
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We woke up on March 2 to news that Microsoft Exchange’s servers had been hacked, with perhaps 250,000 victims. In contrast to the Russian hackers that fed corrupted software from SolarWinds into hundreds of US government websites, these hackers are allegedly Chinese. Microsoft has named them Hafnium – don’t ask me why. In the real world, hafnium is a grey, toxic metal with the atomic number 72, similar to zirconium.
After my own encounter with hackers demanding ransom back in September, I have excruciating first-hand experience of the internet’s pervasive “dark side”, and often succumb to “cyber-miserabilist” nightmares of an internet future that descends into a completely unfixable mess.
Are we not already on a slippery slope, descending from the information age into a dis- or misinformation age? Are we not already infested with crazy dystopian cults that thrive in the murky depths of social media, plotting attacks on Washington’s Capitol building, coordinating racist rallies, even paving the way for the return of the messiah that is Donald Trump?
Over the past week I have been imbibing what may be one of the best antidotes around to this cyber-miserabilism – Eliot Higgins and his new book We Are Bellingcat, describing his astonishing last six years waging war against the world’s bad guys, as a nerdy Robin Hood exploiting the amazing potential of the internet as a force for good – an “intelligence agency for the people”.
Higgins starts out as an absolutely improbable hero, a computer-gaming nerd with no degree and a drab job, who as a blogger laid the foundations for Bellingcat from a laptop on his kitchen table in Leicester which, like my hometown Grantham, is among Britain’s least charismatic communities.
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