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.
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
(Image copyright FutureAtlas.com — usable with attribution and link)
Follow on Twitter: @Geofutures
A curious intelligence experiment is underway on the Web, the NYT reports.
American intelligence agencies are putting 48,000 boxes of captured Iraqi government documents online, in Arabic.
The idea, pushed by conservatives, is that this will give more attention to neglected details of Iraqis activities and intentions, possibly bolstering the case for war.
This particular scheme may be amateurish in execution, but the underlying idea — truly open-source intelligence — is profound.
Open-source intelligence traditionally refers to publicly available sources analyzed by conventional intelligence agencies.
But the newer meaning of “open source” — opening information, methods, and output in a system to broad participation — could be applied in the intelligence sphere.
Civilian analogues are already in operation:
- Amber Alerts to find missing children are a method of rapidly creating a dispersed intelligence gathering apparatus.
- Fighting child exploitation, investigators have released images with the victim digitally removed, in hopes that the public can identify something from the background or other clues. These methods have sometimes yielded results.
Applied to intelligence, open-source methods could address two problems: inadequate attention resources, and inadequate information gathering. Both are enabled by the networked information revolution that connects ever more people and devices.
Attention: networks of varying openness could be applied to answer three kinds of problems:
- Is there anything to this? Does an image or document warrant further attention?
- Do you recognize this? Where, who, or what is this?
- Is anything happening? Networks could be tasked with real-time monitoring of sensors or imaging systems.
Gathering: The Internet and mobile phone networks are forming an increasingly pervasive information network that far surpasses that of the world’s intelligence agencies. These networks can be used in several ways:
- Passive gathering: The Web and mobile networks are increasingly good for near-real time monitoring of events. After the London bombings of 2005, it was possible to get multiple images of many of the bomb sites from the photo site Flickr.
- Post-facto gathering: The library of images captured by civilians will grow more and more vast, and it is not long before any public event will be recorded by numerous devices. It will be possible to request images of an event or place from the public with near-certainty that the image is out there. (A version of this was done by the US armed forces during World War II, when they asked the public to send in all their pre-war tourist photos of Europe, in order to compile a visual intelligence database. Flickr could achieve the same results in a matter of minutes.)
- Real-time gathering: In certain circumstances and places, it will be possible to put out a request for civilians to gather data in real time.