60 Minutes

The war crimes in Ukraine are among the worst of the 21st century, but they are just the latest in a history of assassinations and mass murder at the hands ...

Analog denials in the age of the digital witness. He recovered in a German hospital, returned to oppose Putin, and is now in prison. Alexa Koenig: Exactly. So a lotta people are being really innovative and creative about how to use a lot of digital tools and techniques to ultimately solve these puzzles. When he arranged all of the social media into a timeline, he could run the convoy backward to its starting point. So, in a nutshell, what we found out was that Putin is operating an industrial-scale assassination program on his own people. Higgins found clues in each image—billboards, buildings, road signs—that let him fix the location and time of each post. Eliot Higgins: So, Bellingcat comes from the name of a fable, Belling the Cat. And it's about a group of mice who are very scared of a very large cat. But Higgins noticed, in the hours before the shootdown, there were many social media posts from bystanders who saw a missile launcher on a flatbed trailer traveling in eastern Ukraine. But then they realize that no one knows how to do it, and no one is willing to volunteer to do it. Eliot Higgins: And we look [at] as many sources as possible and use those sources to build a picture of what happened. Bellingcat's founder, Eliot Higgins, has created a method of mining online data and social media to put the lie to disinformation and unmask Vladimir Putin. Eliot Higgins: I was working for a company that housed refugees in the U.K. I then worked for a company that manufactured pipes.