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I would like to introduce to you Anita
Gordis, who's a postdoc at the University
of Mannheim and also working for the
Human Rights Data Analysis Group,
and she's going to give a talk about
information control and state repression.
So please give a warm welcome.
Applause.
Well, thank you very much.
Yeah, my name is Anita Godus, and
I'd like to say this is my first C.C.C.
and I'm pretty sure it's the best
conference I've ever been to.
So pretty cool.
I work at the University of Mannheim as
a researcher and as a conflict
researcher, I'm interested in
understanding how governments
use violence, where they use violence
and what types of violence they use.
And for the last five years, I've also
been working for the Human Rights Data
Analysis Group.
And what we do is we try
to analyze statistically
large scale human rights violations
and ultimately build evidence based
arguments that can help bring the
perpetrators to justice.
So the talk I want to give today
is on information control and strategic
repression.
So the ability to connect via
social media has been celebrated across
the world by human rights groups, by
researchers and by policymakers, because
it seems like we finally have a tool that
can help ordinary citizens
connect, overcome collective action
problems and mobilize against repressive
rulers.
Now, for all of you sitting in this room,
you're quite aware that this view on the
digital revolution alone is deceptive
and it's deceptive for for
one important reason, and that is that
governments principally still remain
in control of network accessibility.
So governments haven't just been sitting
on the sidelines watching mass uprisings
in their countries.
They've been building an arsenal of tools
to manipulate, censor
and survey information exchange happening
within their countries.
Now, we know this and we've learned a lot
about this in the last few days, and I'm
really scared also about
what I've learned here, but what we don't
really know is how this control of
the Internet informs government
repression. So how does it actually
inform the violence happening
to people in countries by government?
Right. So in the next 20 minutes, I want
to give you a very brief theoretical
background, then discuss what I
mean by different types of repression
used by governments.
And then I want to discuss a very
important topic, which is how we deal
with the dark fear of violence.
So how do we figure out who
is being killed and not documented?
And then lastly, I'll give you some
results on how Internet control and
violence seem to coincide.
OK, so
let's think about this from the
perspective of government, that's what we
try to do as far as conflict researchers,
governments and use repressions,
for example, during riots.
So there are two different types of
threats that governments can
can
can encounter, on the one hand, the
hidden threats so that people who are
organizing to overthrow a government
to to build an opposition group
and the government doesn't really know
exactly who the threat is and
where the threat is located.
Right. So in these situations,
state, state institutions
need information. They need intelligence
on where these people are, what they're
organizing, so they can eliminate it
before it gets even bigger.
The other situations where the threat
is already fully visible, the government
knows exactly who its enemy is,
it can already see thousands of people
gathering on the streets, fighting for
for change.
And in these situations, they're likely
to just say, OK, we're going to use any
means necessary to crush down this
this protest.
So if we think about these different
types of responses to
to threats with within the
state, we might think about
how governments might
use different digital responses as well.
So on the one hand, they could
survey the Internet in face of a threat,
they can glean intelligence from people's
Facebook, profiles from what people are
twittering, what they're planning on
doing from events and so on and so forth,
from email exchanges and use that
against opponents.
The problem is, as soon as you let people
generate content online, you give them
a platform to mobilize and organize.
So the other option would be
to shut down the Internet, shut down
all communication and give them no
way to to organize virtually.
Now, these are obviously very two very
abstract concept concepts.
Lots of governments, surveillance, censor
at the same time.
But these are kind of the abstract
ideas that they could use.
And what I'd like to argue is that the
choice of digital response, either using
surveillance or using censorship,
is likely to inform the type
of actual violent repression used by
governments.
OK, so the case
of my research has been the ongoing
conflict in Syria.
The Syrian civil war has been called the
most socially mediated conflict
in the history.
What we see here is the Syrian
presidency's Instagram account.
And I don't know about you, but I can't
see any traces of conflict in
this in this account.
It looks like Assad is ruling a country
that's united under him and
his wife is smiling and they're having a
good time.
We can't see anything of death, death and
destruction that's actually going on
within the country.
