Month: November 2024 (Page 6 of 6)

Learning about the war in Ukraine has shown me a new side of warfare one where regular people, like you and me, are central to gathering and sharing evidence in real-time. Through tools like Ukraine’s “e-Enemy” app, civilians can document what they see around them and contribute directly to how the world views the conflict. This app empowers millions of Ukrainians to submit information about Russian military actions, each time reminding them with a message: “Their relatives, friends, and the whole world will learn about their brutal crimes against the Ukrainian people” (TIME). But as I read about this, I began to wonder: could this be a double-edged sword? What happens when ordinary citizens become the main witnesses to war crimes? Where do the desires of ethics clash with the desire to showcase the raw truth? I find trouble with this intersections and I cannot imagine what it would be like for someone else.

One part of this new wave of evidence gathering is something called the Berkeley Protocol, which establishes guidelines for verifying content so that it’s accurate and credible. It’s basically a roadmap to make sure digital information collected by people in war zones can be used as real evidence. But with all of this new technology, it seems like the law is still playing catch-up, and there’s no guarantee courts will accept “citizen evidence.” This made me question whether international law needs to evolve. Should courts adapt to include new types of digital evidence, and if so, how would that change the legal landscape? It’s fascinating but also challenging to think about. I enjoyed thinking about the legal and humanitarian intersection of the reading.

Another big limitation is that the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is supposed to hold people accountable for war crimes, doesn’t have the power to prosecute certain crimes, like Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. This is partly because powerful countries including the United States have been reluctant to support a system that might someday hold their own leaders accountable. It makes me wonder: what happens to all this evidence collected by Ukrainians if no court can prosecute the biggest offenses? If justice isn’t possible at this level, does the whole idea of open-source evidence lose its impact?

As I read about open-source investigations, I couldn’t help but think about Bellingcat, a group of volunteers who analyze videos, images, and background clues to verify events like the MH17 shootdown. These people work from home, using digital tools to find the truth, often at great personal risk. But this raises another question: How do open-source investigators keep themselves safe? And what kinds of protections should exist for people doing this risky but essential work? I know that there are things such as the whistleblowers protections for legally important people so how do these protections translate?

I also found myself thinking about how people’s motivations and patience play a role in this kind of evidence collection. The TIME article mentions how Ukrainians want to ensure the truth is recorded before memories fade. Yet, legal processes are slow, and there’s a real risk that people may get frustrated with the pace of justice. I wondered how delays might affect the motivation of those documenting events. If justice takes too long, could it lead to a sense of helplessness or discourage people from submitting evidence? And what impact does this have on both the victims and those working tirelessly to record these events?

Ultimately, reading about open-source investigations in Ukraine has left me with a lot of questions. We’re seeing how ordinary people can contribute to documenting war crimes, but there’s still so much to figure out. How can we make sure this evidence is reliable and safe to collect? And in a world where everyone is a potential witness, what will justice look like in the future? These questions feel urgent, especially as we consider how technology is reshaping not just warfare but also the pursuit of truth and accountability.

In the Bellingcat Documentary, the current state of human perceptions of online content is described as an “emotional relationship to information.” From the average citizen to a world leader, how are we controlling and monitoring information in a way that tells the true story, instead of watching content echo back to us our existing beliefs? Something that permeated this week’s readings was the idea of how accountability and evolving interpretation techniques defined the practices of OSINT.

Something that struck me was how OSINT journalism was doing the job of traditional media outlets in a way that exceeded the current abilities of those outlets. For example, forensic techniques of an independent organization like Bellingcat interpret information and guide readers in a way that only those active in open-source investigations could do.

I enjoyed learning about the specific approaches used that have revolutionized the idea of accountability for global human rights in modern warfare. For example, the idea of creating networks of verified identities based on tattoos, birthmarks, freckle patterns, and scars was fascinating.  The Forbes piece also spotlit a “gamified” crowdsourcing approach to collecting smartphone footage of the war in Ukraine that is helping officials piece together attacks, by upping the quantity and quality of footage submitted.

In the current age of warfare, there is an unprecedented speed in which information spreads and therefore gathering it needs to match that speed. OSINT functions as the remedy to this: gaining a well-rounded image about what is happening so that there is a data-based foundation.

