OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING:

Bellingcat has found itself at the heart of some of the Kremlin's touchiest affairs over the last few years--starting with the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in July 2014. A Russian missile killed the 298 passengers onboard and sparked months of disinformation and denials. The tragedy was "a massive catalyst both for the work of Bellingcat but also the development of the field of online open-source investigation as a whole," says Eliot Higgins, Bellingcat's founder, who is based in Leicester, England.

Higgins and a crew of volunteers cut through the Kremlin's falsehoods about what happened to the flight known as MH17, ferreting out the origins of the missile launcher used in the downing and tracking its journey into Ukraine. Obsessive curiosity is Higgins's trademark. Blogging under the name Brown Moses, he became known for using YouTube videos to identify the weapons being used in the Syrian civil war. At Bellingcat, he has put together a roster of skilled contributors who specialize in sorting through just such information mazes.

One is Aric Toler, a Kansas City-based researcher with a background in Russian literature. Toler started "for fun" in 2014, helping on the MH17 reports. He ended up working on project after project and with Bellingcat's website gaining popularity and funding, was brought on full-time. About half of the organization's income comes from grants and donations from groups like the Open Society Foundations and the National Endowment for Democracy or from crowdfunding for specific research projects. The other half comes from Bellingcat's workshops on how to responsibly leverage open-source information. Toler helps lead these five-day seminars for journalists, analysts, and others, which are offered in Western capitals as well as near Russia's border in Georgia and Armenia.

Open-source reporting centers on analyzing publicly available material in an effort to pin down objective facts about an individual or incident. Bellingcat walks people through the process on its website, showing how you can verify a video or identify the weapon used in an attack. The site's reports detail how the underlying information was obtained. "The hope is that my audience will see the process of verification and investigation, learn from that, and participate, so they learn how verification works and become skilled investigators themselves," Higgins told the Columbia Journalism Review.

Even as the site staffs up, it continues to crowdsource its work. Bellingcat asks readers whether they can identify the location of a particularly obscure photo or video, for example, or figure out what time it was taken. "It's kind of like a game, who can figure it out first," says Toler. "Some people garden and some people do other things. It's just a hobby that people have."

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