Technology
Another step toward journalistic use of unmanned aerial vehicles: Polish media have been using mini-helicopters to cover protests.
As I’ve said before, it is highly likely that UAV journalism will expand to include sustained, sometimes-live coverage of otherwise inaccessible news, such as massacres in the Congolese jungle.
Facilitating conditions are likely to include:
- situations with no one in charge — Somalia or eastern Congo, for instance, where there is only nominal government authority
- places where great powers are sympathetic — even if a government objects to “illegal” use of UAVs within its borders, if powers such as the US disapprove of a regime, media organization are likely to get away with their use; the Libyan uprising is an example
It is also simply unclear how adept even great-power militaries will be at finding and destroying small, stealthy, cheap UAVs.
Some of the same issues apply to use of UAVs for human rights work.
Militaries and their governments need to devise policies for how they are going to interact with this kind of coverage; it will not be easy to prevent, and taking action against such private UAVs may have legal consequences, in addition to public relations repercussions.
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For the Twitter futrchat on the future of human rights today, here are some resources and links. (Follow the conversation with #futrchat.)
- Freedom House checklist of political and civil rights — This is a good list of what might be called core human rights, though that designation is subject to a variety of debates.
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which codifies many political, civil, and social rights, and is accepted by most countries in principle, if not in practice.
- “A History of Violence” — An essay by Steven Pinker arguing that violence and brutality of all kinds have been decreasing for a long time.
- A report on fighting human rights abuses using technology.
- Ronald Inglehart on the relationship of social conditions and wealth to values, including values that shape attitudes toward human rights.
- Pew polling data on the attitudes of middle classes toward democracy; culture and class matter.
- In thinking about future drivers, what happens if the world becomes much more wealthy? This Asian Development Bank report offers a scenario in which both China and India have per capita incomes over $40,000 by 2050 — see pages 124 and 120.
- Some thoughts from Hplus on the relationship of transhumanism and human rights — see especially scenarios 3 to 5.
- Other human rights-related posts on this blog.
I used to wonder whether a society that became so networked that it could support a ubiquitous monitoring system would end up not using such a system for oppressive political control, both because of the flows of relatively free information that the networks would enable, and because the ability to run such a system implied a high level of socioeconomic development.
China appears to be answering this question, by building an immense surveillance system that will “cover a half-million intersections, neighborhoods and parks over nearly 400 square miles,” using as many as 500,000 cameras reporting to a central system, David Brin notes (from an NPR report). The monitoring system is ostensibly targeting crime, but could clearly be redirected for political surveillance — and in any case the line between crime and politics becomes blurred in China, for instance when social order is seen to include suppressing dissent by Tibetans or Uighurs.
Still, while China puts immense efforts into controlling expression on the Internet and mobile networks, these technologies have still provided new outlets for expression that have changed the role of public opinion in Chinese society. China runs a highly oppressive high-tech monitoring system, by some definitions, but it is also clear that new information networks are changing the nature of China’s politics.
So I won’t dismiss my original question about the role of technology. Its oppressive aspects will vie with its liberating qualities in coming decades, shaping human rights this century.
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Despite the title, this is not an overview but a few thoughts, in preparation for the APF Twitter chat on the topic today.
Transparency
Increasing transparency may be revealing how power is wielded, but it has a very long way to go. Most people, even in open societies such as the United States, have only a vague sense of which people and organizations hold and use power over them, and what they are doing with it.
Complexity
Complexity obscures power, even to its wielders — witness the 2008+ economic implosion, in which no one, even the powerful, actually knew what their actions meant.
It may also place it in unexpected locales. The maid who has accused the now-former IMF head of sexual attack may -– through no fault of her own –- damage the economy of Europe and even the world.
Machine power
We are passing power to machines. Obscure algorithms were key to the Great Recession, and increasingly determine wide swaths of our lives, such as what we see through search engines and other information portals. These algorithms may or may not reflect the actual intentions of those who created them, and those who use them.
State power
On the whole, states may be increasing their power. Especially in emerging markets, they have more money, technology, and skills in their hands, enabling them to do things that they couldn’t a couple of decades ago.
At the same time, the rawest use of state power, violence, is more constrained that it was. The ordinary repression of the 1980s is now beyond the pale for all but a few states, and can easily get a regime — at least one without power — referred to the International Criminal Court. This is the case nearly across the board: even today’s severe human rights violators tend to be restrained by the standards of the past.
Time Magazine has done a slideshow of 20 apocalyptic visions on film.
Charted by plausibility and likelihood, they come out like this:
- Plausibility — The plausibility that this kind of event would unfold in this way.
- Likelihood — The likelihood that this kind of event will happen.
There are three broad categories in this list worth heeding:
- The likely — We are already well on our way to aspects of “The Inconvenient Truth.”
- The plausible accidents — “Children of Men,” “28 Days Later,” and some of the other bio-disaster movies are disturbingly plausible, even if the exact circumstances are unlikely. Our ubiquitous chemical experiments on ourselves and our growing biotech capabilities mean that we could simply stumble into one of these apocalypses, with no one intending such an outcome.
- Low likelihood but inevitable — Asteroid disasters are unlikely to happen in any short span of time, but inevitable in the long run, unless we do something about them.
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Wired reports that the Air Force is developing tiny, armed drones.
The articles quotes a military document reporting the development of “a Micro-Air Vehicle (MAV) with innovative seeker/tracking sensor algorithms that can engage maneuvering high-value targets.” Such a system could allow precision and stealth, with small charges replacing relatively indiscriminate munitions such as the Hellfire missile.
