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Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

CIA affiliated organization

Substantiation needed -- to be treated with extreme skepticism otherwise.

Hint: the word "affiliated" has a specific meaning -- and your substantiation will have to support that meaning.

Also, I've seen the articles you're about to post already -- and the evidence they offer is quite tenuous, and does not support the claims they make up at the top.

Saying that Eliot Higgins is affiliated with the CIA is quite laughable if you know his background. His success is an old-school self-taught hacker success story and should be celebrated as such.

>Bellingcat is a CIA affiliated organization

This is no more than one the many plausible explanations of their success, unsupported by real evidence.

>their articles should be treated with extreme skepticism

Do you mean facts or narratives? On the former, Bellingcat seems to be doing a good job.

> This is no more than one the many plausible explanations of their success, unsupported by real evidence.

The real evidence is that it’s staffed and run by “retired” spooks.

They're also funded by the National Endowment for Democracy who is funded by the US government. They also just happen to write articles that push US imperialism encouraging war and overthrowing governments.

No, this is absolutely not. By the same logic everybody who worked before in the government would make their new employer "affiliated", but this is not what does this word mean. E.g. let's say, a security firm founded by former cops guards shopping malls: does it mean, this firm is affiliated with the police or it's just the best application of their skills?

The real evidence would be a proof that the agenda of Bellingcat is set by CIA. Not funding or other resources, not information or any other support, but the agenda. Not "roughly coincides", not "they work on the same targets", but "set by".

Who is a “retired spook” in their organization?

It probably is but do you have any source?

Anyway, it's still interesting when they write about how they use "publicly" accessible data.

In the case of Bellingcat, it appears to have been used as a public front for the CIA to release information that they wanted out there publically using parallel construction[1]

[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/17/bellingcat-can-say-what...

Other links of interest :

https://declassifieduk.org/cia-sidekick-gives-2-6m-to-uk-med...

https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/24/author-bellingcat-opcw-wh...

https://www.mintpressnews.com/bellingcat-intelligence-agenci...

Nothing in your citation states that they are doing parallel construction. If anything, it appears to claim the opposite:

> Russian state media have repeatedly sought to portray Bellingcat as working on behalf of the CIA or other Western intelligence agencies. Polymeropoulos was unequivocal on this point. “We have no ties to them,” he said.

Right - the Russian government keeps trying to portray them as CIA affiliated because Belligcat uses the corruption of the Russian state (eg the numerous databases of information that RU government employees put up for sale, or sequential passport numbers for the personas used by GRU operatives while traveling) to prove that the Russian government was responsible for the Navalny poisoning, the Skripal assassination attempt, the MH17 surface to air missile attack, etc etc. all of their findings are independently verifiable and require nothing but stuff that’s been for sale on dark net sites for years.

Yes. BrownMoses, noted Something Awful Forums poster and moderator of the Debate and Discussion subforum, as well as the founder of Bellingcat, is actually a CIA operative. It’s by far the most logical explanation, thanks for pointing it out.

Is that really so hard to believe? Many people have hobbies outside of work, like FSO Sean Smith aka Vilerat: https://www.somethingawful.com/news/sean-smith-vilerat/

SA has a ton of wannabe spooks too. See for example Goonfleet.

He’s not a spook, because he paid Lowtax tenbux, isn’t even not an argument.

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