Digital Witness: Using Open Source Information for Human Rights Investigation, Documentation, and Accountability

385 Pages·2020·54.355 MB·English

by  Sam Dubberley, Alexa Koenig, Daragh Murray

Digital Witness

Digital Witness
Using Open Source Information for
Human Rights Investigation, Documentation,
and Accountability
Edited by
SAM DUBBERLEY
ALEXA KOENIG
DARAGH MURRAY
1
3
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This book is dedicated to all of those people who have had their rights violated, or have
witnessed the rights of others being violated, and have picked up a mobile telephone or
other recording device and taken photographs or videos of those events, often at great
risk to themselves. This book is also dedicated to the international community
that has rallied to help bring their stories to the world.

Foreword
On 24 May 1844, Samuel F B Morse sent his famous message, ‘What hath God wrought?’
by telegraph from Washington to Baltimore. Morse’s invention had great consequences that
were not foreseen. One of them was a profound impact on human rights.
The rapid transmission of information made possible by the telegraph permitted the
newspapers of Morse’s era to invent a new profession: war correspondent. Before the tele-
graph, information about what transpired in armed conflicts often consisted of self-s erving
accounts written long afterwards by military commanders extolling their own glorious
deeds. These generally did not include such matters as the mistreatment of prisoners; the
neglect of the wounded; the rape of women in occupied communities as part of the spoils
of war; and indiscriminate attacks that victimized non-c ombatants. All that changed with
the invention of war correspondents. Using the telegraph, they provided daily accounts of
the follies and cruelties of war, often dealing with matters that previously went unreported.
The first armed conflict to be covered by war correspondents using the telegraph was
the Crimean War of 1854– 56. There, the correspondent for the Times of London, William
Howard Russell, distinguished himself. He wrote about the foolhardy and disastrous charge
of the Light Brigade ‘into the valley of death’; and his reporting on the lack of care for
wounded soldiers inspired Florence Nightingale and a party of nurses to set sail for Crimea.
Russell’s reporting helped to create public awareness of the crimes of war, which in turn en-
abled the Swiss businessman Henri Dunant to secure support a few years later, in 1864, for
the adoption of the first of the Geneva Conventions.
The telegraph was instrumental again in war correspondent coverage of another bloody
conflict around the same time, the Civil War in the United States. The Civil War was also
the first armed conflict in which another technological innovation, photography, played a
significant part. The newspapers of the era were not yet capable of publishing photographs,
but the pictures taken by Matthew Brady and other photographers of the era were widely
reproduced and exhibited, giving viewers a more realistic grasp of what happened in armed
conflicts than had been possible previously. The photos, along with the extensive war cor-
respondent reports, created the context in which Francis Lieber, a German- born professor
of law at Columbia University with contacts in the administration of President Abraham
Lincoln, prepared a code of conduct for Union forces. The Lieber Code of 1863, consisting
of 157 articles, was the first comprehensive attempt to codify norms of war conduct. It be-
came the basis for much of the body of law, now known as international humanitarian law,
that the contemporary human rights movement relies on to try to protect human rights in
the context of armed conflict.
My own first experience in taking advantage of communications technology to protect
rights took place just over a half century ago.
In the latter half of the 1960s, when I worked for the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU), much of our work involved efforts to protect the rights of opponents of the war in
viii Foreword
Vietnam. In New York City, as in many other places, street demonstrations against the war
were often accompanied by large numbers of arrests. The police would testify in court that
the demonstrators had conducted themselves in a disorderly or violent manner and, based
on that testimony, demonstrators were routinely convicted of misdemeanours. Many were
sent to jail.
The only way we could defend the demonstrators successfully was to show that they had
conducted themselves peaceably. When demonstrations took place, we sent observers to
the scene wearing large badges identifying themselves as ACLU observers. As we expected,
the police were arresting large numbers of opponents of the war who behaved in a wholly
orderly and lawful manner.
Our observers noticed something else. When police made arrests and put the detainees
into police wagons, the arresting officers immediately went off to make additional arrests.
Later, when we went to court to defend the demonstrators, other police officers turned
up claiming to be the arresting officers and testifying about the disorderly conduct of the
detainees they claimed to have witnessed. It was apparent to us that the police testimony
had nothing to do with the actual conduct of the detainees. It was made up so as to secure
convictions.
We dealt with this by arranging to have a few observers with movie cameras placed in
buildings overlooking sites where we knew demonstrations would take place. My colleague
Paul Chevigny, the director of our Police Practices Project, acquired a device commonly
used in film editing called a ‘moviola’ that he attached to his desk. It was not a very advanced
piece of technology, but it served us well. The moviola allowed Paul to examine films of
demonstrations frame by frame to see what was happening when a particular person was
arrested; and, more importantly, to show which police officer had made an arrest. Our first
