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04/03/2026 05:12:49
33c3-talk-7909 Latest text of pad 33c3-talk-7909 Saved April 3, 2026 |
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OK, so it is said that history is written by the victors, but in the era of information, we just have to dig out the truth and expose the lies. The student archive is a group of volunteers dedicated to documenting human rights violations committed by all sides during the Syrian conflict, with over 2000 incidents preserved in more hours of online footage than there have been hours of conflict. The Syrian archive is the only tool to gather and verify all this data. Without further ado, I present to you this year Nakib team. Hello, everyone, my name is Kathy, and I'm Jeff Sorich. First of all, I would like to thank you for being here and thank you for inviting us. It's really, uh, we appreciate being able to present here, uh, what will be going through in the next 30 minutes, uh, is an overview of the project, their backgrounds, uh, specific problems that we have identified by working on user generated content, uh, our methodology and, uh, three case studies as well as our plans for 2017. So we have started this work, uh, in Turkey in 2014, working with journalists, uh, lawyers and human rights activists. Uh, and the project is about a platform that collects, verifies, uh, preserve and analyze visual documentation of human rights violations. And the goal is to create an evidence based tool that can be used for reporting advocacy, accountability by journalists, human rights defenders and lawyers. Since then, we have been collaborating with a number of groups, uh, the United Nations or Shihad, which is the investigation team based in Geneva, doing investigations on Syria. Since 2012, we've been working with them on investigations related to Aleppo since they got the mandate to do this from the Security Council a few weeks ago. And we've been also working with Human Rights Watch later to cluster munitions research in Syria, Amnesty International as well with the digital verification team, which is a group of young professionals from Berkeley University and Essex Universit
y who are helping us doing in-depth verification. We've been also collaborating with Billancourt, which is a collective of investigators specializing in the use of open source investigations. Uh, we're also working with the Meedan, uh, integrating their platform, which is a collaborative verification platform, uh, also with the witness in terms of improving our methodology and workflow with technical technology collective that are supporting us in the development of the collecting infrastructure, as well as, of course, citizen journalists, lawyers and human rights defenders as they are our main source of information, such such as the Institute for Justice. So since the Tunisian revolution, we have seen a big shift in how conflict has been being reported. Uh, so from, uh, being reported by journalists, NGOs who had access to the country into depending on user generated content, especially in areas where you can't actually access the country. Uh, journalists and NGOs are banned from reporting. And in the case of Syria, there are more hours of online footage than they are actually ours in the conflict itself. And hidden in that footage, there's hundreds of untold stories of human rights violations and possibly war crime evidence. But with this user generated content that we have been working with, we identified three kind of problems. One of it is the content is being erased and can be found. Content is not verified. The content is unsearchable. So working with lawyers and human rights activists, they are doing this work in a hostile environment. There have been attacks and targeted by many groups for doing their work. There have been attacks by all kinds of weapons. Basically, their devices get damaged, their data gets lost, the evidence gets lost. Of course, when they are moving through checkpoints where they are moving through borders, also, their devices are seized, damaged, and of course, information is being lost. If they are publishing what they have on social m
edia platform, it's being deleted, is being removed because it violates the privacy policy of those commercial social media services and also because their accounts get hacked because of what they are publishing. In this case, Physicians for Human Rights has worked on an investigation and documentation related to attacks against hospitals in Syria. They refer to visual evidence that was published on YouTube. It's not there anymore. We lost the evidence that actually refers to this type of attack and I don't know if we can get it again. Uh, it's not just us that are having this problem, but also other investigators, such as Blanchot Elliot from Billycart, who is the director, has been doing a lot of work on chemical attacks that happened in August 2013. And basically most of the evidence that he has been looking for and analyzing has been also gun. The other problem related to this is that content is basically scattered everywhere. It's on different social media platforms, different websites. It's really hard to understand what happened in a specific incident because it's really hard to understand the full image. It's also, of course, scattered offline when there's no Internet connectivity and external hard drives or computers. When it's published online, it's not verified. There are hundreds and hundreds of videos. We are not talking about one or two that are coming every day. With this comes a lot of fake information as well, which makes it really hard for a journalist and human rights organization to actually respond to this huge amount of data related to violations. It is so difficult for it to be searchable because it doesn't have any kind of metadata when it's published. Also, metadata is being stripped from social media platform when visual evidence is published there. Most reports that are published by human rights organizations or articles by journalists in different formats, formats. So it's really inaccessible. So we worked to address these three problems
