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“The Internet Is Not A Horse”: presentation at Wilton Park, May 2011

Over the past few months, I’ve been working with the human rights organisation WITNESS on a new initiative that aims to help those using video for human rights to do so more safely, more ethically and more effectively. As part of this initiative, we have produced a report [published in September 2011], called Cameras Everywhere, as WITNESS’ first toe in the waters of technology policy.

Why would an organisation that has focused on advocacy campaigns to expose and end specific human rights abuses suddenly decide to engage in the world of technology policy? Finding and sharing new ways to use new technologies for documenting and exposing violations remains a central part of what WITNESS does. But in the process of building and running human rights projects that involve technology, we have been forced to confront a range of extremely thorny technical, legal, editorial and ethical challenges woven through the evolving communication environment. And in conversations with technologists, say, we’d raise issues about ethics, and they’d say, “Well, we’d never thought about it that way.” And with policy-makers, “Ah, now I hadn’t really thought about the human rights impacts of copyright enforcement.” Or with NGO colleagues, “Well, we’d like to be more involved in debates about technology, but we don’t know where to start.”

We felt it important to share in an accessible way the lessons we have learned, and to try to stitch together a perspective for our partners, donors and fellow activists, for technologists building the tools we all use, and for policy-makers who set the laws and policies that govern these same technologies. Law and policy set and shape the parameters for what technology can do – indeed law is sometimes embedded within technology – and therefore what it is possible for activists (and citizens more broadly) to do, and what protections they can enjoy and exercise.

This report is based both on our own analysis and experience, and on more than 40 in-depth interviews with highly-placed experts from settings as diverse as academia, technology policy, grassroots activism and broadcast journalism. We hope that it will provide a springboard for further discussion and help bring these various stakeholders a few inches closer together in common understanding and dialogue.

And why, you may well ask, is the internet not a horse? Well, several of you have already expressed a number of times this morning your intent, or a generalised need to “harness the internet” – a view I find highly problematic.

Here, in preview of the report, are 5 of the biggest trends emerging from our 40+ interviews that relate to the media development and governance sectors.

1. Redefining quality:

We are seeing a huge increase in the quantity of content, but old markers of quality need to be redefined in this new era. Journalists are having to deploy traditional skills in new configurations and at different speeds, as well as sharing parts of their role to their networks on Twitter and elsewhere. Curation, facilitation and amplification are becoming core skills, alongside new forensic techniques for evaluating the accuracy and reliability of information. This could mesh powerfully with long-standing approaches within media development, such as foregrounding the perspectives and demands of those on the front lines of poverty and marginalisation, or increasing the diversity of sources. It’s incumbent on the media development community to engage with these new modes of doing journalism, and to help to shape the new markers of quality and value.

2. A new ethics of information and communication

When billions can communicate in real-time through text, audio and images, and images formerly seen only within a country’s borders or by a select few are now available instantly around the world, media literacy and information ethics become ever more important. Ethical practices in journalism are part of the picture, but it’s bigger than that – it’s more fundamentally about how we communicate, how we film, photograph, document our and others’ lives, and how we share this information, for example on social media networks. [Update: A journalist wonders, for example, about the ethics of using material posted to social networks, and whether there might be a signal of intention missing between "public' and "private".] Services like Facebook are trying to make it as easy and “frictionless” to share content as possible, but might “friction” – for example, considering whether I really should post that picture – be a good thing? And as more and more citizens acquire the ability to stream live video, for example, how will technology providers, regulators, NGOs, media, and citizens respond? How will “local cultural sensitivities” change and adapt in a truly globalised communication environment? Several of our interviewees suggested that looking at these issues through the lens of human rights provides a robust new basis for a new information ethics. Alongside these ethics, we will need to rethink how and when we might extend, for example, some of the statutory protections afforded to journalists to others engaging in similar work, but not affiliated with publications, and not working in traditional media forms. How might this benefit governance, for example? [Update: Here's a case from December 2011 where a blogger invoked, but was judged not to have followed professional practices necessary to, statutory legal protections journalists might have access to.]

