- 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.
- Thoughts and Reactions on The Atlantic Philanthropies’ Report on Funding Trends in Human Rights and International Justice Many of our donors and peers have been asking for the WITNESS take on the report, “Human Rights and International Justice: Opportunities and Challenges at an Inflection Point,” commissioned by The Atlantic Philanthropies and written by Jonathan Fanton and Zachary Katznelson.
- WITNESS Enters Knight’s #NewsChallenge With SecureSmartCam App We’ve entered the Knight Foundation News Challenge with the SecureSmartCam (SSC), our collaboration with The Guardian Project.
- Amy Robbins: Join Me In Supporting WITNESS For the Next 20 Years As WITNESS celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, I wanted to write a brief note to describe why I support this outstanding, and vital organization. I know many of you reading this share my view because you, too, strongly support WITNESS’s efforts.
- The Mozilla Festival and the Importance of a Free and Open Internet 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.
- Promoting Cameras Everywhere Recommendations at RightsCon and Stanford University This week, WITNESS is busy in the Bay Area of California where we'll be at multiple public meetings discussing ideas in our Cameras Everywhere leadership initiative. We're speaking on a panel at the first Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference, attending the first advisory board meeting of the exciting new EngineRoom initiative, and we're presenting at Stanford University's Liberation Technology Seminar on the "Cameras Everywhere" report and the tools we're developing in WITNESS Labs.
- Video Advocacy Example: In Syria, Exposing Official Lies Through YouTube Last week, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that over 2600 people have died as a consequence of repression of protests in Syria. The Syrian government claims that far fewer have died, and that the balance is split between government forces and armed protestors.