in a variety of ways. So for the first problem, the contents being deleted or that it scattered throughout the Internet, we worked to develop an automated, secure content backup tool. So every day our content is being scraped and backed up externally in servers throughout the world. Also, by making the platform, the database online available online, we've kind of centralized the data that's being scattered throughout the Internet and put it in one place dealing with the fact that the content is not verified. We've worked to develop a very detailed methodology. It's an open source methodology that we're going to go into in a little bit and also an infrastructure so that we can highlight how the verification is actually working and then relating to the fact that the country's unsearchable. We recognize the fact that we needed to have a very standardized metadata scheme and filter system so that you can search through all the content that we have. So for the methodology, we found three components. There's a collection, the archival component. There's the basic verification component and more in-depth investigations. So there's five steps that we've identified for collection in our kivel, the first step before we have any of the content is to first make a list of all of our sources for that content. So we have identified 200 credible sources made up of a variety of individuals or organizations, you know, local field clinics, individual citizens and larger NGOs. A lot of the sources that we're working with have been reporting on the conflict since 2011 or 2012, although some are more recent. So after we have a list of the sources for the content, we need to develop a list of sources for the verification, you can't verify the content with the same sources who are providing the content. So we need to develop the separate list. And this is mostly made up of a team of citizen journalists and journalists and human rights defenders who are located in Syria. When we need additi
onal information regarding verification of any of the videos, we get in touch with them and they can also help us identify a specific place or item in the videos. And the third step that we have for the collection archival is to establish this metadata scheme and we for our database decide to use the metadata scheme developed by the U.N. Office for High Commissioner for Human Rights. And we did this because they are in a unique position to investigate and also to prosecute. So we felt that if we categorize our data by their standards, then it could be useful for future investigations. These are some of the categories that they have in their metadata scheme, and I'm not going to go over all of them now, but you can just see them. We can come back to them later. The first step of the collection of archival is to record as much of the metadata that we can. So we want to contextualize the material that we do have to identify the location, the data that it was recorded and uploaded. I can talk about that in a bit and also the origin of the video, which is a bit harder to identify. As I mentioned, a lot of the metadata is stripped when it's uploaded into social media platforms. So sometimes there's very little additional information and sometimes it's more. And then step five, once we have identified all of the metadata and an incident, we work to collect store hash and timestamp all of the videos that we have so that we can preserve the integrity of the videos and make sure that they're not modified after we have downloaded them and stored in securely. So for the verification, we also have five steps, the first step, once we have the video downloaded and stored in our servers, is the person to aggregate all the metadata that we have using, as I mentioned, the metadata scheme from UNCHR, but also additional metadata fields like type of munitions used, if that's able to be determined or the weather unique landmarks that are in individual videos. Once we have all of that, w