This data-based foundation rested at the core of the implications of how open-source reporting could be applied to the sphere of the International Criminal Court (ICC). I was largely unaware about how difficult war-crimes cases are to prosecute, and of the fractures that exist within the structures of the ICC. I enjoyed the optimistic view of seeing how journalists’ work in acquiring citizen evidence is reinventing modern warfare and accountability in international justice.

Thinking about the work of open-source journalists and the work’s application to international war accountability, learning about this world left me with questions about preserving the integrity and reliability of open-source investigations, specifically in how world leaders and press outlets can undermine sources used in OSINT and their work. As social media and video content becomes increasingly malleable and prone to convincing manipulation (e.g. deepfakes, AI-generated content, photo editing), how will open-source journalists work to maintain the integrity of their sources and gain trust? Are there new techniques that Bellingcat is developing in this changing technological landscape?

Building upon the idea of content manipulation, I wonder if upon the further growth and expansion of OSINT and its notoriety that content may be manipulated and weaponized to breed falsehoods in the investigations. For example, what if traceable aspects of an individual (scars/tattoos) are manipulated to mislead journalists?  In this kind of situation, how does the field adapt? Would the rise of OSINT and the spread of its methods potentially bring about a new era of misinformation warfare?

I found the pieces on OSINT and Bellingcat fascinating. I have been on X for a few years and I have seen a lot of OSINT work in relation to the war in Ukraine, so it was fascinating to see more examples of OSINT work in other contexts. I thought the analogy in the documentary of the present moment in digital space being akin to the time of the invention of the printing press was helpful: there has been a sudden development which is still rapidly evolving, and the consequences of that change and our understanding of it are not yet settled. For example, I was struck by the simplicity of the investigators’ methods for investigating Russian soldiers. They could search the soldiers’ units on VContact and then check the mothers and wives’ forums to see discussions of troop movements. So, my first question for Christian would be: how are governments responding to OSINT investigations? What counter measures have they employed?

I was also interested in the part of the documentary where Christian shows us how a car bombing in Iraq was staged. He goes on to explain that it took him several days of research to find out what actually happened—time, he explained, that traditional news outlets don’t have. So, what does this mean for journalism? To what extent are we going to rely on citizen journalists being able to prove their claims vs will people continue to trust big news organisations?

I was very interested in the TIME piece on the Ukrainian government’s app. Citizens can use the app to report war crimes and Russian troop movements as well as interact with the government in other ways. The article was particularly interesting in the context of the other readings on OSINT as this seems to be an exampled of state-sponsored engagement with OSINT both for military purposes in the present and for War crimes prosecution purposes in the future. As Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation says that “this war has been the most radical shift in warefare since WWII, at least in Europe”. I hear people say this sort of thing about the war in Ukraine in the context of drone warfare, too. I imagine the same will be said once AI is deployed more regularly on the battlefield too. However, the liberal in me is worried about how a government app on your phone could be abused. I spoke to a Russian guy my age I met last year in France and he was telling me about a similar government app in Russia. There, however, Russian men started to receive their draft orders via notification on their phones so they could no longer claim not to have seen them. They could also lose access to their drivers’ license and bank accounts through the app if they did not respond to the draft order. In any case, I think the app will be a huge resource to ICC investigators (the Foreign Affairs piece was super helpful at explaining why prosecuting Putin would be so hard) and historians. My other questions for Christian would be to ask how OSINT is evolving with technology, e.g AI. and I am also interested in how Bellingcat investigators remain transparent whilst also protecting sources / unique investigative practices.

In the Bellingcat documentary, I was particularly struck by Professor Jay Rosen’s distinction between how credibility is established between traditional journalism and open source investigative journalism. He says that while traditional journalism can rely on the credibility established by the institutions that platform it, open source journalism has no choice but to rely on transparency. Thus, the resources used to generate journalistic accounts of events such as war crimes need to be made available and need to be directly verifiable by the public. In addition to making these sources accessible, open source journalists also guide the public through the process of analyzing the data and verifying its authenticity. This got me thinking about how traditional journalism could benefit from adopting a similar approach based on transparency and reproducibility, as academia has. This could avoid problems like the controversy we briefly discussed in class about Judith Miller’s dismissal from The New York Times.

I was also surprised to see how fabricated data could be picked up by international media without any effort to verify it. These examples clearly demonstrate that the media has its flaws and that its biases can affect the quality of the reporting it does. At a time when trust in the media is on the decline, what would it mean for traditional journalism to include sources in its reporting that help the public verify the claims being made rather than just expecting its readers to trust it? Does journalism lose something when transparency becomes a much more important part of its work than trust? In asking these questions, I could not help but think of cases where otherwise perfectly credible sources demand anonymity. What does transparency mean when confidentiality is such an important part of journalists’ work?