At the same time, we know that the Syrian
government is using different types of
surveillance against its population.
It's using shut
downs of the Internet
and it's manipulating information as
well.
So so this picture is obviously
highly deceptive
to investigate just how deceptive it is.
My colleagues and I
coauthored a report that was commissioned
by the UN Human Rights Office
that appeared in August 2014,
where we looked at the number of
documented killings that
have occurred in the first three years of
the conflict.
And what we find is that we can
uniquely identify almost
200000 individuals who've
been killed by the regime,
200000 people who we know
have been killed.
So we know that the dark figure is likely
to be much bigger because not everyone is
documented.
So when we hear about refugee flows
coming to Europe,
we know that this is for this is
happening for a reason. People are dying
on the ground and they're dying every
day.
Right, but these people haven't all
been killed in the same way some people
have been killed through through
explosions. Some people have been
directly executed.
And the question is, how do we understand
the different types of repression used by
the Syrian government?
OK, so what we see here is
a snapshot of our database, what we
received were
lists from four different human rights
groups on individuals
who were killed, including the location
where they were killed,
the date on which they were killed.
Sometimes information on their agenda and
their full name, which I've anonymized
here, and we were able to match
every individual in every group
through this information so we could
arrive at a number of uniquely identified
killings.
What you don't see in the snapshot is
auxillary information that tells us
something about the circumstance of every
individual's death.
OK, so if we think about different types
of violence used by by governments
in conflict with research, we often
broadly distinguish between two different
types of two different types
of violence used by the government, the
one we can we can call
targeted violence.
So this is violence that's used
to eliminate individuals or groups based
on certain characteristics.
So examples would be a government
target, someone for the information he or
she has, because that person has defected
from the army because that person is
is leading an opposition group.
So these are people who are eliminated
because they they they share specific
traits.
Another example would be
a government that that is an ethnic
minority and that is trying to target
another ethnicity.
These would be what we call targeted
forms of violence.
The other form is on targeted generalized
terror, the entire civilian population
is seen as a threat to the government and
anyone is attacked.
Now, these are two different types of
strategies that a government can use to
suppress its population.
And oftentimes they're both used at
different points in time within a
conflict.
And Assad's army
has been using both types in the Syrian
conflict as well.
OK.
So the axillary information we get from
these human rights groups can help us to
understand the circumstances under which
each individual was killed.
So this is an example of one person
who was recorded in three different
sources and source A, B and C.
And what this tells us is the first
source tells us the person died under
torture in the prison system.
Right. So that gives us information that
that person was singled out, he was
detained or she was detained and then
tortured.
The second source tells us this person
was shot.
So this person didn't just die
from the effects of torture.
This person was actually shot.
The third source tells us where that
person was arrested and when they were
where they were held and on what date
they were arrested.
So if we put this information together,
it tells us something about the nature
of repression used against that
individual.
So examples of
of words that we find
when we look at individuals who were
killed in a targeted way would be people
who were previously arrested or detained,
who were found with their hands and legs
tied, who were tortured, who
were directly executed or who were named
to be defector's.
And examples of untalked that violence
would be people who were killed in
explosions, in bombings or children,
for example.
Now, I look at the period from mid 2013
to mid 2014, which means
I have over 60000 records of people
who were killed by the government.
And in order to classify these, according
to these two different categories,
I draw a sample of 2000
and I can code them to establish
what I would consider to be targeted
and targeted violence.
And then I use supervised machine
learning to help me with the
classification of the rest.
And I'm happy to talk about the details
of the method afterwards.
OK, so the next big
problem we have is that we
have very good and very detailed
information on people who were
documented, but in every
conflict that people who fall under the
radar of human rights groups, no
matter how good a job they're doing.
So depending on the time and location,
when someone is killed, the probability
of he or she being documented
by a group is likely to vary.
And this is a problem when we're
trying to understand patterns, because
the patterns might be biased if we only
look at documented violence.
What we can do is estimate the stock
figure using a method called multiple
systems estimation.
If you attended C.C.C.
last year, you might have seen the talk
by our founder of the Human Rights
Then Analysis Group, Patrick Ball.