3. Privacy, identity and technology are inextricable

Our privacy, our identities and our technology are increasingly linked and bound up with each other. Participating in new networked technology – using a mobile phone, having a Facebook profile, using a free email service – and taking advantage of its social aspects means trading aspects of your privacy, and linking formerly separate parts of your identity. Doing this unwittingly, whether you are an activist, official or journalist, presents new types of risks. It is clear that neither policy-makers nor civil society organisations understand these technologies well enough, if at all, or how they work – and therefore their understanding of the vulnerabilities and risks inherent in them is cloudy at best. We all need to understand these technologies, the people that build them, and the impacts they have better – whether by learning the basics of computer code, or about how mobile phones work, or how data is collected on web users – rather than seeing them as somehow “magical” or dismissing them as insubstantial. [Here's one excellent analysis, from October 2011, of how journalists could do better, by OSI Fellow Christopher Soghoian.]

3. All our eggs in one privately-owned basket

Technology, and video increasingly, is a critical part of civil society’s infrastructure. We need to invest continually in making sure civil society has the capacity to use it effectively, as it can magnify the impact of resources, mitigate isolation, act as a protection and so on. But as I have noted, it’s also a risk generator… Much civil society content is stored on private commercial web services, some of whom have less than stellar records on protecting freedom of expression. This content is also vulnerable when commercial web services are shut down – in these circumstances these services rarely consider donating their content to a public domain site like Archive.org [non-profits also fail to do this, but they host far less of other people's content]. Content is also vulnerable to takedown on the grounds of copyright – parodies, an honourable tradition in internet video, for example, are especially vulnerable to poltically-motivated copyright takedown. But copyright policy debates are dominated by the film, music and publishing industries and by polarised rhetoric, and policy-makers rarely have access to a balanced set of research and resources to help guide digital-era policy. We’re in the early days of addressing this public/private conundrum – and media development practitioners and donors might have helpful lessons to share from their experiences of more inclusive definitions of the public interest, bridging public and private media.

4. Agility

Programming cycles in civil society are too long and inflexible, and unsuited to the nature of more fluid and iterative project development (some might say, to the nature of reality.) Whether this is a result of donor requests for deeper and more robust evidence of impact, or some other root-cause, it is leading in some cases to risk aversion, and to a fear and masking of failure. Venture capitalists and technologists thrive on acknowledging and understanding failure – civil society and donors need to own up to, understand and use failures much more clearly, especially in the iterative ICT domain, which rarely responds well to rigid long-term logframes… Similarly, legislative cycles are too long and unwieldy to be able to cope adequately with new developments in technology and new uses for technologies. It means that policy coherence is fractured across and between different domains of government and intergovernmental policy, and that legal and regulatory mechanisms are increasingly out of step with the reality of practice. And legal communities and judiciaries around the world (here in the UK too) need to understand these developments better too, not least in helping to develop evidentiary standards for social media.

5. Civil Society

I’ve already said a lot about civil society, but here’s something specific that came out of a lot of the interviews: civil society needs to collaborate more and to compete less when it comes to the internet and the media. Civil society’s collective knowledge, understanding, networks and influence are enormous – CSOs are among the most trusted organisations and institutions in the world. But lack of coordination, lack of collectiveness, and lack of forward-planning are hampering this potential influence. We need to infuse spaces (and the companies that own them) such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook with the human rights ethics and values we espouse, but at the same time, we need to learn from other sectors in becoming more fluid, more porous and more collaborative – and if we are to exercise more credible influence, we need to understand the technologies and spaces we are talking about better, in the same way we understand trade negotiations, or HIV/AIDS, or the environment – or indeed, governance.

6. Donors

Finally, a word about donors. Donors – whether governments, foundations, individual philanthropists or crowd-funding sites – need to be more mindful and less risk averse in how they approach and evaluate funding for human rights and ICTs. They need to help rethink the programmatic model for a more complex, instant age, bring together groups of grantees more systematically, and function more clearly as brokers of ideas and as field-builders and -strengtheners. They also need to use their long and evolving understanding of M&E to help build less burdensome, more shared systems for documenting and measuring the effects of what they fund. Interviewees also called on donors to fund the development of a more systematic evidence base in this field. Finally, they need to use their long experience to help peers and grantees to avoid repeating mistakes of the past, particularly in instrumentalising, or “harnessing” the internet. [Here's a presentation I gave a few months later with recommendations from the final report on what donors can do specifically.]

