Open source research isn’t only about analysing social media or satellite imagery. Another important area involves investigating company structures and relationships.
NED money has gone to UK investigative groups Bellingcat, Finance Uncovered and openDemocracy, as well as media freedom and training organisations Index on Censorship, Article 19, the Media Legal Defence Initiative, and the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The whole Bellendcat thing sounded a bit sus to me when I first came across them being lionised in the UK press. One plonker sitting in his bedroom outdoing the might of the Five Eyes? Mmm, sure.
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
This is where OpenCorporates – a free repository of company registries aggregated from primary public sources, published in order to promote corporate transparency – can be helpful.
To see other sites that offer access to corporate registries, go to the companies and finance tab of the Bellingcat Online Investigation Toolkit.
David Szakonyi, co-founder of the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, reflects that “by accessing OpenCorporates’ API, we achieved in less than a day what would have taken two people between four and six months to do”.
Editor’s note: Some of the images contained in this guide have been blurred as they include the details of real companies that are featured on OpenCorporates.
If you’re an independent journalist, you’ll need to use your own name and email address and provide a list of media sites that have referred to your reporting.
You will need to tidy the table as when it displays the data, Excel will duplicate some of the company information (in columns) as it creates one row per officer.
NED money has gone to UK investigative groups Bellingcat, Finance Uncovered and openDemocracy, as well as media freedom and training organisations Index on Censorship, Article 19, the Media Legal Defence Initiative, and the Thomson Reuters Foundation.