>their listing in a publicly accessible database may constitute one of the largest mass breaches of personal data of an intelligence service in recent history
The CIA maintains their own personal files and does not use the OPM. Granted, the theory is that China could cross reference the OPM hack data with foreign diplomats coming to China to find which ones are the spooks, but the data on spooks hasn't been compromised. At least not that we are aware of.
Former NSA senior counsel Joel Brenner called the material “a gold mine for a foreign intelligence service,” declaring, “This is not the end of American human intelligence, but it’s a significant blow.” (Points to the CIA, which refused to have anything to do with the OPM and thus kept its own employees’ information safe.)
another fantastic piece of work by bellingcat! i am starting to worry for their health, however.
bellingcat is basically the opposite of wikileaks. rather than repackaging leaks from insiders, they just repackage information that is there for everyone to see. can't fault em for that.
There is a KGB hitman who was detained more than 10 (!) times all over Eastern Europe, and Middle East, but was coming back again and again under new passports
while i have no idea whether they are intentionally partisan or not, their analyses so far have been highly damaging to russian interests, going all the way back to when they found the russian proxy group in ukraine that shot down that airliner. they're also stepping on russia's toes in their analyses on the syrian war.
the thing that worries me is that bellingcat reports on strategically relevant tactical-level things. if they just reported on everyday tactical stuff -- which they do too -- it might disrupt russian narratives regarding their involvement in certain conflicts or whatever, but that wouldn't ever be a problem for bellingcat itself.
russia couldn't give a damn if bellingcat ruins their narratives regarding who is fighting where because they can maintain deniability, but if it's ruining their operational capabilities i assume they take it more seriously.
Are 100% of these registrations spies? Or could some legit diplomatics be mixed in? (IIRC like the Americans, Russians use diplomatic posts as cover majority of time)
The address to which the car was registered, Komsomolsky Prospekt 20, coincides with the address of military unit 26165
How long has this been known? The time between this information becoming available to the time all public databases are searched for this address matches is probably measured in minutes.
My Cyrillic is rusty and my Russian nonexistent, but the field identifiers seem to imply that they blurred passport numbers, addresses and telephone numbers.
>"Up until about a year ago, we were mostly volunteers and I had three or four people working with me," he says. "Over the last year we have expanded to 10 members of staff plus a translation team and our volunteers. So we've expanded quite significantly."
After a stint working in a related industry I see red flags every time I read "citizen journalist", and Higgins is no exception, his day job is closely tied to US government. That's not to say he's some government shill, his investigative output is excellent, but put in context I personally can't believe there isn't some reputational blemish to be noted. People rarely achieve anything working alone, and these investigations are achieving a lot.
Although I won't link to it, you may be entertained by the paranoid ramblings RT.com shares about him. Higgins is most certainly neither an altruistic white knight (western view) or amateur propagandist (Russian view), the truth as usual is a bit more complex and lies buried somewhere in between.
My take was that he was fed by a Dutch source. Retribution for MH17.
But does it matter? The point of the story is humor, i.e. the collective stupidity of the entire unit! Appearantly none of these cyber-geniuses realized that if their personal car was registered to the base, then maybe everyone else’s was too, and that might not be a good idea.
I’m not sure how the fact that this wasn’t some random youtube “citizen journalism” makes it any less funny.
It's a weirdly common 'critique' of Bellingcat and as far as I can tell, has absolutely no basis in reality. They mostly target Ukraine/Russia/Syria/Iraq, etc so I get the suspicion but they're very public around sources and methods and since they're an open-source intel group, anyone can verify everything they've found. Is it only "western intelligence" that can be critical of Assad and Putin?
> since they're an open-source intel group, anyone can verify everything they've found
This is a common misconception; to properly verify their investigative work (not just the specific findings), you also have to know what they possibly found and didn't show. That basically means replicating their work, and being more informed about their subjects than themselves.
Meh.. That would impact things they didn't publish -- But for the work they publish, the contra findings aren't really relevant.
E.g. for the MH17 investigation where they disprove many of the lies from the Kremlin and decisively identify the specific BUK system used, the route it took, who was at command and their specific role within the Russian MoD all via open sources, social media, etc: https://www.bellingcat.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/mh17-3...
The Russian government made many claims after MH17 was shot down, some attributing the anti-aircraft attack to Ukraine and some categorically denying their involvement. Bellingcat with their supporters gathered tons of evidence that shows dispositive proof which contradicts both sides of the Russian story. It's common knowledge now that the Russians carried out the attack and Bellingcat is largely to thank for that being public -- I'm sure various security services were performing their own attribution work, but it's nice to have plain reading material to prove so.
Any media organization that doesn’t repeat the kremlin’s propaganda is, by default, a western intelligence operation. I remember Assange tried to label the Panama papers as a CIA operation because it found some of Putin’s accounts.
A ton of intelligence officers used to hang out in something awful too back in the day. Like not in the 'navy seal copypasta' keyboard warrior sense, but people I knew personally and knew they were actual intelligence officers.
Why was this flagged? I get that it's not the BBC or the NY Times but this is about as "high quality" as journalism gets in a field where every potential source has reasons to selectively reveal information of varying truthfulness to mislead everyone else.
At the very least, they're laser focused on certain topics and take sides, which can indicate a huge bias in investigations they are pushing as neutral and correct. (I didn't flag the article though, and I'm unable to tell if they are really biased since I didn't follow their topics thoroughly)
All those millions of man hours of human capital investment in those officers...
Burn.
Plus, it’s probably safe to assume this will be a gift that keeps giving. Presumably there are other GRU locations where whoever was in charge of registering GRU vehicles made the brilliant decision to register them all at. Identify one, and you get them all.
Pretty sure the OPM breach holds that record.