bellingcat is an organization of digital nerds, most of us with a little bit of almost autistic-like fascination with numbers. every time you use your e-mail, you make a phone call, make a doctor s appointment, take a plane or a train, anytime you use the atm, every time you actually look at the screen of your phone, that leaves a trace. in a place like russia, imagine the person who works at a travel agency that has access to the flight manifest, they re getting, what, 25 bucks a day as a salary? and then for another 25, they would be able to sell that flight manifest to anybody who asks for it, just because they ll double their income for the day. this is a whole industry. data brokers are on the dark web, you negotiate a price, and within a few minutes they say, yeah, i can get that data for you by tomorrow. and then you have to send bitcoin. now, bellingcat can t pay for that data because it s a foundation, so i have to pay for that data myself.