Eliot Ward Higgins (born January 1979),[1] who previously wrote under the pseudonym Brown Moses, is a British citizen journalist and former blogger, known for using open sources and social media for investigations.

[8] In 2012, when Higgins began blogging about the Syrian civil war, he was unemployed and spent his days taking care of his child at home;[2] his wife is Turkish.

[2] Higgins' analyses of Syrian weapons, which began as a hobby out of his home in his spare time, are frequently cited by the press and human rights groups and have led to parliamentary discussion.

[8] Higgins' work on who was responsible for the sarin gas attacks in the Syrian civil war was criticised in a letter to the London Review of Books by Theodore Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former UN weapons inspector,[citation needed] Richard Lloyd.

[14] Higgins used geolocation to publish an estimate of where the James Foley execution video was made outside Raqqa, an Islamic State stronghold in north-central Syria.

[15] From 2016 until early 2019, Higgins was a senior fellow in the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab and Future Europe Initiative projects.

[19] On 15 July 2014, Higgins began a new website called Bellingcat for citizen journalists to investigate current events using open-source information such as videos, maps and pictures.

[22] Bellingcat has suggested that the anti-aircraft missile that hit the plane was fired by a Russian unit, the 53rd Buk brigade, based in the city of Kursk.

[25][non-primary source needed] Bellingcat's use of error level analysis in its report was criticised by Jens Kriese, a professional image analyst.

[41][non-primary source needed] Higgins was also one of five authors of an Atlantic Council report released in 2016, Distract, Deceive, Destroy, on Russia's role in Syria.

[2] Amnesty International said, in 2013, that the Brown Moses Blog was vital in proving the Syrian government was using ballistic missiles, information then used to send a research mission to Syria.