major use of this technology took place in connection with a demonstration in New York
in December 1967 when the police made more than 600 arrests at a peaceful protest against
the war. After using the film footage in court in a couple of cases to demonstrate that the
police officers who claimed to be the arresting officers were lying, we showed what we had
to the assistant district attorneys prosecuting these cases. The result was the dismissal of the
remaining cases. In a subsequent episode in Washington, DC in May 1971, when the police
made about 13,000 arrests of anti-w ar demonstrators in a single day—p robably the largest
number of arrests in one day in American history— we used the same approach. In that in-
stance, we even succeeded in getting damages paid to many of those who had been arrested.
Later, in 1981, as founding director of Human Rights Watch, one of the ways my col-
leagues and I established that organization’s reputation was by producing speedy reports on
human rights abuses in remote places. Our ability to do so was helped greatly by the devel-
opment of satellite telephones. They were large, heavy devices at the time, and making calls
on them was very expensive. Yet they enabled our field researchers to report their findings
to us much more rapidly than had been possible previously. We could get help to victims of
abuses and influence press accounts of episodes that were often reported in biased ways by
forces that committed those abuses. Later on, satellite phones became far more portable,
and the cost of calls declined sharply. Internet communications came a little later and, of
course, greatly increased the ease, the speed, and the quantity of information that could be
collected and disseminated.
Satellite technology also played an important role in war-r elated human rights develop-
ments of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia. Television broadcasters used satellite television
Foreword ix
starting in 1992 to report from the besieged city of Sarajevo, creating awareness of the daily
sniping and shelling that was killing thousands of civilians. This played an important part
in creating support for the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the
Former Yugoslavia. And in 1995, satellite photos were used to verify reports that 8,000
Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces at Srebrenica and to locate the
grave sites. Satellite photos have also helped make it possible for Human Rights Watch to
document abuses such as the burning of Rohingya villages in Myanmar in 2017 and 2018.
The internet has of course been the most significant development in communications
technology in recent decades and has had a revolutionary impact on gathering and dis-
seminating information on human rights abuses. Unfortunately, it can also be used to fo-
ment hatred and abuses of rights and no ready means has been devised to counter such
misuse. Although some governments have devised means of limiting internet communi-
cations, those intent on obtaining or circulating information are often able to find ways to
circumvent restrictions. Despite China’s ‘Great Firewall’, for example, human rights moni-
tors outside the country are generally able to secure almost instant reports on the Xi Jinping
government’s arrests of dissenters.
For the most part, governments and anti-g overnment forces that engage in human rights
violations try to shield their actions from public view. There are exceptions, of course.
Groups such as ISIS or Boko Haram flaunt their abuses to show their contempt for the
norms of the societies they are intent on destroying, while some public officials, such as
President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, occasionally boast of their abuse of rights,
perhaps as a way of enhancing their macho credentials. Yet the prevailing practice world-
wide is to give at least lip service to human rights and try to hide their violation from public
view. This is what compels so many organizations intent on protecting human rights to de-
vote so much of their effort to exposing such abuses. Communications technology has be-
come of enormous assistance in those efforts.
The documentation of human rights abuses, whether by the use of advanced commu-
nications technology or by far less sophisticated means, tends to engage human rights ad-
vocates in disputes over the facts with the perpetrators of abuses and their defenders. It is
crucial that human rights proponents be able to back up their findings by citing the sup-
porting evidence. Accordingly, it is essential that they should master the effective use of the
technologies available in open source investigations.
When this homework is done, human rights proponents often gain great advantage
from the efforts of those they identify as the perpetrators of abuses, along with apologists
for those perpetrators, to deny the evidence. Such denials often draw far more attention
to abuses of rights than could be obtained in any other way. In the early days of Human
Rights Watch in the 1980s, my colleagues and I often regarded officials of the Reagan ad-
ministration such as US Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick and Assistant
Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, who regularly denied abuses of rights that we attributed
to US client states in Central America and elsewhere, as our unwitting allies. Their denial
of abuses, and their attacks on journalists and human rights researchers who reported on
those abuses, attracted far more media attention than we were capable of generating on our
own. They often spurred journalists to conduct their own investigations of the abuse we had
identified. By taking great care in our reporting, we were confident that our findings would
stand up to scrutiny. It was an information struggle that we fought with the aid of the tech-
nology that was then available, and we were often successful.