[mikosty]

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.

[vintermann]

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.

[Fnoord]

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.