By Bryan Nunez | December 1st, 2011 “Less Yack, More Hack”
Last month, WITNESS was invited to participate in the Mozilla Festival held at Ravensbourne University in London. The festival brought together some of the Mozilla community’s best developers and put them in the same room as some of its most innovative online content creators to collaborate hands on to create new features and build actual working demos. The cry of ”Less Yack, More Hack!” served as reminder to keep things concrete and tangible and not to veer off into the theoretical as so often happens at conferences.
I had the privilege to represent WITNESS at the “Science Fair” which showcased some of the newest developments in web based content creation such as the latest release of Popcorn JS. I also go to reconnect with colleagues from Ushahidi, Frontline SMS, BAVC, GlobalVoices, and Universal Subtitles. I showed off the ObscuraCam, a collaboration between WITNESS and the [...]
Continue reading The Mozilla Festival and the Importance of a Free and Open Internet
By Guest Blogger | November 7th, 2011 Mark Stanley is New Media Manager for the Center for Democracy & Technology, a non-profit public interest organization based in Washington, DC, and San Francisco working on Internet policy.
One of the most cherished rights in the United States is the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable government searches, which has long protected the privacy of Americans’ homes and communications. But as technology has rapidly advanced, this right—long a crown jewel of U.S. civil liberties—has not been fully applied to protect digital communications.
At issue is the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which specifies when the government can access digital communications such as email, documents, photos, and videos stored privately online.
The government claims, for example, that ECPA allows it to access any email that has been opened and is stored with a Web-based email service—like Hotmail or Gmail—without obtaining a warrant from a judge based on probable cause. The consequences [...]
Continue reading U.S. Needs Strong Privacy Protections for Digital Communications
By Bukeni Waruzi | August 30th, 2011 The Lubanga trial is coming to an end as the prosecutors, victims’ representatives and the defense counsel make their closing statements in the submission of evidence phase before the trial chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
I came to attend this crucial phase with hope and trust in the evidence materials submitted by the prosecution that would prove the commission of the crime, the personal criminal responsibility of the suspect, Mr. Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, for enlisting, conscripting children 15 years old and using them to participate actively in hostilities in Ituri region, North Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 2002-2003. This is a war crime under Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the ICC. However, I was saddened, to see that the crime of sexual violence against girls wasn’t included amongst other charges against Mr. Lubanga.
Over the course of the presentations, I saw Mr. [...]
Continue reading The ICC’s Lubanga Trial Nears Close: Will Child Soldiers Receive Justice?
By Guest Blogger | July 5th, 2011 Post written by: Mariel Gruszko, a WITNESS intern working with the “Cameras Everywhere” and “Tools and Tactics” initiatives.
On June 16, riots swept downtown Vancouver after the Vancouver Canucks lost the Final of the NHL’s Stanley Cup. The online response to the riots—a public campaign to name and shame rioters followed by a heated discussion regarding whether naming and shaming constitutes vigilantism or community policing—still rages.
This blog has extensively discussed the risks that human rights defenders face when they upload videos, agree to be filmed, or attend mass demonstrations. One aspect of this is when repressive governments use either automated or crowd-sourced identification technologies to persecute human rights activists. But what about when citizens themselves initiate and participate in crowd-sourced identification of others in social media, for example, criminals, or suspected criminals?
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Crowd-Sourcing Law Enforcement: Two Stories
During the Green Movement protests of 2009, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard [...]
Continue reading Crowd-Sourcing Surveillance: When Does Little Brother Get Too Big?
By Sam Gregory | May 12th, 2011 A couple of weeks ago I presented at Re:Publica, the largest social media conference in Germany. Since the conference gives a generous 50 minutes to its speakers I had the opportunity not only to talk about WITNESS and our work in general (first 10 minutes or so), but also to explain in some depth the video advocacy challenges and opportunities surfaced by events in the Middle East and North Africa as well as some of the emerging questions in our Cameras Everywhere initiative. Namely, how do human rights values and practicalities intersect in the new ubiquitous video moment?
As you’ll see at some point in the video, Re:Publica takes place in the Friedrichstadtpalast, a enormous revue theatre in Berlin… hopefully I didn’t gulp too much as I step up to the podium.
In case you don’t get through the entire video, below is a summary of the presentation:
In the [...]
Continue reading Watch: Cameras Everywhere – Presentation at Re:Publica 2011
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