I've since linked to articles by Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté detailing just some of the issues with Bellingcat's work.
"In 2014, he used a Kickstarter campaign to launch Bellingcat, an online platform for citizen journalists to verify and publish research that taps into the hive mind approach to worldwide, Internet-era collaboration and open-source sleuthing. Whereas traditional investigative journalism—commissioned and published by newspapers or foundations or blogs—is only as expansive and wide-ranging as the team of reporters assigned to any given project, Bellingcat is more like an online meritocracy of ideas à la Wikipedia: Start a thread or page or investigation or project, and if it yields something good, some will read while others will contribute. Get enough people involved, and things can even start to snowball."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing
> "Crowdsourcing is a sourcing model in which individuals or organizations obtain goods or services, including ideas, voting, micro-tasks and finances, from a large, relatively open and often rapidly evolving group of participants."
The fact remains, Bellingcat are funded in ways that we could expect to compromise their journalism. The IEEE article doesn't mention any of that and only mentions the Kickstarter.