
Eliot Higgins is a British journalist and founder of Bellingcat, a website that publishes the findings of citizen journalists in war zones. Higgins, who also writes under the pseudonym Brown Moses, worked to house refugees until 2013, when he decided to pursue a career in citizen journalism with a focus on conflict zones. Bellingcat was created to unite writers, activists, and other contributors to learn how to use open source tools and engage in social media investigation to pursue journalism. The website provides guides to a variety of journalistic techniques, ranging from identifying burnt villages on satellite imagery to collecting Syrian sources without knowledge of the Arabic language. The website exposed the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons in 2013 and broke the story of the Sergei Skripal suspect’s identity in September 2018. In 2015, Bellingcat won the Hanns-Joachim-Friedrichs Special Prize for its outstanding research.