e can start the verification process for the second step is to verify the source of the video. A lot of the videos that we're getting are sent directly by sources on the ground. So in that case, we we know we know who this is. But when something is uploaded online, we can determine the source by the user accounts, whether it's a media house or whether it's an individual journalist. We we we we we determine whether they're credible or not based on their history of uploading and whether or not they're known to us or not. If they're not within our database of credible sources, we have a procedure for verifying them, for vetting them. And I can go into that in a bit. The third step for verification is to verify the location. So this is the whole geolocation component. So there's basically geolocation that we can determine by reading the descriptions of the videos that we've uploaded and also communicating with the people who have uploaded them in some cases. We also do more in-depth geolocation as that is going to go over in some of the key studies. And then a fourth step is verifying the filming and the upload date, so upload dates are able to be determined by the date that it has been uploaded to YouTube. But there's tools developed by groups like Witness and others that help with this process. Sometimes it may be difficult to verify the date that it was actually filmed. People can film, they can upload it at the same day or sometimes many months later. So we have to cross-reference this with a lot of news accounts, reports by NGOs or international human rights organizations. And then the last step is to publish this into our database, so we make our database publicly available and open in an open source format, and this is what the database looks like. So you can see on the left there's an identifier, there's description, the date that it was recorded, where it was and a type of violation according to the UNCHR standards. So in the red box, you can see the type of vi
olation and this is using that metadata scheme underneath that, you can see the types of weapons identified. And then location. And when you click on an individual incident, you can see on the left hand side, this is where the video is, they don't auto play because we don't want to expose people to content that they might find disturbing. And if we found that a video has is particularly graphic, we always include a warning and a red banner at this one doesn't have it. On the right hand side, you can see the initial metadata at, then blow it. We've geo located so you can see where each video was actually filmed. On the right hand side, you can see more additional metadata like the weather or weapons used. So when we look at the videos altogether, we've developed a map where you can it's interactive. This is just a screenshot, but you can zoom in or out and you can find particular areas where particular incidents were filmed. This is all able to be filtered by the type of munition used or the type of investigation that we're doing, for instance, on cluster bombs or chemical weapons. And with that, we've done a number of investigations. So we do this for a couple of reasons. One, we wanted the archive to be used as an advocacy tool for people right now. We wanted to keep people updated in terms of what's the current situation. We also want to speak directly to policymakers, people like the ICC, people like the UNCHR and others. But also we recognize that there's a strong amount of trust that's needed between us and the people who are uploading the videos the way we need to trust them in order to know that the content that they're providing us with is legitimate or if they're vouching for it, that that they're making the correct claims. But they also need to trust us that we're using the data for the intended purposes. And this is particularly true when they're sending us information directly. So we have an investigation as part of the website, as you can see here, and
the first one on chemical weapons is a case study that is going to talk about now. So the first case study is related to the use of chemical weapons in Syria since 2011, until until now, we have located and verified, collected hundreds of visual evidence related to this. What we can quickly see from this is, first, chemical weapons has been, uh, a tool from the beginning of the conflict since 2012. Uh, most of the organizations maybe or, uh, human rights community think that it started in 2013 because there is a very big incident there. But it actually started before. We could also see that it's still continuing 2015 and 2016, even after the OPCW, the Organization of Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, have announced that they destroyed chemical weapons in Syria in 2015. Another graph that shows the peak, uh, in 2013. And most of the video has been published, uh, there because there was a big incident in the countryside of Damascus of the use of sarin gas against civilians. Uh, we can see that it's still continuing, not even November, but also until a few days ago. This is one of the recent incidents that happened in eastern Aleppo, which was the use of chlorine cylinders against, uh, civilian and also civilian areas. Uh, this is the, uh, the video that has been, uh, published by the Syrian Institute for Justice, which are lawyers that are based in Aleppo. And we can see that they are taking footage of their impact sites after the gas cylinder has been dropped from this type of images. We try to identify structure of the buildings to be able to understand where this actually happens. Uh, this is the gas cylinder that was used. We they sent us, uh, a very close image to it. If we go even closer, we can see that there is the sticker from A, B, B, C, which is A, B, C, C, which is a Jordanian company that produces, uh, chemicals. And, uh, we also were able to identify the structure of the buildings, uh, as you can see, also the impact site, as has been seen in the videos,