And there’s an evolving list of resources I used here - please feel free to browse and contribute.

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• Fragmentation in TV audiences  but increase in DVD, download, theatrical documentary markets. (DVD sales plummeted 40% in the USA in the last quarter (early 2011) as digital downloads take off)
• Tech barriers to entry lower than ever for individuals to make, participate in, distribute documentary, competition for attention ever more fierce as opportunities to watch multiply.
• Funding still fragmented, largely production-focused, further decreases threatened, and nothing systematically replacing financial and editorial support decreasingly offered by TV channels.  Crowdfunding online seen as potential option for some, commercial sponsorship for others.
• Online viewing growing in length, web now first port-of-call for many producers to show portions of their film, generate interest, secure funding, conduct outreach.
• Perception of growing interest in more authentic (i.e. direct) content from new perspectives/voices.
• Many in each successive generation increasingly comfortable with use of video as means of communication, and with tools of creation – different expectations around participation, form of content, cost, availability.
• With journalism seemingly in crisis, some expect that documentary should take on more “investigative” role.
• New types of documentary content emerging (especially focus online on short-form or serial content, animation, and closer ties with photojournalism), but traditional ones still dominant.
• Action-oriented/advocacy documentary a growing genre, with associated online action opportunities – with foothold in theatrical distribution, and many new entrants in online space. Quality uneven.
• NGOs, public sector more credible in documentary space as partners/endorsers of filmmakers, less as producers. NGOs beginning to commission films directly.
• Many online documentary networks and platforms (including for development/human rights), yet few truly comprehensive places online or offline dedicated to helping people watch, learn about, discuss, get involved.
• Academic centres for study/teaching of documentary not up-to-date with converging practice – not holistic (Depts for TV, online, radio, documentary, journalism, media studies, etc, all doing broadly similar/overlapping things).  NOTE – state of research about documentary is very fragmented.
• Landscape in the developing world looks very different… – long-term need for any/all of these to be catalysed or strengthened, almost everywhere…

Visual content and human rights - Visual content has changed our world – how do we manage its impact on society, governance, and privacy?

Panelists:
Sam Gregory, Program Director, WITNESS
Thor Halvorssen, Founder, Oslo Freedom Forum
Victoria Grand, Director, Global Communications and Policy, YouTube
Hans Eriksson, CEO, Bambuser

I’ll draw in part on Cameras Everywhere, but what topics and issues would you like me to raise with these panelists? Let me know either via a comment below, or tweet me.

When the Egyptian government shut down the internet during the protests in Tahrir Square, it was seen as a form of repression.

Should access to technology now be seen in the same way as access to, say, clean water? And does this mean that the companies behind those technologies have a particular moral obligation to their users?

The authors of Cameras Everywhere, a report published earlier this month by Witness, a non-governmental organisation focused on using video to expose human rights abuse, argue that they do. (Full disclosure: Sameer Padania is the report’s co-author and a friend.) They looked at the role of mobile telephones and social media, as well as technology providers including Google, Twitter and Dailymotion, in documenting human rights abuses.

It’s a sign of the enormous shifts around us that even a paper like The FT can find room on its pages for a relatively specialised report of this kind. Next step is to encourage media outlets with paywalled content to make their human rights stories publicly accessible…

My talk slides and words (a mix of what I wrote and on-the-day adaptations) are after the “more” link below. Before that, and besides the WITNESS Cameras Everywhere report I drew on for my presentation, here are the principal resources I mentioned on both panels that might be of interest both to attendees at the conference, and to those who followed the hashtag #giveandtech.

Interesting recent research:
- Joe Karaganis of the SSRC’s epic Media Piracy in Emerging Economies (2011) – if you are searching for empirical research on copyright and intellectual property around the world, this is an essential read (see also the Washington Declaration below).
- Aeron Davis’ 2009 paper New Media and Fat Democracy, on how ICTs are creating wider gaps between a growing empowered core of citizens, and a much larger group of disengaged citizens (thanks to Ben Wagner for the pointer).
- Andrew Chadwick’s new paper The Hybrid Media System, which takes aim at false dichotomies between new and more established media.
- UNESCO’s recent Freedom of Connection, Freedom of Expression report.

