but, that's exactly where bellingcat comes in. 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 feel it's almost my duty, that when we're faced with all this information showing terrible things that are happening, it's to put it out there. it does involve risk. but then, defending liberty, human rights, democracy, involves taking risks. it's when we stop taking risks and we let the fear take hold that we see democracy die. we can see a russian armored car column... >> pelley: we met eliot higgins last month in london, as bellingcat was building a database of social media exposing apparent war crimes in ukraine. eyewitness accounts of attacks on neighborhoods, assaults on hospitals, and murders of civilians are being collected and published on bellingcat's website for all to see. >> higgins: this is actually the location where the woman was killed. >> pelley: nearly everyone in ukraine is a witness with a

and it will show up as crystal, the journalist from bellingcat.ed up cmoed a alexey from doctor from fsb, that was in the enough we couldn't place a real person behind the name. then i would look up if this number showed up in car registration databases. we found an actual alexander who owns a car this number is listed for contacting that person. then you have a real person with a birth date. then you look up his passport file. you see his face. you repeat that many times with the oother suspicious numbers. and then you have a short list of interesting people. and these became our prime suspects. now we knew when the navalny traveled to siberia. we had the actual passenger manifests of six different flights that flown to where navalny flew from moscow hon the day before during and after the day which he arrived. we needed to see if any of those suspicious people traveled to siberia at the time of the poisoning. and we found an overlap. we found a nest of was. s we didn't know existed. it's a domestic assassination machine month an industrial scale

bellingcat is combining tens of thousands of social media posts to make them searchable by pla nde lk as many sourcesse ces touild a picture of whatvideos, photographs, satelle imagery. then we look at the witness statements and the various allegations made by either side. >> reporter: locations and times are corroborated with independent sources, including satellite images and google street view. the goal is to provide verified evidence for future criminal trials. >> and it also means we're collecting an archive of materials that for future generations they can go back and look at this material. >> brennan: you can watch scott pelley's full report sunday night on "60 minutes." today in russia, wnba star brittney griner was back in a moscow courtroom. her pretrial detention was extended another month following a brief hearing. the 31-year-old american has been in custody for nearly three months after vape cartridges containing cannabis oil were allegedly found in her luggage at moscow's airport. the u.s. state department said she's being wrongfully detained but doing as well as can th

researchers in bellingcat and places like the new york times, they know where to look and they know thegoing to push to say that this does not happen, it is a false flag, or something like that. they know to look past these narratives. it is new. the collection of these things in a war crimes trial would be brand new. whenever this ends, if it ends, and bring into a criminal court is going to be different in the age of social media. marking them in the moment, this is posted on this day, using this metadata, making it so it is quantifiable, is very important. that is with the letters are all about. >> in the last minute here, what is the response from the companies? do you think they will comply with these kinds of requests? >> typically, they do. they are not a very binding. they can be, they can be made binding. they have the ability to enforce this stuff. twitter and facebook, probably take top, and google, who also got these letters, generally want to help with this stuff. they made mistakes and they admit it to it. facebook does not admit to a lot, but in the last month or two, the