I was fascinated by the creativity of investigative journalists and how they use gaming and geolocation technologies to challenge official government statements. This kind of work by ordinary citizens is inspiring and illustrates an optimistic application of technology to democratize access to crucial information. The documentary complements the Times and Forbes article very well. On the one hand, “social media, smartphones and near real-time monitoring of attacks could usher in a new era of accountability”. On the other, it is legitimate to be wary of accounts that are not produced by people trained and accredited to provide us with information. It is legitimate to be wary of people like Elliott Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, because the reality is that he is not an expert. The promise of technology and open-source investigation must be balanced with caution. Ultimately, we cannot all become investigators. We cannot, and in my view should not, expect trust to disappear. Trust is a fundamental part of the social contract, and without it we cannot live in community. So in my view, it is much more important to revise the norms of the institutions from which we expect the truth, to invest in accountability mechanisms, and to further decentralize power so that institutions are able to hold each other to account. That is much more productive than an environment where everything is questioned.

I am excited about the possibilities that open source investigations will offer, particularly in terms of holding powerful individuals, institutions, and states to account. I am equally excited about working to restore trust in our institutions.

The Foreign Affairs article highlighted the limitations of international legal systems in trying the crime of aggression since the international avenues for trying this crime are less clear than the jurisdiction of the ICC for example. After the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals were disbanded, no international court had jurisdiction over the crime of aggression. This article demonstrates two key points for me. The first is the limitation of international legal systems. The crime of aggression cannot be applied against nationals of nonparties due to the concession made at Kampala. One alternative workaround mentioned in the article is for a few states to create an ad hoc court (or for the crime to be tried domestically in Ukraine), which can both be very long processes that take a lot of time. The second and related key point is that the role of journalism is in some ways to be “faster” than the legal system by documenting and gathering evidence of war crimes and aggression as they occur in real time. In other words, it’s an additional form of accountability which should not “wait” for the long and drawn out legal processes.

Citizen journalism and open-source investigations can contribute to this goal. For example, the TIME article on Ukraine crowdsourcing digital evidence of war crimes is a good example of allowing citizens to document alleged war crimes so that authorities can later hold the perpetrators responsible. It helps that Ukraine adapted already widely-used government apps for this purpose, and that there is an organized effort to gather this information into one database. The article notes that international war crimes are notoriously difficult to prosecute, so it’s still unclear what the effect of these efforts will be in terms of prosecution. However, these documentation efforts are still useful on their own in terms of countering potential Russian misinformation about what’s happening on the ground, as noted by a Ukrainian officials defending the use of these digital tools. The Record’s article also demonstrates that use of newer tools can help answer questions that were previously either impossible or very difficult to answer when it comes to investigating mass graves. It also suggests that mass surveillance changed from being something that was solely in the purview of governments to something that is more open-source due to the digital era.

Bellingcat’s investigation into the downing of Malaysia airlines flight MH17 over Ukrainian airspace is great example of open source investigations being “ahead” of legal processes while helping with the conviction years down the line. As of the time of publication of The Record article, there was still no verdict on the case of the three Russians and Ukrainian accused of downing the plane. However, a verdict did come later that year. Although it took more than eight years between the incident and the verdict, there is no doubt that Bellingcat’s effort of looking through social media posts in eastern Ukraine and eventually finding intercepted calls helped make this verdict possible or at least faster than it might have been without the open source investigation.

In Philadelphia’s Welcoming Center, a nonprofit focused on immigrant economic integration, Mariama Diallo sits confidently at her desk, where she works as an administrative support specialist. Under a black blazer that matches her hijab, Mariama wears a west african ankara dress, its bright pink fabric making her immediately noticeable. In the center, she exudes a quiet confidence, from the way she speaks to her mannerisms as she shows us around.

Just a year ago however, Mariama was in Conakry, Guinea, a city she was forced to flee following the 2021 coup. Initially, the coup was seen favorably by many Guineans, including Mariama; Conde, the previous president, had become increasingly authoritarian, and Mamady Doumboya, who took over, built his platform on promises of recapturing the power taken away from the people and holding fair elections. These promises, however, didn’t last long, as Mariama recalls the descent into violence after just a few months.

