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He has hails from Canada, from the
Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human
Rights Studies at Concordia University,
and he helped build up the digital
mass atrocity prevention lab.
Please welcome Nikolai.
Hello, everyone. Thank you very much for
that kind introduction.
Thank you all for just coming at the
latest, uh, talk tonight.
And, uh, thank you for C.C.C.
for inviting us. Um, uh, it's
a great honor for us to be here.
Um, just a little bit about
myself, just a little bit of background,
like, uh, I'm a German Swiss citizen, but
I work now in Montreal for the Monterey
Institute for Grad Studies.
And, um, since the beginning of
the year, like or for me better since
April, I helped, uh, build up the,
uh, what we call the digital mass
atrocity prevention lab.
And I mean, everyone has the lab these
days. And so what we want to
do with that is actually kind of try and
reach out into different communities like
we do a lot of policy work.
Um, but obviously, like since
we have like, uh, a hacking
audience tonight, like we also want to
be involved in, like, uh, tech
communities and the hacking communities.
So when we saw
the talk, uh, on the keynote and,
uh, the introduction
on, uh, to to this Congress,
um, like my colleagues and I
were really pleased to see that there is,
uh, way that, uh, like a need from the
community actually to open up and kind of
let people who are not necessarily
hackers like my background is
international relations and not
necessarily the deep tech.
Um, I'm interested in it.
And I can follow what the CCC is doing
for the last couple of years.
Um, and especially one talk, uh,
just at the camp this this year by
Claudio, uh, about helping the helpless,
where he basically.
Told the infosec community to reach out
to human rights groups and and help them
where they where they can actually be
helpful, that
resonated with us. And we come from the
other side and basically Montreal, like
we a fairly small team.
And so what
I'm going to talk about in the next
couple of, uh, I would say 20 minutes
is just a little bit what we did
over the last seven, eight,
nine months.
And it's going to be like pretty much in
chronological order.
We're going to talk a little bit about
what the U.N. is doing in peacekeeping
and peace TAC.
We did a big research project
using Media Cloud.
That's a tool by the Berkman Center and
the Center for Media.
We kind of encourage
like we we we talk to a lot of, uh,
technologists and hackers at various
hackathon. And we kind of want to share
some lessons learned.
Um, and
if this time I just want to go through,
like, a couple of various projects, which
we found a little bit interesting, very
interesting. And just kind of see what,
uh, what what you could learn from it and
then just open the dialog between
different fields, because obviously I'm
coming from a fairly different field
than many of you.
Um, so
one thing we do at the Monterey Institute
of Translating Studies, we have a
workshop on mass
atrocity prevention. So it's mainly for
policymakers and people in the peace
keeping and peace building community.
A lot of people with a non-technical
background. And what we try
to do in the last couple of years is
getting more tech stuff into the
workshops you see here
at this picture. It's like the workshop
in the middle.
Uh, we have Walter Dalton, who is a
professor in, uh, Kingston, Ontario,
in Canada, and he looks
on how like the UN is using
technology or could be potentially using
technology, uh, to
monitor peace treaties or
just kind of look at look at new
ways, because, I mean, obviously, it's
2015 and the UN is finally
kind of catching up to that.
Um, for those
who are interested, like there is earlier
this year, like the UN actually came off,
come out with a final report on how they
can use, uh, new technologies
in peacekeeping.
Um, and Walter was part
of that kind of expert panel.
Um, so there is
there are things happening.
I mean, the UN is a slow and
sometimes very kind of hard to
like a ship, hard to maneuver.
Um, so it's interesting to see that even
there there's kind of thinking about
technology and, um,
admittedly, like it is more
like on the military side of things.
So like they did think about like the new
the new peacekeeping, uh,
kind of force and how to kind
of get them equipped.
Um, but what
we also have been involved with is like
a growing field of of what they call
piece tech, um,
which is more like on the on the civil
side. And really kind of I believe a lot
of people with good intentions are
being part of that. And it seems like
there are a couple of conferences out
there, um, since I guess
2010, 2011 they started.
And what they want to do is try a couple
of try to get a lot of people from
that community software development
community together with peace building
community. So it's about kind of getting
the barriers down between different, uh,
different fields.
Because that's also what we saw over
like pretty much last year in
the different events we participated in.
It is difficult for those few to talk
to each other, the different languages,
different backgrounds and different
cultures.
And we
see a benefit and actually in
kind of getting those barriers down and
in a bit, um,
so that would be one part of just
kind of informing you what's out there.
That's way more stuff out there.
And, um, that's
just like a brief overview.