the tree that has been seen also in the video. And through that, we go to Google Earth to be able to understand where this actually happened. And the title there is a description of what happened and we looked around that area. This is exactly where the cameraman is standing. And then by getting a better satellite imagery, we can see the same buildings on the right, the impact site. And that she so we know exactly that. This is the location in eastern Aleppo that has been attacked. This is not the only attack that's used this kind of gas cylinder. Uh, but also there have been, uh, earlier ones from Zeta in October 2016. Uh, there has been a recent one a few weeks ago in Elfreda's district near Aleppo, December 8th, 2016. There has been another one a few days ago that happened in the second Hanano in Aleppo, December 18th, 2016, which also shows a pattern of the use of gas cylinder against civilians. And we can identify that this is one of the tactics that has been used by the Syrian government to take control of, uh, of Aleppo. All these claimed reports we can match with the OPCW also report that has been published in 2015 proving that the Syrian government was responsible for the use of chemicals against civilians. So the second, uh, case study is related to, uh, cluster munitions used in Syria. Uh, it has been used by the Syrian government and also by the Russian government starting in their operation, uh, September 2015. They deny that they have any kind of, uh, weapons like this in Syria. But there was a report that has been published by Russia today. So a video and this video, uh, has been published from an airbase, which is the main airbase of the Russia aircraft. And we can identify two types of, uh, cluster munitions. One is incendiary RPK and it's a 2.5, and the other one is more as a cluster, uh, identified cluster munitions, I believe, a hundred eighty two point five RTM. Uh, we there were also other, uh, footage from an air base that we are talking by jo
urnalists, uh, that were there visiting, uh, and by accident. They also, uh, photo to this, uh, cluster munitions. That is their. So since then, we started to collect and verify the visual evidence from media activists that there have been claims that there was a cluster munitions has been used. And with Human Rights Watch in July 2016, we were able to collaborate on a report about cluster munitions used in Syria. And through the database, they have identified specific types of cluster munitions, as we can see in this light and also on the. So the third case study is related to Israeli airstrikes. Russian airstrikes, coalition airstrikes, we started with the Russian airstrikes since the beginning of the operation in September 2015. We have been collecting hundreds and hundreds of also visual evidence related to that. We try to locate as much as possible to understand what happened and where where was the most attacks happened and in which areas. And we did some in-depth also investigations of specific videos. Uh, this is one of them. It's it was published by the Just Short Media Center, which is a group that is based in Idlib. And they were claiming that there was a mosque being bombed. It's called Hattab, and they were also claiming that it was bombed by Russian aircraft. So after that, uh, the Russian Ministry of Defense has announced that they are not responsible for this type of attack and this is all fake and they have published satellite imagery of the actual mosque saying that this is the actual mosque that was reported. And it's still intact. And this is a recent satellite imagery. So what we did is we asked one of the journalists, our sources that we work with from Idlib to take a photo of this, uh, mosque that has been showing on the satellite image. And he did. And it actually was still intact. But the name was Al Faruk, not Farouk not. So we located this one through Google Earth just to understand where it is exactly. And then what we try to do is we try
to do to look for other mosques from close to this area. And we have found this satellite imagery that was posted on Facebook page of the just distributed media center of a mosque that is close to that mosque. But it's still intact because it was months before the attack. But through the satellite imagery, we were able to locate the drone image with the videos that has been published about the attack. This is one of the videos from one of the sources, Asherman Abdullah, that we work with him in Idlib. This is another one from other sources, the just one media center. And from there, we were able to use Google Earth again to locate, uh, the actual mosque that was attacked. And then we saw that the distance is about one kilometer between the claimed mosque that was attacked and the actual mosque. And we can see this clearer and this footage from Google Earth right now. So it's about one kilometer away. And we got a clear satellite imagery where after the attack, where we can see that the mosque was was also attacked. We have also noticed that the logo of the satellite imagery published by the Russian minister of defense is covering the actual mosque that was attacked. And we don't know if it happened by accident or if it's on purpose, but we know that there was a fake information or wrong information that was published by the Ministry of Defense. So those are a couple of projects that we're working on in 2016, but for 2017, we have a bunch of plans. One, we want to add a lot of new sources of the base that we're that we're using. So these are both platform based. Right now, we're using mostly videos from YouTube. But you also want to incorporate Twitter and telegram into into our database and also from organizations and individuals like the Violations Documentation Center, who's doing a lot of really amazing work. But we don't have their information in our system yet. And also groups like the UN and various various organizations that are working on human rights issue