“We were very afraid. Sometimes I’d go to work, and couldn’t go home because they were fighting. I would sleep at a friend’s house or leave in the morning,’ she said. “One time we couldn’t leave the house for three days. Every day I prayed to god to stay alive. We saw people around us losing everything. And so my husband started to think about immigrating.”

Mariama insisted on migrating ‘legally’. Whilst awaiting a number of immigration applications, ranging from Quebec and Paris, both locations where she has family, Mariama and her husband won the US visa lottery. They immediately took the chance to leave, bringing them from the blue shores of Conakry all the way to concrete Philadelphia in December 2023.

The transition wasn’t easy. For only 11 months of English study she speaks with impressive confidence and fluency; her initial experience however, was tainted by linguistic barriers, cultural differences and even setbacks from within her own community. Although Mariama and her husband won the diversity lottery, they had a Guinean sponsor family. When they got here, the advice they gave them regarding their economic prospects as immigrants was discouraging.

“I thought maybe I could study and work in law here because in Guinea I had my masters in law,” she said. “But when I asked them, they said no – here, you’re an immigrant. You can work in a care home or in daycare, and your husband can do something like uber. I couldn’t be around people who didn’t want to help me grow as an individual. When I told them I’d got a job helping people at the welcoming center, doing administration and translation, they were shocked.”

With her extensive experience and education, Mariama didn’t want to confine herself to roles which were traditionally expected of immigrants such as herself. She soon got involved in the programs the Welcoming center offered, enrolling in the International Professionals Program (IPP) and Immigrant Leadership Institute (ILI), initiatives aimed at helping immigrants with previous qualifications in their home country integrate and gain the skills necessary to thrive in the American workplace.

As part of the program, she spearheaded the project “Who will listen to Us”, about the challenges immigrants face learning English, having been vocal about the specific barriers issues African, non-english and non-spanish speaking immigrants face in the USA, saying that spanish speaking immigrants have an easier time due to the abundance of multilingual resources already available in the language. She calls the event ‘her greatest moment here’, and is planning another initiative, a proposal for the Philadelphia department of education which suggests creating specialized language learning programs for immigrants based on their specific needs, from professional English to tailored programs for individuals with disabilities.

These programs were instrumental in helping Mariama find her footing professionally when she got to Philadelphia. She now works as an administrative support specialist for the Welcoming Center. When asked what is still missing from her new life in America however, she always goes back to the family and community she left in Guinea.

“In Africa, we have a culture of community and sharing. Socializing is a very big part of the culture. I was in a big family, there were always people around me. Now, I’m only with my husband. Especially during Ramadan, I felt so alone. It can be especially depressing for my husband, especially as he works at home and is alone for longer periods of time when I leave for work and go to Center City. Socializing isn’t a big thing here. You can go mad if you’re not careful.”

It’s a challenge she tries to address in her volunteer work, saying that this isn’t an issue that only affects immigrants. She works both as a Fulani and French translator for AFAHO (African Family Health Organization) events as well as volunteering at the Lutheran Settlement House, which she credits for creating a semblance of the community she had back in Conakry. “I do food distribution every Thursday,” she says, smiling. “We eat, put on music. The old people dance. They’re happy because in their homes, they’re alone too. Even American people need something like this, an environment where they can meet with other people, even once a week. That’s why I like that house. They’re good people, and you can learn alot from them.”

When talking about the current anti-immigrant sentiment from the political right, Anuj Gupta, The Welcoming Center’s director, remarked;

‘When we shut our borders, we lose out on the collective benefit from talent, education, skill, and most of all, determination. You want us to say no to that kind of drive? That kind of determination?

Give immigrants the skill sets and knowledge to address barriers. To become advocates for themselves and their communities. To learn how to engage with elected officials, local government, and become agents of change. And that 3 part model is what comprises the Welcoming Center.”

Mariama’s professional transition, ambition and commitment to serving her community exemplifies the purpose of the center and its programs. Even when talking about what lies ahead for her in the long term, she is oriented in the ways in which she can make an impact, but sees her future eventually circling back to West Africa. There, she dreams of creating an initiative to raise awareness and support Albino communities, who she says are targeted and face discrimination.

The coup and its aftermath brought Mariama to Philadelphia. At the end of the day however, she says; “I am African. I know many things, and many problems in Africa. I won’t stay in America because I can say that they don’t need me here – Africa needs me more.”