Bellingcat
bellingcat.com · Group blog · on HN since 2014
Bellingcat is an investigative group that uses open-source intelligence to identify people behind poisonings, military attacks and intelligence operations.
What HN saysCommenters hold it up as an example of admired investigative journalism, saying they are willing to pay a price for work like theirs.
326HN people shared it
171linked it in comments
255stories submitted
3.2Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2014people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Bellingcat14 people · 2 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 2How We Identified Navalny's FSB Stalkers13 people · 53 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 3US Soldiers Expose Nuclear Weapons Secrets via Flashcard Apps12 people · 313 points · first shared 2021 · 95 comments on HN
- 4Bellingcat’s guide to reverse image search: Yandex wins (2019)10 people · 12 points · first shared 2019 · 1 comments on HN
- 5FSB Officer Inadvertently Confesses Murder Plot to Navalny7 people · 31 points · first shared 2020 · 2 comments on HN
- 6A GRU Agent Charmed Her Way into NATO Circles in Italy7 people · 17 points · first shared 2022 · 1 comments on HN
- 7The Improbable Journey of a US Intelligence Leak7 people · 9 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
- 8The Telltale Traces of the US Military’s New ‘Bladed’ Missile6 people · 20 points · first shared 2021 · 2 comments on HN
- 9From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist Activists Were “Red-Pilled” (2018)6 people · 20 points · first shared 2018 · 3 comments on HN
- 10“We’ve shot four people.” The Turkish Coup through the Eyes of its Plotters6 people · 11 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 11How Russia Works on Intercepting Messaging Apps5 people · 134 points · first shared 2016 · 51 comments on HN
- 12Radar Interference Tracker: New Tool to Locate Active Military Radar Systems5 people · 101 points · first shared 2022 · 1 comments on HN
- 13Have LLMs Mastered Geolocation?5 people · 18 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 14The boogaloo movement is not what you think5 people · first shared 2020
- 15The Remote Control Killers Behind Russia’s Cruise Missile Strikes on Ukraine4 people · 38 points · first shared 2022 · 2 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
MomoXenosaga · 2022-12-17
It's a price I'm willing to pay for investigative journalism. But I will never be worthy of https://www.bellingcat.com/ attention.
sabertoothed · 2022-01-19
zerforschung.org does an amazing job!
They have also recently analyzed Djokovic's test certificate:
https://zerforschung.org/posts/djokovic-pcr-test-en/
Stuff like that is super interesting. I love this investigative journalism. Another one I find captivating is: https://www.bellingcat.com/
farisjarrah · 2021-06-03
This is a bold statement. I think its an untrue statement too. Sure, the main stream media may be a giant dumpster fire. However, there are more journalists then ever doing extremely fantastic work. Just because most people don't see them or read about them doesn't mean Journalism is at its lowest ever point.
Allow me to provide just 3 of the countless example of fantastic journalism that still exists today:
- Many of the journalists covering the Portland protests literally risked life and limb to uncover policing abuses.
- Data journalists at the Covid Tracking Project were compiling and producing such high quality data that governments were using them to forecast local covid health trends.
- The OSINT journalism that Bellingcat does: https://www.bellingcat.com/
riffraff · 2025-09-07
ooooh, so that's what https://www.bellingcat.com/ is called this way!
woodruffw · 2024-08-29
The US (and almost every government) has reliable ways to covertly move a person that don't involve putting SQLi in their own codebases.
The classic way to covertly move a person is to give them a new passport to travel under, and have them move around like every other schlub on the planet. Competent intelligence services make sure that this isn't easy to detect by making the fake passport's identifier indistinguishable from real ones. Russia has prominently failed to do this several times[1][2].
[1]: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2019/11/07/how-russia-is…
[2]: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/08/25/socialite-widow-jeweller-sp…
martiancookbook · 2024-03-06
Thank you for sharing this! I was unaware of the origins of the name of the publication Bellingcat.
https://www.bellingcat.com/
cedws · 2024-01-16
I highly recommend reading Bellingcat's investigation into the poisoning of Alexei Navalny and how they tracked down the individual FSB officers responsible: https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2020/12/14/navalny-fsb-methodolog…
It's the most impressive investigative work I have ever read. One can only imagine the capabilities of nation state actors if an NGO is capable of this.