Such systems could be enhanced much further. They might use small projectiles rather than explosives, and their targeting could be refined. Before too long, a killer MAV might even use facial recognition (with shades of the hunter-seeker anticipated in Dune).
Non-state combatants may have their own options that could rapidly equal many military capabilities. See this drone helicopter with visual feed and augmented reality gaming options for a hint.
Hobbyists have already developed model aircraft with intercontinental capabilities, and it is quite unlikely that governments are currently capable of stopping an albatross-size vehicle flying low over the ocean or a border.
Applications go beyond warfare, of course. See this post about human rights monitoring and journalism, for instance.
(Picture courtesy US Air Force)
Author Bruce Sterling offered his “State of the World 2010” on The Well this week. A few excerpts follow.
As a result of “an emergent, market-driven global financial system that was all about a faith-based market fundamentalism,” he says,
we’ve ended up with our current “It’s a Wonderful Life” Pottersville, where Rupert Murdoch plays our Mr Potter. …. Societies that are top-heavy in this way are just not gonna have major prosperity. Too much of the civil population has been fenced off from the trough. The wealth-generating capacity of the society has been short-circuited. There’s zero political will to socialize the entire planet and re-channel its currency flows, so that’s not gonna happen. Basically, the political class is waiting for the civil population to come back to the church of the free market and get over the fact that its cardinals walk in public with no clothes on.
So you’re just not gonna see a lively, vibrant scene in Pottersville. You can have a Japanese Pottersville, where everybody’s getting older and they’re building huge concrete bridges to nowhere. Or a Managed Democracy Putin-Pottersville, where everybody agrees not to say anything much about the many Potemkin aspects. You could even get some Rio de Janeiro Pottersville full of armed, dropout-ethnic shantytowns where everybody’s high on medical marijuana. But not prosperity.
Continue reading ‘Bruce Sterling’s State of the World’
The Center for American Progress has released a new report on using technology to fight human rights abuses.
Sarah K. Dreier and William F. Schulz write about how mobile phones, social networks, satellite imagery, and DNA forensics can all be deployed to enhance and protect people’s rights.
Cell phones with photo capabilities convey images of human rights violations at a moment’s notice. Internet social networking tools enable activists to connect with one another and with sympathetic audiences to build worldwide networks for change. Electronic data analysis tools allow for vast amounts of information about human rights crimes to be collected and analyzed.
Among other measures, they call for Congress and the Obama administration to
- “Increase funding for scientific research and technology development that link to human rights.”
- “Increase the effectiveness of satellite imagery to document abuses by updating publicly available mapping databases” and increase “NGO access to commercial satellite imagery.”
- Develop “an ongoing, comprehensive effort to facilitate community monitoring. The U.S. government should commit to making satellite imagery of high-risk locations publicly available on a weekly basis.”
- “Support international prohibition of restrictions on cryptography.”
The authors also suggest that predictive modeling could provide early warning: “Scientists can … use advanced sensing technologies in tandem with predictive studies to identify regions at risk before they explode into conflict.”
Technology does not have to be cutting-edge to be highly useful:
Even a recycled, dated cell phone can be a significant boon to human rights and development. Every voter who believes that she or he has been inappropriately turned away from the polls can report that experience to the groups monitoring election violations.
It is clear from the report that creating more tools that support distributed human rights monitoring will be crucial, so that ordinary people can safely, secretly, and readily send calls, text, and images from mobile phones, which will shortly be truly ubiquitous.
To increase affordability, the report suggests that mobile networks in developing countries should provide “text messaging services to social change projects for little or no cost.”
Beyond the material in this report, use of technology for human rights might also be enhanced by:
- crowdsourced monitoring and research — enlisting remote volunteers to go through documents, monitor visual databases or live feeds, and other tasks (building on some early efforts by Amnesty International and others)
- crowdsourced geolocation tools to fill in more of the holes in global mapping they identify
- use of small, inexpensive UAVs in human rights work and related journalism
- deploying a dedicated NGO satellite — expensive but well within the budgets of, for instance, the Gates Foundation
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Iraq is planning to clamp down on the Internet, raising concerns that it will revert to a restrictive approach more typical of the region. Iraq currently has many Internet providers and hundreds of Internet cafes.
A government official told the Associated Press that “All Web sites that glorify terrorism and incite violence and sectarianism, or those that violate social morals with content such as pornography will be banned.”
An Iraqi press freedom group said that the plan was an “attempt to control the flow of free information on the Internet and limit the knowledge of the citizens,” the AP reports.
This can be taken as another sign that the overall durability of a democratic Iraq is still in question. As the US departs, there could easily be backsliding on human rights and democratic practices. The populace will not want to be oppressed, as they were in the Saddam years, but they may well be happy to limit the freedoms and rights of ethnic, political, and religious minorities.
(Image courtesy Mike Licht, Flickr)
A Chinese research group reports that 338 million Chinese are now using the Internet — some 26% of the population.
Despite its restricted state in China, the Internet is still an important driver of expanding freedom. Information circulates much more freely than in the past, and sensitive stories often travel widely before the government clamps down. And those who are determined to get around the so-called Great Firewall can do so.
Though 26% is much lower than rates in developed countries, it still means that the Internet is now well beyond the upper-middle class. The report indicates that usage is spreading in the rural population, driven by rising mobile Internet use.
(Image courtesy openDemocracy — Creative Commons license)