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Tips for Activists Using the YouTube Face Blur Tool
Recently, YouTube launched a feature that allows blurring on videos uploaded to their site. It's a step we've pushed for from the commercial video-sharing platforms and social networks - as a way to enable easy, faster, more accessible options for preserving and enabling visual anonymity in a networked, visual age.
WITNESS
August 7, 2012
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Oral History and the Law: Boston College’s Woes
At WITNESS, the importance of negotiating informed consent within human rights video is paramount. By helping interviewees recognize the reach that their testimony may have in today's digital age, both intended and unforeseen consequences quickly become part of the greater conversation. Education is the key.
WITNESS
July 31, 2012
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TRUST Pennsylvania: America’s Youth Have Solutions to Climate Change, Let’s Follow Their Lead
Over the course of the last year, I have been working with a dynamic, committed and brilliant group of young Americans who don't have trouble imagining a future different from the present. They don’t block out complex problems that lack simple solutions and instead find the solutions.
WITNESS
July 25, 2012
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Visual Anonymity and YouTube’s New Blurring Tool
Today YouTube announced a new tool within their upload editor that enables people to blur the faces within the video, and then publish a version with blurred faces.
Sam Gregory
July 18, 2012
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TRUST: Connecting Catastrophe with Climate Change
My biggest hope is that the media - and then the public - will begin connecting our weather catastrophes with climate change so we will not only hear what the climate is trying to tell us, but will also listen.
WITNESS
June 29, 2012
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VIDEO: Meet Elisângela, the Other Face of Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic Legacy
Elisângela wasn't home when they arrived. Her 17-year-old daughter called her cellphone, frantic, to break the news: "There are several men from the municipal government here at our door; they're saying they're going to demolish our house." Elisângela raced home to try to negotiate, to no avail. In a few hours, the home she and her family had spent years building was now a pile of rubble.
Priscila Néri
June 21, 2012
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Happy Father’s Day: How to Be a Human Rights Tech Dad
We asked some tech-savvy dads we know to share with us some websites, applications, and tools that they've found useful in day-to-day life but that can also be used in a human rights context.
Matisse Bustos Hawkes
June 17, 2012
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Whose Media Is It?: How Police Requests for Unreleased Footage Blur the Line Between News and Evidence
A near 6-month battle between British news broadcasters and the police has recently concluded: last December’s court decision that ordered television companies including BBC, ITN, and Sky News to surrender to police hours of unaired footage from the violent October 19th Dale Farm eviction, was thrown out. Journalists are now hailing the decision as a landmark victory in the fight for news neutrality and confidentiality.
WITNESS
May 31, 2012
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Cambodian Monk and Advocate for Human Rights is Detained, May Be Defrocked
We have received word that the Venerable has been released and was not defrocked. More information soon. The fastest way to get updates on this developing situation is to follow me on Twitter: @WitnessRyan
WITNESS
May 24, 2012
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Tactical and Technological Defences For Facial Recognition Technology
In my last post I looked at how facial recognition technology (FRT) works, how it's now in our phones, social networks and media management, and how legislators and regulators are reacting to this. But it's also increasingly used by law enforcement and for surveillance of "public" spaces.
WITNESS
May 18, 2012
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Join WITNESS For An Online Dialogue On Archiving Human Rights
I'm excited to announce that starting today (May 16) through May 22 my fellow archivist Yvonne Ng and I will be co-hosting an online dialogue hosted by New Tactics in Human Rights titled Archiving Human Rights for Advocacy, Justice and Memory.
WITNESS
May 16, 2012
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TRUST Colorado: Understanding What It Means to Protect Our Atmosphere
Justinian concluded that these essential, common, natural resources belong to everyone and not just the Emperor or the privileged. Consequently, the Roman Empire protected these resources in trust, for the public. This hallowed legal principle, referred to as the Public Trust Doctrine, is perhaps most simply explained by 11-year-old Xiuhtezcatl Martinez...
WITNESS
May 8, 2012
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Are News Photography Standards Out of Touch With the Cameras Everywhere World We Inhabit?
A growing global trend of employing facial recognition technologies (FRTs) has increased risks of compromising the privacy and safety of anyone filmed or photographed, especially in countries with repressive governments.
WITNESS
May 2, 2012
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Stories of TRUST: Celebrating Earth Day with Two Women From Iowa
If we think about it, we can all remember a moment when we realized something was fundamentally wrong with our environment. For me, it was late spring and I was in my front yard in our middle-class neighborhood, in middle America, in the full mid-morning sun. I think I was about nine years old.
WITNESS
April 20, 2012
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Airport Expansion in North-East India Forcibly Evicts 17 Families
Since independence in 1947, tens of milions of Indians have been displaced in the name of development. They have been forcibly uprooted from their homes, farmlands, fishing areas and forests to make way for dam reservoirs, irrigation projects, mines, plantations, highways, and tourist resorts. Reportedly less than 20% have ever been rehabilitated.
WITNESS
April 11, 2012
