Conclusions (Thus Far) from Reading We Are Bellingcat

Self is about 3/4 of the way through.

It is becoming quite clear that the scale of Russian disinformation in the months leading up to November 2020 was designed with one aim in mind: to sink Hillary Clinton. And Comey’s coming up with the e-mail angle in July 2020 — could that have been any better timing? Comey was a dupe — whether a deliberate dupe or an accidental dupe, who can say. But a dupe, nevertheless.

Recently, during the hearings for Judge Jackson’s nomination to the SCOTUS, the matter of child pornography was brought up repeatedly by Josh Hawley, Lindsey Graham, and Ted Cruz.

There were very strong echoes to the Hillary is a pedo and Joe Biden is a pedo line.

Do the GOP have pedo on the brain, or what?

Now, after reading this far in We Are Bellingcat, I now know why the GOP line is always calling a political opponent a pedo. Because it is undisputedly a line. A line they have been given. A line they all parrot like obedient children. None of it was arrived at by independent thinking. That is why it is always the same: pedophilia and child pornography.

None of them truly believe that Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden are pedos, but it’s a mark of their allegiance to the party line, to say it out loud. A mark of their loyalty.

The next GOP Senator who starts the Biden is a pedo line, you’ll know that person is utterly compromised.

Stay tuned.

How Novichok A234 Entered Salisbury, England

Two Russian intelligence officers allegedly carried the chemical weapon in a backpack, strolling through the heart of a peaceful English cathedral city on 4 March 2018. Upon reaching Sergei Skripal’s house in Salisbury, they allegedly drew out a container, aimed its nozzle at the front door and sprayed.

We Are Bellingcat, p. 155

“Firewall of Facts”: We Are Bellingcat, p. 151

“We all need to stay alert to disinformation techniques. If you imagine that digital natives, those who grew up with the internet, are equipped to handle this environment, you are wrong. A Stanford study from 2016, which tested thousands’ of American students’ ability to spot fakery online, reported that young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak. In every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students’ lack of preparation. Some 82 percent of middle-school students could not tell a news story from an advertisement.

“The Swedes have developed teaching materials to educate kids about fake news, online propaganda and doctored imagery. Teenagers in Ukraine — perhaps the country most assaulted by propaganda trolls — are taking classes on media literacy to good effect: students who participated in a pilot programme were twice as alert to hate speech and 18 per cent better at spotting fake news. In Denmark, ‘Trolls in Your Feed’ is a publication for high-school kids, part of a push there against Russian disinformation. Classes, including cautionary study of false news reports, are working their way into school curricula in parts of the United States.”

Cyber-Dominance: We Are Bellingcat, pp. 76 – 77

Self apologizes for going so so slowly through this book, but it continues to enthrall.

General Michael Hayden, former director of both the CIA and the NSA, recalled a turning point for American intel back in the mid-1990s, when espionage officials faced a question: try to dominate cyberspace, or to dominate the information sphere generally, including diplomacy, public affairs, disinformation, and more? ‘We had a sharp debate, and we finally decided that we’re probably in the cyber-dominance business,’ he recalled. ‘Now the important punchline here is that the Russians went to door number two. The Russians went to not just cyber-dominance, but information-dominance.

We Are Bellingcat, pp. 76 – 77

We Are Bellingcat, pp. 42 – 43: “2.2 kilograms of the nerve agent sarin”

That this nerve agent was used at all, against civilian targets in the eastern and south-western suburbs of Damascus, was a war crime. Consulting online reference material, the author identified the weapons carrying the sarin as “a Soviet 140mm M14 artillery rocket . . . only the warhead had been damaged, suggesting that this had not been packed with high explosives. According to reference material, the potential warhead of the M14 was a chemical payload: 2.2 kilograms of the nerve agent sarin.”

@bellingcat today (28 March 2022): “Bellingcat can confirm that three members of the Ukrainian delegation attending peace talks between Ukraine and Russia on the night of 3 – 4 March 2022 experienced symptoms consistent with poisoning with chemical weapons.”

@bellingcat today: “Three members of the negotiating team retreated to an apartment in Kyiv later that night and felt initial symptoms — including eye and skin inflammation and piercing pain in the eyes — later that night. The symptoms did not abate until the morning.”

We Are Bellingcat, p. 43: How a Uni Dropout from Leicester, England Used Google Earth To Become an Expert on The War in Syria

The dis-information about what Syrian President Assad was doing to his own people was being spread far and wide (getting a major leg up from Russian State Television) and all there was to counter it were a handful of people from Human Rights Watch (“an early user of open-source investigative techniques”) and the author, who made extensive use of Google Earth to find out whether the information the world was getting was accurate. At this point, the author was doing all of this online investigative work for free, even though “by September 2012,” his “blog had surpassed 200,000 page views … “

But, the sense of righteousness, the outrage at the lies!

“barrel bombs became an emblematic weapon of Assad’s forces, which rained down thousands more as a devastating and cheap alternative to conventional munitions. By the end of 2017, regime barrel bombs had killed nearly 11,000 civilians, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. Assad had denied that his forces had dropped even one. “I haven’t heard of Army using barrels, or maybe cooking pots,” he joked in a 2015 interview with the BBC. “There’s no indiscriminate weapons. When you shoot, you aim. And when you aim, you aim at terrorists in order to protect civilians. Again, if you’re talking about casualty, that’s war. You cannot have war without casualty.”

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News, by Eliot Higgins, p. 43

Introduction, We Are Bellingcat

This discipline is so new that it lacks a single name. Most common is ‘OSINT’, for open-source intelligence. But that shorthand derives from government intelligence, whose secretive practices diverge from the open and public mission of Bellingcat. A more accurate description is ‘online open-source investigation’. What we do is far more than just internet research, though. We counter the counterfactual forces warping society. We insist on evidence. And we show ordinary citizens how to expose wrongdoing and demand accountability from the powerful.