Um, the other thing what we did is,
uh, at the Monterey Institute, we
have a media monitoring project for
basically we do qualitative research in
countries which might be,
uh, at risk of mass atrocity, atrocity
crimes. There are other NGOs
out there. The Crisis Group, for example,
has a very prominent project as
well.
Um, but what we find is that it's very
difficult to just kind of we we basically
rely on interns who, like SCAP, look
at the media landscapes in those
countries and look at international
media and then see what's actually
happening. But it's very qualitative
work. So we were thrilled when we saw
that there is a way to actually
use more quantitative methods.
Um, there's a
debate in Stockholm in which we basically
followed. You wrote a proposal for this
and we kind of got invited
to do research, uh, with the Media Lab.
Um, what we did there was we used
the media cloud, uh,
framework that I have a couple of other
tools. We mainly use the media to
dashboard, which pretty much is like
a dashboard, which you can
query a database in this in
this, uh, in the
sense that we created the database about
US mainstream media.
Um, there's about twenty five biggest
media sources in the US.
And basically just look, you can
you can query four different for
different, uh, subjects
and then it gives you like a timeline
where you see like it's basically,
uh, sentences per day and then over the
time line which you would you have
looked at and you can get like a word
cloud.
And, um, it's very good
to kind of just get a very brief overview
on a topic.
And what we did.
We were really interested in a lot of
countries we did research on, like
in sub-Saharan Africa mainly.
So we wanted to know how, um,
sub-Saharan Africa is presented in the US
mainstream media, because many of the
things you would normally think, it's
like there are a couple of topics which
always come up, but, uh, many
other good things which happen in
sub-Saharan African countries that never
show up.
Um, so
what is the here we have a couple of
countries like Cameroon, Niger,
South Sudan, Uganda, they all like
they all plotted, uh, next to each other.
And what we found is that compared to
other topics, there's not much coverage
at all. If there is and
if there is, uh, if there's actually
interest to see it here, it's when
there's a World Cup. So that's like an
event in the West, which,
uh, then then actually sparks interest
in media attention.
And
obviously now we don't really have too
much to compare it to.
So we figured that like we needed
something which is very prominent in US
mainstream media and that is Kim
Kardashian. I'm not sure if you know who
she is. She's like a media celebrity.
But when you voted against like
what what the media
attention, she gets this way more than
what all those nine, uh,
sub-Saharan African countries get
combined.
Um, that's actually nothing
new.
We had we had the kind of research that's
been like since the sixties, but now we
can actually show it like with actual
like a lot of data behind it.
Um, then we also went
into like a more like a qualitative
sort of research where we looked at 50
articles each and what we
saw was like basically we have like
like 340 stories which are
which are valid.
And when you look at what the frame
of the stories is, it
was terror related, it's Ebola related
or soccer related. That that's pretty
much made the main the main
topics that got on on mainstream
media reporting Africa is that,
um and so a lot of
a lot of good things which are happening
in those countries are not getting
reported or not.
Not their, um.
So.
When we kind of were at that stage,
we will look at the supply side of
things. That's what the media supplies
and that's what people can can read into.
And we also look
at the same time when we when we did the
research, there was there was an article
by Chris Norton on Medium
where she basically says
that it's also
on the demand side.
So a lot of people actually don't really
want to read anything else.
So it's just a very strong
quote there where she says, like, you
people never click the fucking link.
Um, so
and when when we kind of think about mass
atrocity prevention or prevention of
atrocities, uh,
we believe it's important to know that,
um.
The way we see a lot of countries like
African countries especially.
We need like another we need another
frame, we just don't need only the frame
we have, uh, which
gets gets normally portrayed like Ebola
and terror related.
Um.
Then one thing we kind
of did at the same time when we when we
talked about, uh,
when we did the research, when we,
um, when you wrote the proposal right at
the beginning, we had like
a little mishap. Um, I'm really
interested in, like, the philosophy track
we have here at, uh, at the
Congress. And so I want to share like the
second a little anecdote.
Um, so basically what happened,
I like somebody saw the proposal
and I went, uh, I
just saw it on my computer.
And then I went I went home, uh, on my
laptop and.
So.
I went home and wrote like an email,
just kind of trying to figure out, hey,
guys, what is that research about
cetera, and just have a couple of
questions. What I didn't know was that
my wife actually installed a
chromium plugin which would
actually mocked the overuse of the
word cloud and turned
it into. But, um, so
what happened? I write this really long,
elaborate email because I think that it
was a great project and then this
is what I get back and why
it's media cloud, not media.
But, um, I'm
curious, etc..