We explained the method in much more
detail and expanded on the case
using Guatemala.
So I encourage you to look at that talk.
If you're interested in the method.
I'm not going to go into more detail on
it now. Importantly, this method
can help us identify this dark
figure. And on the one hand,
it's important to identify the stock
figure for the means of analysis.
But it's also important because we really
need to think about accounting for each
individual who was killed by the Syrian
regime. So there's obviously a
much bigger importance in doing this than
just for analysis.
OK, so to give you an idea
of how important it is to look at the
dark figure of violence, this is
a map of Syria by different governorates
across the period of one year.
And the darker areas show us
where we know very little about what's
actually happening on the ground.
So the dark of the areas are the higher
the percentage of undocumented killings.
And as you can see, this high variation
both within
governorates across time and
both and across different governorates.
So if you would have only used the
documented killings, we would
have gotten a very different picture on
about what's happening on the ground.
Now, you can also imagine that someone
who was
intentionally detained and tortured
by the government and then killed might
have a different probability of being
reported than someone who was killed in
an explosion.
So we need to estimate
these different figures separately.
And only once we have this information
can we actually carry on with our
analysis.
OK, so now we have information
on different strategies
of violence used by the Syrian government
across the period of one year.
The next thing we need is information on
Internet access in Syria, and for this,
the Syrian Digital Security Monitor
has been has been
collecting information for the last one
and a half years on the level of Internet
accessibility within each Syrian
district.
I mean, they've been doing this on a
scale from one to four.
So either it's fully accessible, it's
temporarily accessible, it's
infrequently accessible, or there's no
Internet access at all.
And this is the information
that they kindly shared with me that I'm
that I'm using as a measure of
Internet access within Syria.
And what you can see here is how it
varies over time across different
Syrian governorates for
different types of Internet access.
Importantly, what we can see here is it's
not just that some bomb falls and
then all access disappeared.
So it's not just a technical problem
happening here, but we see, obviously,
that the government is putting
putting work into either providing access
or denying access.
OK, so what we're really interested
in is understanding if the variation
in this pattern affects
or is correlated to
the variation in the pattern of violence
used by the Syrian government.
So what we see here is the expected
proportion of targeted killings given
different levels of Internet
accessibility.
So where Internet is fully accessible,
almost one quarter of all
killings that occurred are targeted.
So these are people who've been tortured.
These are people who directly executed or
these are people who were previously
detained.
And as we move down in the level of
accessibility, that number decreases.
It decreases to about eight percent where
there's no Internet accessibility.
Or put in words in governorates where
the Internet is fully accessible, one
in four or targeted killings.
And in governorates where there's no
Internet access, we see about less
than one in 10 targeted killings.
Now, I'm not making any kind of moral
or qualitative judgment on on
any type of killing.
All this is saying is that the type
of violence used by the government, by
the government is different in
governorates where they have Internet
access versus ones where there's no
Internet access.
So the higher the Internet accessibility
is, the more targeted
violence the government's uses.
And conversely, where there's almost
no access, there's going to be much
more indiscriminate violence used.
OK, so in conclusion,
I'm not making a fully causal
argument here where I'm saying that the
different levels of
of accessibility directly
cause a different type of violence.
What I'm trying to say is that
the choice of digital response is likely
to inform, constrain
or enable different types of
of repression used by the government.
It's likely to be part of a larger
repressive campaign.
OK, what we see is that it very spatially
and temporally, so it's not just as
if in the beginning of the conflict,
everything is selective.
And then as it moves over time, the
government uses only indiscriminate
violence. We see a big variation both
over time and space.
And we see that not only affect scale
that actually affects the type or the
nature of oppression used by governments.
I'm happy to talk about all the methods
and and and other
details after the talk.
And if you have any questions, please
email me. Thank you.
Thank you very much for this very
interesting talk, so we still have a lot
of time for questions and answers
so people can gather up at the mikes
and I will call you.
Do we have a question from the I.R.S.
or Twitter?
Signal angel, right?
No, not really.