Collaboration between multiple stakeholders:
- The remarkable Washington Declaration on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest (and my personal perspective on it).

Talking to donors: 
- Chris Blattman makes the case to DfID for conducting R&D, rather than M&E, in a recent post and presentation (PDF) called Evaluation 3.0.
- [not mentioned on the day, but very useful nonetheless -->] James Deane, Head of Policy at the BBC World Service Trust, and my former boss at Panos London, on lessons he has drawn from recent high-level meetings on talking with donors about media development – but which seem instructive for, and broadly applicable to ICTs and human rights too.

Thank you, Stephanie, and I’m honoured to be asked by the conference organisers to speak alongside such groundbreaking people, and to such a distinguished and knowledgeable audience.

Like my co-panellists, I come to this work through a slightly circuitous route – I have worked with very diverse groups from different sectors – from developing world journalists, to human rights organisations large and small, to donors and foundations.

And there’s one thing in common – they are all continually trying to work out where and to what extent it makes sense to merge the internet and technology into their work. There is no shame in this – most people are trying to work this out.

But it’s not just about how we can use technology in our work – yes, digital technologies are increasingly everywhere, as we’ve seen so far day, and can make some aspects of transparency work, development work, and human rights work easier, more powerful, more networked, less suppressible, more scalable.

Digital technology is increasingly everywhere, and it has an ever increasing influence over how we live.

Here’s Eleanor Roosevelt… well, mostly. It’s what I guessed she might say if she were around today, observing the new battlefronts in human rights.

But it’s *also* about how technology – and the laws and policies that govern technology – shape the context in which we work, and how we can do our work safely and effectively – as activists, human rights defenders, NGOs, donors. As Stephanie Hankey just said, for example, activists don’t always understand how they expose themselves to risk and danger through new technologies.

So I’ve worked with the human rights organisation WITNESS in New York to produce this report – it’s available here around the venue, and online at WITNESS.org/cameras-everywhere.

It tries to set out for NGOs, technology companies, investors, activists and donors, what this new “technology everywhere” environment means for human rights, and recommends what each of those actors can do practically to build a better, safer, more effective common culture for human rights.

We talked to over 40 experts from human rights, development, technology, policy, social media and so on, for the report. We asked them, among other things, about where they would like to see the funding environment for human rights go. Here are the five key things they told us – and some of these apply as much to the grantees as the grant makers…

These technologies are here to stay, and they are growing in importance and centrality. This was a core message. You’ve heard a lot about this already today – so I won’t labour the point (too much).

You don’t need to know everything about technology, in fact you don’t necessarily need to know anything, and you don’t need to set up a dedicated programme to understand it, but you can ask those or work with those that already do.

Working with people who can mediate between various sectors – translators, as Ben Hammersley called them in a speech that’s been widely circulated in the last couple of weeks – is one useful strategy.

What I will add is this.

As Martin Tisne was saying in the last panel [specifically focused on funder experiences], this means backing *research* about the relationship between human rights and technology – on a practical and policy level, for example by pairing researchers with practitioners – and a lot of our interviewees mentioned this as a big gap too. And UNESCO’s recent Freedom of Connection, Freedom of Expression report identified a lack of empirical research (rather than normative/policy advocacy) on these issues. The Open Society Foundation here in the UK is commissioning and releasing a series of topic and country reports addressing a wide range of aspects of digital media & human rights, trying to raise and strengthen baseline understanding of the core issues at stake. But more is needed.

[I didn't mention on the day that I particularly appreciate the work of anthropologists in the domain of communication - Jan Chipchase's work for Nokia was always stimulating, for example, and Dawn Nafus is likewise doing thought-provoking work at Intel, not to mention Meg Pickard at The Guardian.]

The world of human rights has many many more new forces bearing down on it than ever before. It’s much more complicated, layered and multi-dimensional than it has ever been before.

Just in the course of writing this report, we encountered and had to grapple with the interactions between human rights and technology in human rights documentation, in whistle-blowing, in copyright and intellectual property, trade talks, export controls, user-generated content, manufacturing hardware, transferring data between different jurisdictions, and so on and so on.

