I think this problem of accountability in wars of aggressions is so important but it can almost feel futile to attempt. I want justice for the people who have faced horrible atrocities but across international borders it is so hard to do. In my environment class last year we talked about treaties and laws and what it took for some to succeed and why most failed. It went back the fact that even though national laws are binding, international laws can’t be enforced unless the countries apart of it agree to enforce it. It is often easy to walk away from treaties that are not convenient to you countries agenda and often there isn’t a means to penalize that country in order to induce enforcement. It is at this inability to enforce treaties or require participation that we have this difficulty. Most of the articles really hit home how difficult it would be to even establish the court to even prosecute the war crimes. But then the question that is next is who will actually be prosecuted. I mean even in America our country has committed war crimes that will never be prosecuted and what does that mean for anyone else.
This week in us looking at how civilian data and footage has been sued to find and prosecute war crimes and criminals I thought of my own research I have been doing. I am apart of the Just Data Lab and have been doing research on the use of cell phones for tracking citizens. I specifically look at how law enforcement tracks protestors. We see the ways that the government can gain access to so much personal information through facial recognition, license scanner, consumer data etc. And every time I look up these sources there is an article about the danger of the ease of accessibility. Then when it comes to horrific atrocities we are ok with allowing privacy to be breached in pursuit of these criminals. I myself felt vindication in seeing how they were able to track important war crimes and locating the concentration camps in China. Even when it came to the insurrection both private citizens and the FBI were able to use social media, data , geolocation etc. it was a collective effort. I thought a lot about how we are able to reconcile these two similar uses of data. I think as the Bellingcat documentary said its partly because when it is citizens doing it there is a lot more transparency in open source journalism that makes people more comfortable. And then also of course our sense of law and order. That if you commit these crimes you in a moral sense forfeit the right to privacy and we got to any means in order to bring justice to those impacted. I think however the work of open source journalists is really cool and important. Particularly I though it was so amazing how the architects were able to use the memories of blindfolded formerly imprisoend Syrians to recreate the inside of the Sednaya prison.
