Citizen journalists – the fighters on the frontline against Russia’s attacks

We can no longer count on our governments to protect us from a tide of disinformation. Our security rests in the hands of open source intelligence, as pioneered by Bellingcat

When the story of 2018 is told, historians may be hard pressed to say which was weirdest: that a deadly nerve agent was deployed in a quiet cathedral town on the edge of Salisbury Plain, at the heart of our military establishment. Or that the Russian suspects were identified not by British intelligence but a group described last week as "armchair investigators".

Because we now know not just the identities of the two men who travelled to Salisbury with a military-grade chemical weapon but also the arm of the Russian army that deployed them - thanks to Bellingcat, a citizen investigation site founded by Eliot Higgins, a former blogger who started it from a laptop on his sofa in breaks from caring for his daughter.