Tackling such complexity effectively requires multi-disciplinary approaches and processes – bringing together civil society, donors, business, governments in unexpected and sometimes previously unthinkable combinations – you’ve heard excellent examples from Martin Tisne in particular [talking about IATI and the Open Government Partnership]. There are others, and perhaps they will come up in the Q&A.

In my own experience, having a donor actively take an interest in helping you network, open doors, talk to new sectors, is incredibly valuable. How Omidyar Network brought its grantees together (together with high-level eBay staff) I found really helpful and eye-opening, and likewise initiatives from the Ford Foundation, Knight Foundation, Hivos, Surdna Foundation and many other donors to do similar things – but how about a coalition of donors bringing together all their common grantees to learn and coordinate on human rights and technology, along with high-level tech company specialists and policy-makers? Our report suggests that regional and global networks like Ariadne (whose Director, Jo Andrews, urged, in the preceding Funders panel, more experienced tech funders to be generous with their knowledge not only with grantees, but also with other grantmakers) and IHRFG take a more proactive role in this regard.

We’re in the early days of setting values in the digital world – that is a significant opportunity for the human rights field – but again it needs a leap of imagination, and of ambition to try to do this. [My own work at WITNESS involved at one point driving the development of a new set of editorial values and processes focused on and appropriate to human rights video/photos, with a strong focus on proper contextualisation, on dignity, safety and protection, but also taking advantage of the new modes of sharing online - a delicate and evolving balance.]

Use your values, and your influence – they matter in this environment. But prepare to see those values evolve and shift in a globalised information environment.

Donors have clout, influence, access, both directly and through your grantees, and by funding your grantees to do better work, and to do better policy, and then helping that policy reach the right places, you can do an enormous amount to make sure the world of the internet is suffused with the values and rights we all share.

But work to influence the policies, norms and ethics directly is also hugely important – a powerful recent example is the Washington Declaration on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest – a genuinely important multi-stakeholder collaboration for those looking to promote a globally relevant and progressive IP regime.

This has come up again and again today – here’s our perspective on why it’s important.

Chris Blattman’s post and presentation to DFID – Evaluation 3.0 – are really worth reading. He talks about R&D and the spirit of experimentation and discovery, not just M&E – weaning ourselves off the rather draining reporting cycle that Owen Barder talked about earlier today.

And it’s not just about the kind of investment/granting/equity model, but also thinking about the programmatic model – how might that change if decoupled from a more classical reporting structure?

And failure is key in work that engages with technology – the Silicon Valley spirit of inquiry, the desire to innovate and work on shorter cycles, to discard what really doesn’t work rather than nobly pushing the boulder back up the hill is, said our interviewees, a really helpful attitude.

[I skipped all of this on the day, both because of time constraints, and as there was already a lot of talk about transparency and accountability.]

There’s already a widespread push on aid transparency and accountability – with much of the analysis and pressure coming from the South. There isn’t a similar movement in the human rights and tech funding domain, from what we can see. This is one area that would benefit from proactive initiatives from donors to stimulate greater demand.

Here are some thoughts on what might constitute small, but helpful changes from donors:

- make available more detailed data, where it is safe to do so, about the quantity, direction, focus, overlap and speed of funding flows from donors at the national, regional and international level
- consider making your own internal research and analysis open source, or at least publicly available – I’ve been consulted by donor organisations or researchers working for them, and often the research is kept strictly internal, when it could very easily be publicly shared (especially when it is publicly funded…) [In the Q&A, I suggested that sometimes, given how little of it can make it back into the source communities, we might regard some of the research and information-gathering by some organisations and institutions in the human rights and development sectors as an extractive industry in itself...]
-  fund research that develops more rigorous and less burdensome M&E methodologies that are appropriate to the world of technology and social media in human rights, that permit shared reporting to participating donors.

There’s more in the Cameras Everywhere report.

A final thought: don’t forget the relationship between technology and human rights here in the UK [and also, as Helen Darbishire of Access Info Europe afterwards enjoined me to say, the EU]. The civil society and think tank space on this is far from saturated (some say it is diluted…), for example, and, as the England riots demonstrated, there doesn’t seem to be a deep seam of human rights-centred policy analysis on these issues here. There needs to be a greater push from UK-focused donors to strengthen the domestic tech and human rights field systematically.

