- Documenting Violations in Burkina Faso During the 2015 Coup Following the September coup in Burkina Faso, WITNESS worked with Burkinabe movements to distribute resources on documenting human rights violations.
- The US Supreme Court Agrees: Your iPhone Isn’t Just a Phone In a win for privacy advocates, the US Supreme Court recently ruled that police must get a warrant before searching the content of cellphones.
- Front Page News: Why We Can All Benefit from Tools to Verify Video What if our devices could capture and store more information in our media? What if we could help media makers make their material trustworthy? WITNESS is excited to announce that we are very close to launching a beta version of InformaCam for testing!
- Introducing InformaCam, The Next Release of the SecureSmartCam Project Recently my colleague at The Guardian Project, Harlo Holmes wrote about the InformCam, the latest release from the joint collaboration between The Guardian Project and WITNESS, the SecureSmartCamera (SSC). This is an important development in the project as it incorporates all of the key themes in the WITNESS Leadership Initiative.
- U.S. Needs Strong Privacy Protections for Digital Communications 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.
- ObscuraCam v1: A Mobile App for Visual Privacy Last week we, along with our our friends and colleagues at the Guardian Project, released the first public beta app from the SecureSmartCam project. ObscuraCam, an Android camera phone application is the result of a 7 month long collaboration between WITNESS and The Guardian Project.
- Amnesty Int’l iPhone App for Human Rights Action Our colleagues at Amnesty International have just announced a new iPhone app called AiCandle which allows people to take action on human rights campaigns directly from their mobile device.
- What We’re Reading + Watching, July 19-23, 2010 This week we're sharing more 'tweeted' bits of news and resources including a guide to mobile phone video journalism, a discussion about the ethics of video in the "YouTube era," an award given to our partners at HOPS in Macedonia, a new audio archive of the world's language, and a new shareable video and education campaign about how cosmetics are made, packaged and sold:
- User-generated video & authentication: Sri Lanka In August a video showing what appeared to be the cold-blooded execution of Tamils by Sri Lankan soldiers was released by the group Democracy in Sri Lanka and aired on Channel 4 news in the UK.
- Human Rights Electronic Evidence Study The Center for Research Libraries Global Resources Initiative is currently studying how NGOs and archiving institutions collect, manage and preserve digital human rights documentation, including blogs, social media, and video and other media from mobile devices; the project is described in significant depth on The Documentalist, the project's blog.
- Conference: Media in Transition 6 at MIT Media in Transition: April 24 - 26, at MIT. Excerpt from the conference description: " What challenges confront librarians and archivists who must supervise the migration of print culture to digital formats and who must also find ways to preserve and catalogue the vast and increasing range of words and images generated by new technologies? How are shifts in distribution and circulation affecting the stories we tell, the art we produce, the social structures and policies we construct?"
- Notes on AMIA 2008: Part 2 A few more session highlights: New Media Distribution Technologies. Brian Newman of Tribeca Film Institute gave a great presentation on Re:frame. Archivists, filmmakers, and distributors of independent film should know about Re:frame, which is making all kinds of previously unavailable or hard-to-find independent film available via DVD on demand and download to own/rent. WITNESS is […]
- Archiving cellphone video Earlier this week amateur cellphone video surfaced corroborating that casualties suffered in the August 22 US airstrike on the Afghan village of Azizabad were much higher than the military has been willing to admit. The Times published a piece by Carlotta Gall "Evidence Points to Civilian Toll in Afghan Raid," which also includes a link to some of the video (edited due to graphic content).
- National Geographic’s Camera Phone Book Could be worth checking out…. Plus it’s got a photo essay on Williamsburg shot with cellphone camera. http://www.cellular-news.com/story/22645.php “By combining photography with communications, [the camera phone] has the potential to become the most influential kind of camera,” writes Baldridge. “It offers innovative functions that let you use images to communicate with others, link up with […]
- Opinions on the Cellphone Videos from the Virginia Tech Massacre Steve Safran of Lost Remote writes: I like it whenever I come upon contrarian points of view. And newassignment.net has a doozy. Steve Fox writes about Virginia Tech student Jamal Albarghouti’s cellphone video of the shooting at Virginia Tech. Here are some of his thoughts: As everyone steps up to applaud the “citizen journalism” that […]