Even more incredible is that Alexei Navalny personally called an FSB officer and was able to extract a confession: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwvA49ZXnf8
slater · 2023-09-04
Quick digging on Kim Iverson:
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2019/09/30/pro-assad-lobby-group-rewar…
"Iversen has put out videos on a gamut of geopolitically fraught topics, speculating that an Iranian attack on an oil tanker was a “false flag” and arguing that Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were overthrown by the West for trying to sell oil in a currency other than the U.S. dollar. Iversen has a particular interest in longshot presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, with one out of every 10 of her videos centered on the congressperson, a favorite of pro-Assad conspiracy theorists who herself questions the Syrian regime’s responsibility for chemical weapons attacks."
Delightful!
nat42 · 2023-07-06
https://maxwelldulin.com/Resources - short summaries of highly technical security posts (4/wk)
https://portswigger.net/research - web security research from the geniuses at portswigger (1/wk)
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/ - project zero's research (1/mo)
https://hn.invades.space/hn_gems_rss.xml - top links extracted from comments on top hn posts (85/wk)
https://kevinlynagh.com/ - posts regularly contain a great selection of links (1/mo)
http://www.paulgraham.com/ - classics (1/mo)
https://www.bellingcat.com/ - open source research (1/mo)
https://pudding.cool/ - art using web technology (1/wk)
https://www.experimental-history.com/ - psychology (1/wk)
raphlinus · 2023-04-13
Some more links. Bellingcat broke the Discord server story 5 days ago[1]. The Washington Post has a stunning story, including barely obscured video (unaltered voice) from a teenager who was active in the group and considers himself a good friend of the leaker[2]. The Guardian story cites and quotes extensively from the WP story, so that should be considered the original source, but does add more context. Emptywheel (who has been pretty consistently excellent when it comes to leaks and the like) has more analysis[3].
[1]: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2023/04/09/from-discord-to-4chan-the-i…
[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/12/discord-documents…
[3]: https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/04/13/bear-versus-pig-on-the-thug-shak…
herunan · 2022-05-25
OSINT is just investigation using publicly-available information. Hence why open source in this context refers to open sources of information (usually online). OSINT was traditionally employed for criminal investigation, but is now growing in journalism.
One example of a collective doing this kind work is https://www.bellingcat.com
fomine3 · 2022-03-28
Also Bellingcat recommends Yandex: https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2019/12/26/guide-to-using…
ryankupyn · 2022-03-04
It's worth replying specifically to highlight how wrong the original comment is, but the evidence that was cited by the Russian government to justify their invasion was clearly fabricated.
For instance, an alleged car bombing in Donetsk right before the invasion was staged using cadavers,[1] and a video used to claim that Ukrainian troops were moving aggressively into separatist territory was filmed far from its purported location.[2]
If Russia was so sure that Ukraine was committing these atrocities, they wouldn't need to rely on fake videos to justify attacking.
[1] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/02/28/exploiting-cadavers-and-fak…
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/22/europe/russia-videos-debunking-troops-i…
thrownope671 · 2022-02-28
Benjamin Strick of the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) team details the map and how it can be used:
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/02/27/follow-the-russia-ukraine-m…
misja111 · 2022-02-25
This is nonsense, they also have reported stories that didn't fit the CIA/US' favorite narratives, e.g. https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2021/11/17/the-data-and-the-dossi… or https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2021/07/20/a-new-platform-tracks-…
belter · 2021-07-10
Follow Up:
"Unsure When a Video or Photo was Taken? How to Tell by Measuring the Length of Shadows"
https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2021/05/18/unsure-when-a-video-or…
pyuser583 · 2021-07-09
Google doesn’t have the best (publicly) available reverse image search AI. That would be Yandex.
