Thread by @EliotHiggins

Many people have made comparisons between Wikileaks and Bellingcat in the last couple of days, but it's like comparing apples and oranges. Wikileaks elicits and publishes leaked materials, we analyze open source materials and, in very rare cases, leaked data.

The clearest case of this can be seen in a story on our October 2018 story "305 Car Registrations May Point to Massive GRU Security Breach". We found this data in pre-published leaked materials, but purposefully chose to not doxx these GRU agents.
bellingcat.com/news/2018/10/0…

We could have easily published all of the available personal information about these 305 GRU officers, but chose not to because it would just be doxxing for the sake of it. Despite what some think, we are not an extension of any security service.

We go out of our way to conceal sensitive personal data on our research subjects. Look no further than our 115-page report on Russia's 53rd Brigade, where we hid the identities of all of our research subjects except those who already have a public profile.
bellingcat.com/wp-content/upl…

Our most well-known reports revealing the identities of individuals were done with very specific goals in mind regarding the public interest. We put a spotlight on the Skripal poisoners and MH17 suspects from the GRU because we were following a story, not to just target Russia.

Another example is this article finding information about one of the most wanted men in the Netherlands. This used entirely open sources -- the guy's own Instagram account -- and we had internal debate if this target was worth writing about (he was).
bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

We do not hack information, and we do not ask others to. In the extremely rare cases we have published non-open source information, such as passport data, it's been from pre-leaked databases or from people sending us information as whistleblowers, not via our instructions.

We find, verify and analyze open source information, and in extremely rare cases (fewer than 1% of our articles), work with leaked information that's hard to come across, but still technically publicly available. We don't solicit or cause these leaks or hacks. Apples and oranges.