There’s more information on the report, on WITNESS, and on what I do, at witness.org and at macroscope.co.uk. Thanks!

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[And for completeness - given that this is already a mammoth post - here are the report recommendations specifically aimed at donor organisations]

FUNDERS

Governmental, foundation and private donors play a critical role in conducting and supporting research, activism and advocacy on issues related to human rights and technology. To increase impact, their funding needs to become more transparent, more accessible, more harmonized and less risk-averse. They should continue to support–through funding, networking grantees and open-sourcing their materials and research–the integration of technology and ICTs into human rights work. However, they must also focus on widening user access, education and participation, and on strengthening advocacy using new ICTs. Funders also need to cross-pollinate with a wider cross-section of practitioners involved with new ICTs outside the human rights field, including private investors. By doing this, they can develop new cross cutting funding and transparency mechanisms, providing a more balanced perspective on failure rates and value generation in technology investments.

1. Make funding transparent.

• Map the funding landscape
• Publish a study of the international and regional funders for technology and human rights.
• Make explicit the quantity, direction, focus, overlap and speed of funding flows, as well as potential donor bias.
• Include new donors based outside U.S./Europe (e.g. India, Middle East, Singapore) and large regional donor networks like Ariadne or IHRFG.

2. Collaborate with other funders, investors and technology developers.

• Create multi-donor spaces on technology and human rights
• Involve the largest international private and governmental donors and smaller individual philanthropists and family foundations.
• Involve emerging crowd-funding platforms such as Kiva.
• Create joint funding mechanisms
• Focus on technology development specifically for human rights.
• Assess human rights risks
• Appoint or support the creation of an independent technology review board that will assess proposals involving large ICT investment for human rights risk and appropriateness–and vice-versa, a human rights advisory board that will assess technology-led proposals.

3. Be thought leaders.

• Evaluate methodology
• Lead a wide consultation on how to adapt, refine or develop monitoring and evaluation methodologies for human rights and technology.
• Consider making shared requirements across groups of funders, so as to strengthen collective impact assessment and to ease the reporting burden on organizations working increasingly in real-time environments.

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Cameras Everywhere: Video , Human Rights and Media

When I spoke on behalf of the human rights organization WITNESS at the 2008 Global Forum for Media Development conference in Athens – about what the emerging ecosystem of citizen video meant for media development, journalism and human rights – the Greek capital was itself in the throes of major protests and civil unrest. Like many other attendees, I went to Syntagma Square to take a look for myself. As I walked the protest route, I tweeted about the march, the clashes with police, and the aftermath – and I uploaded a few eyewitness videos. But I was one of the few, if not the only, conference participants doing so, it seemed.

Fast forward to today, and this kind of eyewitness video is increasingly central to human rights work – and journalism. It has been critical in drawing attention to corruption, torture, denial of rights, and repression around the world.  More human rights video is being captured and shared by more people in more places than ever before, often in real time. It is happening in organized and spontaneous ways, by people with training and without. And unlike the past, when this footage was largely mediated through news media, much of it is reaching the public unfiltered. Video, often live video, alongside other social media, was critical in the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. Media and the public have relied on these firsthand accounts to a striking degree.

These videos are shared, however, in corporate social media spaces and via mobile phone carriers (YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Vodafone, for example), many of which never before regarded themselves as having a stake in human rights. This is bringing a new range of players – often unwittingly – into the human rights field. By virtue of the sheer numbers of people using their products to report and expose human rights violations, these companies have both a stake and a say in how human rights are understood and handled worldwide, and they are increasingly being pressed to meet these responsibilities.

While the heart of WITNESS’ work remains grassroots movements and human rights organizations, we have come to recognize that the media, policy and technology sectors shape many of the standards and structures for the creation and distribution of this kind of human rights video, and of communication more broadly. Therefore they are de facto players in the human rights information landscape. By setting the parameters within which video is created, shared and seen, indeed in which much communication happens, these new human rights actors have the power to influence how activists, journalists and others worldwide collect and share information – and the scale of their potential impact.