OK, then we'll go on with microphone
number one, please.
OK. I have actually
two questions.
One is in regard
of the targeted and non targeted
killings.
You mentioned children as a target.
How do you see in this perspective the
recent Pakistani school shootings?
I mean, I would say this was
targeted even though not
by the government, but by the Taliban
and it affected children.
So is it not
the indicator seems to be not valid in
all cases.
Yes, you can agree.
Did you have another question, though?
Yes. OK, yeah.
So, no, definitely.
The the
the the measure that I use for target
and targeted violence is definitely
something that situation specific.
So so in the context of
of of Syria, what we often see is
that the circumstantial evidence tells us
that these were these were, for example,
kids who were five year old who were with
their parents and who were bombed, for
example.
But we don't see very many cases
where children are tortured, for example.
So so I think in the Syrian case, that's
makes sense. But you're absolutely right,
depending on the type of
the type of conflict we're looking at or
non conflict, the the measure
of the type of violence needs to be
buried.
And my second question is, do you
think or do you have evidence
that a higher number of targeted killings
during times of full Internet access
directly correlates to each other
as a to do with the fact that in
times of full Internet access, the regime
has more and better information
to conduct targeted killings?
So that would be my hypothesis.
This is not something I can directly test
because I don't know which information
the government is actually using, that
it's that it's gleaning from its
surveillance techniques.
But I would I would argue that that is
one of the reasons why they're probably
more likely to directly target people
more effectively.
OK, thank you.
Microphone number two, I
just two observations, more and more
comments than anything.
Firstly, your construct of government
versus civil society or society
is kind of simple.
Syria is a very large, porous country.
You can enter from almost any angle
and you have several religious
orientations to the country.
And so there is fractionalization
that is not really reflected
and it's a shifting situation.
So if you imagine a war
zone in which your town is shelled,
you have no electricity, therefore you
have no mobile phone, you have no
Internet. So the outages
are spurious.
You might be accounting for
a cut out and electricity rather than
cut out in the network.
So two points right to one,
the government against people.
So people against the government is also
a form of violence.
And we might be measuring the wrong
thing. Thanks.
Absolutely, I mean, I'm highly I mean,
I'm using a theoretical, highly
simplified concept, and in
this in this specific piece of research,
I only looked at the effect of government
violence or basically the how government
violence works in
obviously Syria is a is a much more
complicated case.
But but if we only look at the
side of of government against
against the opposition,
we can still assume that the people who
are acting on the on the on the side of
the government are somewhat unified
in that they want to remain maintain the
status quo or go back to
the previous status quo.
And in terms of in terms
of measuring the wrong thing, I think
there are probably periods within
within the data that that that reflect
exactly that.
But since we see that no no governorate
just goes off the grid.
Right. So it's not like they're just
bombings. And then the whole
the whole level of accessibility goes
down forever.
We see that it goes back up again.
So obviously there
it's it's not like it's just one kind
of uniform response,
so.
Thank you. Number four, please.
I first of all, couldn't thank
you more for putting numbers on
this matter because I think
it helps tremendously
in arguing also at a political
level, two questions.
A, I think you
demonstrate some very interesting
correlations.
Still, I
have the feeling that the causation
is a bit more difficult to explain.
Could you elaborate on this and
attach to this?
My second question, have you made any
temporal analysis seeing
patterns like Internet going
off, something happening intended going
on?
Yes, so so
absolutely, as I mentioned at the end of
my talk, I'm not using the word causation
in the in the in the social science
sense. In this case, what I'm
saying is that these two these two
phenomena, Internet control and violence,
are likely to be part of the same
campaign used by governments
when they use which campaign is a very
different question.
So the first thing I wanted to establish
with this was to see
do they even Cauvery, do we see any
kind of correlation here?
The second question is when
governments use what type?
I refer to that a little bit in the
theoretical part.
So we're likely to see governments
or in the case of the Syrian government,
we're likely to see them using
using targeted violence in areas where
they haven't fully given up hope of
control. Right. So where they're still
fighting to maintain control, where they
still have have some faint
hope that that it'll be theirs at some
point again. So in a sense, leaving
the Internet on there is a
form of
a form of providing infrastructure for
the people who are still supporting them
and spying on the people who might not
be.