Um, obviously
it was a failure. We feel that we felt
embarrassed, but we were lucky and
we got it. But like, yeah, I think it's
important to kind of share whatever
mishaps you have beaten, like software
development or especially in academia.
Um, so just putting it out there
very briefly, um,
then I guess the last thing I want to
want to talk about is like we participate
in various microphones and that's there
were some times that were like like free
and open source software because there
there was a lot of people just
like the traditional tech community, like
in Montreal. We have a lot of software
developers, um,
and obviously out there there's like
something like a hackathon fatigue.
I mean, you see you see there like
T-Mobile and flatboat Lebanon.
They'd like basic big corporations using
hackathon and hacking culture in a way to
to basically outsource their
R&D.
Um, so
we also saw kind of like a hackathon
fatigue in what we did, what
we did. And we said like a couple of
criticisms, like pretty
much the biggest, uh, thing
we noticed was that when we opened, like
a lot of people who organized hackathon,
we participated in the drive to bring
actually both pieces together, um,
the tech community and the peace building
community, for example.
Um, but oftentimes it was
really difficult to actually get
enough people with the technology.
So you had like 40, 50 people,
um, but only two or three.
Well, were able to code.
Um.
Which then in the end, if you have to
actually try to get some sort
of ideas going into the project,
you actually, um, end up
with a lot of policy talk and a lot of
like there wasn't as much like
cross-cultural ization as this is like
and then talking between the feel that I
would have kind of hope for it.
Um, but also like,
uh, one I would say
more like on the positive side of things.
An example was, uh, where we participated
in the Talking Peace Festival, where
we found, like, uh, that, uh, hackathon
in, uh, in Washington, D.C.
and we participated in that.
And there we found a good mix of
both people actually knew how to code a
new kind of.
How to think about surveillance and kind
of think about the important topics, I
guess the audience here is really
concerned about.
So and what we also
found is that when you think about
building whatever kind of technology,
it's really important to be engaged with
the community, those
those people, uh, it should
be served with for,
um.
So we found like this was something
we felt like there was a lot of
movement. I think that was interesting.
Both sides. So it wasn't only from like
the political policy side, but also from
the side of of of the tech
knowledge.
And we think and and
so like in a way we
like what what, uh, a lot of NGOs
and human rights groups could
use the hackathon or
similar ideas could use it for is
actually like. Yeah, build trying to
get get get a bridge between those two
communities. I know that's like I mean
today we have a lot of a lot of, uh,
fairly depressing stories.
And, uh, I don't
want to end with, like, a happy ending,
but like I'm just like what I what I want
to say is that, uh, we
feel that there is like there
are a lot of people who think they could
be, um, working together
to actually build technologies which
could help people in human rights
situations and.
But what we think is actually
just trying to engage and get together
and see where that leads, that's part of
why I'm here. That's kind of like I'd be
happy to talk to people who
have different thoughts and actually give
us feedback on what we can improve,
because, um,
if it is about talking to each other,
that's that's something we would really
be, uh, engaging in.
OK, and so
just to give you like an example of a
couple of projects we found fairly
interesting or kind of
free, we came across during during
the time we did the research.
And then in the last half year,
it is a project called The
Early Warning.
Uh.
The early warning system, which basically
has a couple of components, is like a
statistical analysis method and
some sort of like an expert or so,
uh, they ask a lot
of people from, uh,
the peacebuilding community and then
different other communities like what
they what they're going to think is going
to happen in the next 12 months in
country X, Y, Z, and then
they give opinions. I guess it's fairly
it's a fairly big opinion poll, too.
It's about like, I think, to 200 people,
uh, participating from different
fields.
So it kind of tries to to get a couple of
methods together.
And, um, I'm I'm very sure that,
like a lot of people who are engaged with
the this project would be interested
in how to make those tools better.
Um, because what
we kind of think is that, uh, a
lot of NGOs and human rights groups, what
they can offer is kind of like a network
to connect people with each other.
And they also have like, uh,
oftentimes a better
knowledge of how to actually get the
message out rather than if you just have,
um, technologies and
tactics. Just think about the deep tech
and that's what they're doing.
And so, like, kind of getting
their heads away from the keyboard
and actually the wider world and how it
is deployed, et cetera.
Um.
So be grateful if you could get some
feedback on that as well.
Um, then there's another,
uh, actually, like I'm very
kind of hesitant to to promote apps
because I'm not really sure how just an
app by itself can promote
peacekeeping or mass atrocity prevention.
It's just I don't really see that's
necessarily like a good
way of promoting it.
But there's this one up we found
pretty interesting.
Um, it's called eyewitnessed.