s that are currently publishing in PDF format. Of course, we also want to be incorporating offline data sources more into the database that we're using. We're looking forward to continuing the open source investigations that we're doing with Belenkaya and with Amnesty International's Digital Verification Corps. And we're looking to develop a toolkit for open source investigations, open source here, meaning information that's publicly available. But the toolkit itself is also going to be open source, as in it will be on gett and available for comments. So if you have any feedback, please let us know. And then lastly, we're looking to develop a platform for collaborative verification of large data sets. So right now there isn't one. There's projects like check from meeting that are working on verification and individual videos, which is super, super helpful, but for large data set that doesn't currently exist. So thanks so much for all your time. If you have questions, I know we still have a couple of minutes left. Otherwise, we're available afterwards. And if you have any interest in helping or supporting us, you can check us out here at our website. We're on Twitter and you can email us. That's EPDP King. Thanks so much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. We have a few minutes for questions, so please microphone one. So I want to ask, how could you verify the number of casualty casualties for every crime and whether if your archive include crimes, less major crimes and the chemical weapons that you've been used since 2011? Right. So we didn't verify the number of casualties as a result of the chemical attacks. There are other organizations who are doing so, like the Violation Documentation Center. And what we are trying to do is to incorporate what they have dataset with the visual evidence so we can understand exactly what happened. OK. And whether your archives include other crimes that are started since 2011 or whether it just includes crimes since 2014. U
m, so we have videos about crimes from 2011 until now, we were not able to process all this information because we're talking about thousands of footage, but their plan is to go through it for next year. Thank you. Uh, next question. Microphone number three, I just wanted to say that you're doing a great job. It's very important that somebody does this and, you know, it's please keep this up. It's actually two questions. First question is, do you have a narrative which brings the facts together? In a way, I'm not talking about a factual narrative, but what the different parties involved in this war are saying and what they're claiming about these events. So we know what happened, but what are they saying about it? And you have that in the platform. And the second question is, how can we help? I mean, we have a lot of people here in this room probably want to help. So how can we do that? Right. So for the first question, we don't have the narrative from all the groups that are on the ground. What we focus on is just contextualizing the visual evidence and make sure that it has more metadata so it's more understandable and more has a value to be used for advocacy purposes, accountability purposes and so on. In terms of the help, I mean, we are here really to to reach out to the hackers community to and to everyone who is able to help technically and then technically on this in terms of research, building methodology, technical infrastructure and more. Yeah, and just to add onto that, I mean, a lot of the methods that we're using are pretty they're not that difficult in all of our methodologies as outlined in every report that we're writing, what we're going to be making, this tool kit that's available and get. So if you have any suggestions, like, please help us there, give us some comments, that would be really helpful. There's also a huge backlog of lots of videos. I mean, if you have time, it would be great to help us with some of those things. Thank you. I think w
e have one more time to squeeze in one more question, but please be precise. Maybe the I.R.S. Channel. Well, we have questions from ask one question is if your work is based on the international human rights definition or if there is a special human rights definition made in Syria. And I'm sorry, can you repeat the question? One one user wants to know if your work is based on the international human rights definition by the UN or if your work relies on a special human rights definition defined in Syria. So it's it's we're using the UN categories, which means we are working according to the international humanitarian law, basically. So some of that is related to also the Syrian court panel and some of it is not there. But the standard is UN charter and international humanitarian law. And I'm afraid that's all the time we have. Thank you very much, guys. Thank you. Thank you.