In response to these changes, WITNESS has launched a new initiative – Cameras Everywhere – to help foster more ethical, more effective and safer video for human rights. Here we offer GFMD members a look of our new Cameras Everywhere report on emerging trends in human rights, technology, media, and business – which we believe holds useful insights and opportunities for the global media development community, a critical partner of the human rights movement around the world. The report is based on interviews with more than 40 experts and practitioners, including major content publishers and technology platforms; international human rights groups; international policymakers; researchers in technology, privacy, and media; and of course, journalists. It recommends specific, manageable steps for players in the human rights and information landscape that we believe will strengthen the practical and policy environments for human rights video, and other information and communication technologies.

We identify five overall areas where there are particular challenges that need to be addressed, and that are relevant to the wide spectrum of GFMD members:

• Privacy and safety
• Network vulnerabilities
• Information overload, authentication and preservation
• Ethics
• Policy

Video and other communication technologies pose significant new vulnerabilities. As more people understand the power of video, the more the safety and security of those filming and of those being filmed will become a concern. And because these technologies (automatic facial recognition being the most recent and concerning example) are networked, global and instant, the risks are networked, and move far beyond the control of any individual.

New communication technologies – the Internet, mobile phones, social networking sites, mapping and geospatial technologies like satellite imaging – are challenging long-held assumptions. More and more people, including many who see themselves as neither human rights activists nor journalists, are now using video and social media to create and share content, and to investigate, organize and advocate around issues they care about. But this presents new challenges in how to handle and understand such large quantities of information, how to authenticate it, and what to preserve and why.

Journalistic protocols and ethics have already had wide influence over the information environment, and human rights values and protections are woven into the fabric of these codes. But these codes too will need to evolve to respond to new kinds of ethical and practical challenges. Human rights approaches to information – for example, the right to visual anonymity, as discussed in this preview of the WITNESS report – might in some cases offer robust ways of dealing with these digital era challenges.

These challenges are becoming part of every society, not just a handful of the most developed nations, and it is increasingly apparent that they interweave with practically every area of policymaking too. Policymakers at all levels are struggling to understand and accommodate the shifts that mean that even technology-related trade, health and culture policies, for example, can have significant human rights implications.

The values that have driven the media development community in the past are the same ones that it brings to this new, evolving environment. New information and communication technologies (ICT’s) can bring broader participation, transparency and opportunity, but who can participate – and survive – in this emerging ecosystem of free expression is still shaped by poverty, inequality, marginalization, discrimination and repression. The media development and journalism community can play a key role in guarding against the creation, as one recent study put it, of merely “fatter elites.”

We hope that this report offers some insight into some of the most pressing issues in this arena, and suggestions for how to address them. To read, download and debate the report and case studies, visit http://www.witness.org/cameras-everywhere/report-2011.

Sameer Padania is lead author and researcher on the Cameras Everywhere report.

NEWS RELEASE
Media Contact:
J. Coco Chang, 718-783-2000 x 316
jcoco@witness.org

HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS NEED BETTER PROTECTION WHEN USING VIDEO AND TECHNOLOGY; TECH COMPANIES HAVE A ROLE TO PLAY

WITNESS Provides a Roadmap Report on How to Create a More Powerful Video-for-Change Revolution  

NEW YORK–September 6, 2011–As human rights activists and ordinary citizens risk their lives across the Arab world, WITNESS’ latest report argues that we have not yet done enough to empower and protect those who attempt to expose injustices through video.

Video, a powerful tool for change, is enabling the public to become human rights activists on an unprecedented scale. It captures the stories of those facing human rights abuses and the direct evidence of violations. But empowering and protecting activists at the heart of this change and harnessing the power of video and technology to defend human rights, is risky, WITNESS warns.

Launching today, the Cameras Everywhere report calls on technology companies, investors, policymakers and civil society to work together in strengthening the practical and policy environments, as well as the information and communication technologies, used to defend human rights.

“Today, technology is enabling the public, especially young people, to become human rights activists, and with that come incredible opportunities. Activists, developers, technology companies and social media platforms are beginning to realize the potential of video to bring about change, but a more supportive ecosystem is urgently needed. It is our duty, through this ecosystem, to empower and protect those who are risking their lives,” said musician and advocate Peter Gabriel, co-founder of WITNESS.