And basically what it does, it is it is
an app to, um,
document atrocity crimes.
Um, and like, it's
you can just download it and it
kind of looks at, uh, takes the security
of the people who use it very seriously.
Um.
So, for example, like you said, it's
not just like a logo on the air, but it's
kind of it's more hidden in within
us.
But actually, to get to that point, it
took a lot of work from security
researchers to actually
be able to make photos of an atrocity and
then sexually transmitted
to, uh.
I think it's the International Bar
Association, which then
can use those pictures with timestamps,
et cetera, then to be actual
legal documents in, uh,
for example, ICC, the International
Criminal Court cases.
Um.
I think the last thing I would
do is just kind of there like three
Canadian companies, I think a couple of
them might be even at the Congress.
Uh, so we try to
kind of engage with them, like, for
example, quality of life.
Uh, they work very much
for free and open source software
in the field of human rights.
And kind of since we're
very new with what we're doing at the
Digital Mass Atrocity Lab, uh, it would
be great if we could just kind of
get a conversation going, seeing what's
actually what we're doing really badly
from a security perspective.
Um, and
yeah. So if I think.
That should be actually most of what I
what I wanted to share, um, I
will put a couple of a couple of, uh,
links already of what we did and
what we what we did on on an iPad.
But I feel free to just reach out, write
your comments in there.
You can't even troll.
I will just delete it
and. Yeah, I think.
That would be the the the main thing
of my talk, uh, give us feedback and let
us know what you think and then
be critical.
Thank you very much.
We have actually plenty of time
for questions, so if you have
any questions, please line up at the
microphones.
Are there questions from Iasi?
No, no questions for any questions
from the audience.
No, go on,
please, please go to the microphone so
our listeners at home can hear you
and we can also record it.
Microphone front left, please,
from left, all right.
OK, OK,
yeah, I guess some reflections
because you were also asking for input.
The first one was interested if anyone
here is developing us is D
or C application toolkits
or any type of technology
that I
guess it's called technological blending
or whatever you call it.
But to bridge the digital
divide between people with dumb phones
and feature phones, which are pretty
much the new dumb phone and I
guess, yeah, the entry
level of an Android phone that can run
that app is always increasingly going
down.
But yeah, I mean, successful
projects like Ushahidi have thought about
that integration with.
Yeah. Dumb phones from
the start. So I would be interested if we
have those skills or
some application tool kit, for example.
Is that a completely neglected
technology?
That's just guess more of a brain fart,
more of an idea.
And then the second question is,
how do you deal with the fact that.
In situations like this, you do usually
have tech experts,
usually from the global north,
narrating the stories of the global
south is a
big generalization, but it's a tendency.
And how does that get resolved?
Yeah, but well,
I think the second question,
like, I could answer it in a way that a
lot of what we're doing is this is part
of a learning experience, especially for
me, for myself personally, like I know my
colleagues who do that work for a longer
time. And like they they've been involved
in peace building projects for a long
time. So they were actually talking
about, like, you know, how getting better
than ever, just getting them into, like,
sort of like areas where they
shouldn't be.
And so they actually did, in a way, more
about that. But for us, like for me
personally, it's just kind of like a
learning experience. That's what we try
to reach out.
Um, so I'll be able to talk more, uh,
if that's possible later.
Great story, just to add a selfish
point, I'm writing a thesis on the topic,
so if anyone wants to continue a
conversation later, sure, I'm sure that's
the point of this whole session anyway,
to continue our conversation.
Thank you very much. Thank you so much.
Microphone on the front, right, please?
Yeah, thematically breaching the
early warning project and the media cloud
project, um, I'm
wondering, it seems kind of plausible
to me that mass atrocities are introduced
by some media activity locally
or globally.
And I'm wondering if you're aware of any
research or if you have done any research
in that direction, analyzing media
and as an
early warning for mass
atrocities. Are you aware of any research
done in that direction?
Yeah, like I mean, one
one piece where we were interested in
what what media cloud is providing is
that it actually matters what what's
happening, uh,
like in the media environment, in
certain countries, uh, for example,
Burundi.
And one thing we kind of
were thinking about, and that's just an
idea which which would be interesting to
get some feedback about it, like there is
something called the Cheatle Project.
It's like the general database on
language and tone.
And I mean, it's a project like actually
Google is behind some of that.
And they basically look at media and runs
in almost real time.
So when you when
you when you basically have an
environment where where you think there
might there might be atrocities happening
in the near future, that
could be something to look at because
you can actually monitor what's
happening. But I mean, then again,
monitoring is close to
then again, also like you surveil the
whole country and you see what's
happening in their in their in
their environment. But
that's something we talked about.
