this was my impression as well. how did they get passport photos and cell phone records? my suspicion for a while has been that bellingcat is basically a way of laundering US intelligence when it is thought to be beneficial to publicly release information or shape public discourse. that isn't to say that i think what they're publishing is necessarily untrue, or that everything they publish is fed to them.
In Russia there is a laws that force both internet services and telecoms to provide SMS and phone calls on demand to police. Not just to some spy agencies, but just to normal police. It's heavily used against opposition leaders as well as some entrepreneurs.
So there is literally tens of thousands of people who can leak phone billing information to anyone.
As for passport data there is tons of points of leakage too since Russia have well-centralised online government services and tons of people have user-access to these databases. E.g people in police, medical services, education, tax departments, local government, etc.
And obviously salary of most people with such access is well below $1000 / month after taxes so they are happy to sell any information for few hundred dollars. Imagine it: all spy agency staff profiles don't have "TOP SECRET. PLEASE DON'T LEAK THIS" warning on it,
> “I don’t want to be too dramatic, but we love this,” said Marc Polymeropolous, the CIA’s former deputy chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia.
> When former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned, it was Bellingcat that was first to publicly identify the two Russian military intelligence operatives that had traveled to the U.K. to spritz the door handle of the Skripals’ home with the Soviet-era nerve agent.
> “Whenever we had to talk to our liaison partners about it, instead of trying to have things cleared or worry about classification issues, you could just reference their work,” said Polymeropolous, who retired from the CIA in 2019.
Russian passport and cellphone records are for sale. It's as simple as that. The Russian state is corrupt at the top, but it's also corrupt all the way down to local officials with database access. There's a large pool of people with access to these records so it's not even especially expensive.
Elliot Higgins has been on the pay of the Atlantic Council before he founded Bellingcat. The Atlantic Council is a think tank that is full of former CIA employees. A big part of Bellingcat's funding also comes from National Endowment for Democracy, an organisation that promotes foreign meddling. This is no smoking gun of course, but it does smell a lot.