For the Cameras Everywhere report, over 40 senior experts and practitioners in technology and human rights, like Marietje Schaake (Member of European Parliament), Bob Boorstin (Director, Public Policy, Google) and danah boyd (Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research), were interviewed on issues of privacy and safety, information authentication and management, network vulnerabilities, ethics and policy. Key findings from the report include:

• Video is increasingly central to human rights work and campaigning. With more human rights video being captured and shared by more people than ever before–often in real-time and using non-secure mobile and networked tools– new skills and systems are needed to optimize lasting human rights impact.
• Technology providers are increasingly intermediaries for human rights activism. They should take a more proactive role in ensuring their tools are secure and integrating human rights concerns into their content and user policies.
• Retaliation against human rights defenders caught on camera is a commonplace, yet it is alarming how little discussion there is about visual privacy. Everyone is discussing and designing for privacy of personal data, but the ability to control one’s personal image is neglected. The human rights community’s long-standing focus on anonymity as an enabler of free expression must now develop a new dimension–the right to visual anonymity.
• New vulnerabilities are emerging due to advanced technologies, like facial recognition, which are often instant, global, networked and beyond the control of any individual.
• With more videos coming directly from a wider range of sources, we must also find ways to rapidly verify such information, to aggregate it in clear and compelling ways and to preserve it for future use.
• Ethical frameworks and guidelines for online content are in their infancy and do not yet explicitly reflect or incorporate human rights standards.
• Neither the United States nor the European Union routinely applies human rights standards in forming internet policies. And intergovernmental organizations, such as the UN, are not yet agile players within the policymaking arena of the internet. Meanwhile some governments, notably China, are making headway in both shaping policy against domestic freedom of expression and seeking to influence international standards.

Cameras Everywhere makes a number of critical recommendations to technology companies and investors, policymakers, human rights organizations and funders, which includes:

• Calling on companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo!, Twitter and Nokia, who are being pushed to the forefront of human rights debates, to step up their efforts in changing privacy controls, allowing for anonymity and developing user and content policies that better serve human rights defenders;
• Ensuring legislative policies and international agreements are consistent, up-to-date and supportive of human rights, including scrutiny of monitoring practices for dual-use technologies that might be utilized for repressive purposes;
• Incorporating human rights needs, checklists and impact assessments into technology investments;
• Investing in training and support for using technology for human rights work;
• Increasing transparency, accountability and accessibility of funding for human rights-related technology and
• Building better engagement among technology companies, developers, human rights groups and policymakers.

“No one–not technology companies, NGOs, technology or parliamentarians–can afford any longer to treat these different sectors in isolation from each other,” said Sam Gregory, program director of WITNESS. “They increasingly intersect and human rights are central to all of them. It is our collective responsibility to address these challenges holistically.”

As human rights defenders continue to use the power of ubiquitous video to ignite social change, WITNESS is also announcing enhanced initiatives that will address their safety, build their skills and secure greater impact.

• We will actively engage with key technology companies to push for policies and functionalities that better serve human rights activism and freedom of expression.
• Through the WITNESS Labs initiative, we will increase collaboration with technology developers to create innovative tools that support human rights. The first project is the SecureSmartCam–a collaboration with the Guardian Project on the development of a set of mobile apps that enhances control over anonymity and consent and metadata documentation when using mobile video.
• We will develop and distribute accessible training tools to build citizen activists’ skills to shoot, share and circulate video for human rights purposes.

For more details on research findings, recommendations and WITNESS’ next steps, please read the full report available at http://www.witness.org/cameras-everywhere/report-2011.

Report team representatives will be organizing panel discussions on Video Anonymization and Authentication and hosting a workshop on the SecureSmartCam Project at the Open Video Conference in NYC, September 10-12. To register as press, please go to: http://openvideoconference.org/press/.

About WITNESS
WITNESS is the global pioneer in the use of video to expose human rights abuses. We empower people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change. Founded in 1992, WITNESS has partnered with more than 300 human rights groups in over 80 countries, trained over 3,000 human rights defenders, developed widely-used training materials and tools, created the first dedicated online platform for human rights media, the HUB, and supported the inclusion of video in more than 100 campaigns, increasing their visibility and impact. Videos made by WITNESS and our partners have told dozens of critical human rights stories, and have galvanized grassroots communities, judges, activists, media, and decision-makers at local, national and international levels to action. www.witness.org

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