Google is actually pretty crappy at reverse image searches.
https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2019/12/26/guide-to-using…
pizza · 2021-02-15
Interestingly enough, Yandex did so also, a while ago, as it was being used as a scarily good open-source undercover agent identification tool https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2019/12/26/guide-to-using…
although I can't seem to find the followup post that actually discusses how the Yandex search quality decreased following the publication of the original article
quesera · 2021-01-14
Journalists and office staff in First Look's line of business should definitely be aware of these risks.
But it's certainly possible that they simply failed here. That possibility warrants an internal investigation, to determine the nature of the failure, and to signal internally and publically that they take their responsibility to sources seriously.
No organization likes to be criticized from within. But some organizations are strengthened by their reaction to criticism (whatever the source), and others are diminished.
Laura Poitras is a credible party. I'm inclined to believe her side of the story here.
Related (though not directly): Bellingcat is doing impressive work. https://www.bellingcat.com/
jacobolus · 2021-01-14
Here's the best summary I have seen of what happened in Portland last year (at least, up through July):
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2020/07/20/what-you-need-to-k…
There was definitely some vandalism involved (and e.g. people shooting fireworks at the wall of a fortified building), but federal authorities were incredibly disingenuous in their descriptions of events and justifications of escalation.
Most of the dangerous violence was police-on-protestor.
danpalmer · 2020-11-19
If you enjoy this, I'd recommend looking into the organisation Bellingcat.
They do investigative journalism using social media/crowd sourcing/leaked database, and many similar forensic techniques. They've done great analysis on the MH17 missile attack for example, which is documented in their podcast: https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/podcasts/2019/07/17/mh17-episode-…
solarkraft · 2020-07-15
Trivia: The journalistic website bellingcat [1][2] is named after this.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingcat
[2]: https://www.bellingcat.com/
garrettgrimsley · 2020-05-06
At the time that the videos were posted there was nothing secret about the coup. See this bit from the Bellingcat [0] investigation:
>By the time the video was first shared on Twitter, eight of Goudreau’s men were dead and two others captured as the boat they were on was intercepted at sea by the Venezuelan authorities. A second boat, soon on its way to Venezuela, would also be intercepted at sea the following day, resulting in the capture of eight of Goudreau’s men, including two American citizens.
The videos were in or subtitled in Spanish, so my take on it is that because they had not seized TV or radio stations in the country, they took to Twitter to get their message out. It could have been a call for support from the populace.
[0] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/05/05/the-invasion-of-venezuela-b…
CodeGlitch · 2020-04-05
I too have an interest in OSINT. Inspired by the work of Bellingcat [1] (who have uncovered some serious warcrimes through their OSINT work).
[1] https://www.bellingcat.com/
edm0nd · 2020-01-24
DDG is awesome. They have been experiencing a surge of growth, https://duckduckgo.com/traffic
Yandex is another site I've been using for reverse image searches. I find it to be better than Google and Bing. Bellingcat has a great article on it, https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2019/12/26/guide-to-using…
praneshp · 2019-08-05
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/04/the-el-paso-shooti…
This is a good read if you are non-snarky and were really looking for an answer.
strangeloops85 · 2019-03-29
The alternative is that Youtube could choose NOT to recommend videos for large categories of videos, particularly those related to kids or other categories (for example, Rohingya-related videos in Myanmar in the current time period). You need not censor the videos, however you can choose to make their discovery less easy.
There's no law that says they have to recommend videos. There is however sufficient evidence at this time around the rabbit-hole effect causing real-world harm. This isn't 2005. It's about time Youtube, and social media properties adopt the medical principle: "first, do no harm". Perhaps they will do this willingly, but somehow I doubt it.
To wit: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2018/10/11/memes-infowars-75-…
usgroup · 2018-09-26
If you like this then you’ll appreciate these guys:
https://www.bellingcat.com
JoblessWonder · 2018-09-25
It all started with a tip that gave them the general area though.
This is my favorite example of gathering data just from examining a video: https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/case-studies/2014/08/22/gun-safet…
pjc50 · 2017-05-19
Reminds me of bellingcat's excellent work in tracking the MH17 missile launcher on social media, e.g. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2017/04/04/photographs-u…