Bellingcat Weekly Newsletter
Thank you for subscribing to the weekly Bellingcat newsletter! Each Sunday, we compile the key stories published by Bellingcat during the previous week, along with links to our favorite examples of open source research around the web. Along with our web content, we will update our readers on events that our staff and contributors are involved with, such as noteworthy interviews and training workshops.
We will also have some themed content for each week - for today, it's the role of open source research in human rights investigations.
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Open Source and Human Rights Research
Through the Syrian Civil War and elsewhere, open source materials have been valuable for the collection of materials to investigate human rights violations and evidnece of atrocities. Non-governmental organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, blend together on-the-ground reporting with the collection of open source materials for their investigations. This week, we will examine specific uses of open source materials in these types of investigations, and the emerging scholarly conversation regarding the best practices of collection and verification of open source materials in a legal context.
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Senior Analyst at Amnesty International, Christoph Koettl, submitted this paper in January regarding how open source research can and should be used in the collection and verification of materials in human rights investigations. With so many materials originating from citizen media, it is vital, as Koettl argues, that human rights practitioners "proactively develop a sound and transparent methodology" in human rights fact-finding.
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The collaborative organization AirWars has conducted open source investigation into the ongoing airstrikes in Syria and Iraq, focusing on the casualties from airstrikes conducted by both the US-led Coalition and Russia. In October, the Washington Spectator spoke with AirWars director Chris Woods to try and calculate the total number of civilian casualties from U.S. drone strikes--finding that the reported figures are far outweighed by the more accurate assessments seen in local, open source materials.
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It is difficult to keep up with all of the reports of chemical attacks in Syria, but in 2016, there has been an unfortunate abundance of materials documenting the evidence of civilian casualties from chlorine gas. Hady Al-Khatib, Bellingcat analyst and director of the Archive for Conflict Investigation, gathered, verified, and analyzed open source videos and photographs showing the effects of chlorine gas used by the Syrian government in Kafarzita, Hama on October 1st.
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Gathering evidence of human rights violations and atrocities from open source materials is possible, but can they be used in court? Keith Hiatt, the Director of the Human Rights and Technology Program at the Human Rights Center at the UC Berkeley School of Law, submitted an article to the Yale Law School Journal arguing that open source materials should be used in investigating tribunals, both because of their availability and relatively low cost, compared to eye witnesses. He concludes piece with the conclusion:
"Open source investigations offer a way to make sense of the vast amount of information available online. They will save money. More importantly, they will save lives. For these reasons, international human rights tribunals should embrace open source investigations, and should clarify evidentiary rules to allow for admission, and clearer weighing, of this new and powerful kind of evidence."
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Announcements, Events, and
Media Appearances
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Bellingcat was awarded a Google Digital News Initiative (DNI) Innovation Fund this week for the development of the Archive for Conflict Investigation. This platform started as the Syrian Archive, an online database with over 2,000 incidents of chemical attacks, airstrikes against civilians, and other human rights abuses, and will be developed into a platform that can be used and accessed by journalists, human rights advocates, lawmakers, and historians to find verified datasets of open source materials from conflict areas. As part of the project, Bellingcat is also currently engaged with a range of government and non-government organisations to develop the use of open source, social media, and user-generated content in areas related to accountability and justice. Lessons learnt from the Archive for Conflict Investigation will be applied to the open source investigation of future conflicts.
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Bellingcat analyst Christiaan Triebert spoke at the WorldView Global Alliance User Conference in Munich this week. Christiaan focused on the possibilities of using satellite imagery to verify claims made by nation-states.
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Bellingcat founder Eliot HIggins spoke at TEDxAmsterdam on Friday with a presentation on "Finding truth in a post-truth world." Eliot focused on Bellingcat's research on the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 and the role of open source research in a media landscape with increasing influence from fake or misleading news.
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Bellingcat analyst Aric Toler spoke on the "Future of Open Source Intelligence" panel at the Defense One Summit in Washington D.C. on Thursday.
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Notable open source investigations from last week
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On Tuesday, we published a translation of independent blogger Askai707's in-depth investigation revealing a significant amount of evidence proving the direct participation of Russia's 61st Separate Naval Infantry Brigade in the Ukrainian Conflict. What's more, this investigation shows that many of the soldiers who shared photographs of themselves fighting near Luhansk in the summer and autumn of 2014 later received medals for their roles in fighting in Ukraine, by decree of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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Bellingcat contributor "Mr. Woods" of @AnotherWarBlog conducted open source research into the use of children and adolescent fighters in the YPG, Syrian Arab Army, and a variety of anti-regime Syrian rebel groups.
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