Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vintermann 1045 days ago
He took National Endowment for Democracy money. I guess you can pretend that isn't intelligence money. Would you like to?

He also took a think tank job at Atlantic Council for many years. I guess you can also pretend that it isn't part of the military-intelligence complex.
1 comments
mikosty 1045 days ago
By "he took" you probably mean that Bellingcat has received support from National Endowment For Democracy?

Are you saying that this support has somehow affected the investigations conducted by Bellingcat? How that is visible exactly?

Also, I don't know too much about National Endowment For Democracy so could you provide some reading about how it's affiliated with intelligence agencies?

link
vintermann 1045 days ago
I'm not going to argue the very basic notion that people who fund you and can decide to change their mind, have power over you and influence you. Higgins has complained that he had to fire people for lack of funding in the past.

As I tried to suggest, if you want to contest such very basic things, go ahead, but like Oryx, I get tired too, so I might just leave it at that.

link
mikosty 1045 days ago
It seems that the National Endowment for Democracy support for Bellingcat ended in 2021: https://www.bellingcat.com/app/uploads/2023/06/Bellingcat-An...

>Last year marked the final year of project funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) that provided funding for Russian-language workshops at no cost to journalists and human rights researchers based in Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia and the Caucasus.

link
vintermann 1045 days ago
Yeah. He quit (or they didn't want him any more, I don't know) the Atlantic Council job too.

I think he has an ambivalent relationship to these organisations, though he gets very mad at anyone who brings it up. He publicly supported Corbyn, which is absolutely not something you expect an Atlantic Council fellow to do. And as I said, he refused to defend a certain political movement in Ukraine (I seemed to get flagged for calling them what they are, and what Higgins has called them too...), right when most of the press got busy "nuancing" what they'd written earlier on then. He has also written negatively about UK arms deals with Saudi Arabia.

All this is things I respect Higgins for. He was never a simple warblogger, of the kind we saw plenty of at the run-up to the Iraq war.

Oryx though, was. On the other hand he didn't try to court the mil-int crowd. And I'm glad he ultimately doesn't want to go down the path of the war-honking NAFO trolls.

link
Fnoord 1044 days ago
All of these people could easily get a government job involving OSINT. They either chose not to, or they chose to but prefer to stay under the radar (a wise decision, if so). Personally, I'm rather suspicious about someone not accepting donations as part of their voluntary work. They gotta be paid somehow, I suppose with government payment it'd be conflict of interest. But in the end, it does not matter; what matters is their actions, and those were meant to be objectively factual.
link
mikosty 1045 days ago
Not a surprise you did not want to answer the rest of the questions.
link
vintermann 1045 days ago
I'm not interviewing for a position at your think tank.

People who honestly want to get a picture of what the NED is, can read up a bit on it. Nothing I've said should be controversial.

link
dash2 1044 days ago
For anyone who doesn't know this already (I didn't), I looked up NED's website and it says it's a private organization, but that it is funded mostly by the State Department. So, not intelligence agencies.
link