And in places where they've completely
given up hope, where they say, OK, we're
going to punish people here for their
for their involvement with
any any of the opposition groups,
that's probably where we're going to see
more indiscriminate violence
in terms of temporal analysis.
Yes, I've I've written a different
research project on temporal analysis.
And what we there basically see is that
during network outfall network outages,
as they occurred a couple of times in
Syria, the level of violence,
the scale of violence increases
tremendously and significantly
so. So there's definitely some kind of
larger strategic idea
going on behind that.
I'd love to talk to someone from the
Syrian government, but I haven't been
able to up until now.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you. So, Christian from the
Internet.
Uh, yeah.
Um, is any
work planned or always done
regarding what is happening in Ukraine?
I haven't I haven't worked on the
Ukrainian case, I'm
I'm aware of other other researchers
working on the Ukrainian case, but I
think that's that's also going to be very
interesting, very
interesting example of how governments
can strategically use the Internet
and even more there.
I mean, what I've what I've been looking
at here is kind of very crudely looking
at Internet access as a form of
information control.
But actual information manipulation might
be something that would be really
interesting. And looking at the Ukrainian
case.
Then microphone number one, please.
I thanks for the talk first.
Could that be that in areas with
less or no Internet access, there's
just less information getting
out that could identify a death
as a targeted killing so
that the correlation isn't as
strictly or as strong between
those? And there's a little bit
correlation between no Internet access
and less information
that identifies killings as
such.
Um, no, we don't find that.
That's a very good point. And I think
what we do see is that where
there's no Internet access, we know
less about the number of people killed.
But the information that we do have so
on recorded killings is just as good.
So we have information on that.
The people were, for example, killed in
bombings.
So the quality of the information
stays roughly the same.
It's just less the quality stays
the same. The quantity sometimes
varies. Yes.
Thank you very much.
Another question from the Internet.
Uh, yeah, um,
there was a question about this
whole scattergories.
Uh, somebody want to know if you can
name explicitly some of these
sources.
So, yeah, so the sources we use,
human rights groups working in Syria,
so if you do have it,
if you have a look at the
report we wrote,
where is it? Yeah.
So the report names the groups in detail
and therefore human rights groups that
have been working actively on the ground
and they've been doing absolutely amazing
work.
So when I talk about holes
in the documentation, this doesn't mean
that these human rights groups aren't
doing great work. They're doing amazing
work. It's just that some areas are
almost inaccessible for them.
So, yeah.
OK, then, one last question for my two.
Hello.
My question is about the mythology,
how you determine if
there is Internet access.
And another question
you partly answered already.
I think the proportion between targeted
killings and non targeted killings
regarding in relation to Internet
access is like a proportion.
But have you also looked at the
absolute figures, how they change with
having Internet access or maybe having
some Internet access?
Yeah, yeah, um,
so.
So in terms of the methodology, as
I say, the data I use that Internet
access wasn't something I collected
myself, but as far as I understand,
they've they they partly
had people helping them
collect collect information on the ground
within each district.
So they had people who were
who were telling them every month
we've been able to access the Internet
via our phone. We've been able to access
the Internet via DSL and so on.
Like a survey.
Yes, like a survey.
I'd be very interested in hearing
other ways to measure this, maybe on a on
a more discreet scale.
So if if people have
ideas on that, I'd be I'd be very
interested to hear about that.
I haven't looked at the the differences
in scale of violence when
it comes to different different levels of
NetWare accessibility.
What I have done is looked at the
difference in the scale of violence
between days where the Internet is off
and days where the Internet is on.
And there we do see a significant
difference. So on days where the Internet
is off, we see a much higher level of
violence and this is even controlling
for documentation patterns and
everything. So it's not just an artifact
in the data.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for your questions.
If you still have questions, you can just
after the talk, walk up to any time to
ask her.
And then I would like to thank you again
for your presentation.
Thank you.