In late January, as people took to the streets in more than 100 towns and cities across Russia to protest the arrest of the opposition leader Alexey Navalny, my Foreign Policy colleague shared a meme that was circulating on Twitter. It showed a row of planks lined up like dominoes. The catalyst was labeled “Eliot Higgins unemployed, bored.” The end of the row was titled “Putin regime in danger.”
Higgins, who a decade ago was a college dropout with a rapacious appetite for news, wasn’t quite unemployed, but he was bored. Stuck in a grim administrative job in Leicester, England, Higgins set out to do what he felt traditional news media weren’t doing: get to the heart of what was really happening as the Arab Spring exploded. He scoured social media and online forums for new tidbits of information on the rapidly escalating crisis in Syria, Yemen, and Libya. Later, he would turn his sights on Russia—culminating in this year’s explosive revelations about Moscow’s failed efforts to assassinate by poison its biggest gadfly, Navalny.