Like I mean, the the research
on what like different technologies
or media play in mass atrocities,
that that's just I think that's a whole
range of literature out there.
Um, where you look at that, at the
front end genocide, for example, there's
a whole band
of, uh, literature on
radio as being the enabling technology
because it was like, uh,
there was lies and kind of hate
speech trends transmitted over
radio technology, for example.
Um, so there was a whole bunch of
research on that topic.
The microphone from left, please.
Hi, thanks for talk.
Thank you.
Um, could you expand a little bit
like in an ideal world, what
kind of software would be missing from a
peace building or from the UN
perspective?
Um, in an ideal
world, like I mean, if there
is such a thing, I think what we're
actually interested in is, uh,
how to enable collaboration.
I think collaboration tools might be
something really interesting to look at,
because you have in
some environments, you have many
different NGOs with different different
kind of channels and how they work with
each other. So, uh,
if you make it like a community effort,
it might be interesting to look at just
basic collaboration tools and how to
implement them. I mean, from from
the little insight I got over the work
I did over the last couple of months and
over like a year was that
oftentimes the tools are there and the
tools are there to be used, but they're
actually not embraced or not used by
a lot of NGOs or like I mean,
when we look at a lot of surveillance
technologies and technologies,
um, people know about
it, but we know how to use it.
And it actually would be great to have
better resources.
I mean, that so far they're like they're
wikis and that's a way to implement
it. But it also I think it needs the
human factor to actually push people to
to use the technologies.
Uh, we could be providing them.
Microphone from dry, please.
Um, so I understood
that you are covering official media
reports with Media Cloud.
Are you also researching already in
the social media, like the publicly
available, um.
Whatever Twitter streams and Zaref like
that, like us personally,
we don't, um, I mean, obviously
there is there is like I've been involved
in a couple of projects which like
I know about it, but I said, um,
who do that? Um, but
that's the thing like us.
It's like we are not like a handful of
people actually at my institute.
And like we
we don't at this point, we don't have the
technological skills or the tech skills.
And some of it is actually fairly easy, I
suppose. Um, I mean, that there are two
out there down which you can like, look
at what's happening on Twitter, et
cetera. And, uh, actually
look at this at this hackathon in
Washington, D.C. we had something which
basically looked at this, uh, digital
project, Media Cloud and Twitter at the
same time as some sort of like a
big monitoring system or risk assessment
system system.
And the interesting thing about it is it
also evaluates tone.
So basically you have a sentence which is
kind of negative towards a special group.
It would kind of it could theoretically
trigger trigger something.
And we had a couple of guys who like,
uh, like, uh, code in Python.
They called it like a prototype.
And then basically they
would then send it automatically a
message to to the peace, peace,
uh, building people on the ground.
Um, so that's thinking about
it. Like, I'm not really sure
who else is thinking about that kind of
stuff.
But I mean, the fact is,
like the stuff's going to be more digital
like years to come.
So, like, I think
the peace building community will have to
catch up to that to.
I think that Twitter sentiments or
also image recognition,
this can help.
Thank you.
OK, take the microphone
from the left, please.
Yeah. Thank you for your time.
One thing that that was missing for me
was, um, uh,
actions for peace enforcement, which
you I think did not cover
in the top.
Did you what you can do to promote peace
enforcement is the third escalation step
for, um, um, atrocity
prevention, meaning deploying forces,
et cetera. I mean, deployed forces to
prevent stuff.
So so what
I saw here was mostly reactive.
Um, I mean, international law
is reactive.
When these atrocities, um,
some I think technology can could also
be used, um, as an offensive
weapon.
Um, the eyewitness
idea I think was it was a good start.
If you combine it, for example, with,
um, image recognition on the ground
or let's say, um, drones
or small mini drones
that fly over the, um,
the area affected so that they
they are also visible.
So the people on the ground who might
commit atrocities can also see that they
are witnesses.
Right. And stuff like that.
So that you build up offensive, um,
capabilities with, um, technology.
I think that would also be interesting.
Right. That's something I haven't thought
about that. But but thanks for the input.
That's great.
Do we have any questions from Iasi.
No. Uh, Ben, one last
time microphone from left please.
Uh, you mentioned using technology
for looking at the media and it
seemed like all sorts of things were
leveraging what's already
been done
by different organizations
involved in preventing atrocities.
And it seemed like you thought that
Eyewitnessed was an example of an app
that may not be a very effective
direction for technology
investment, but
it seems like the appeal of an app like
that is that it's about directly
impacting the atrocity,
whereas the media and just leveraging
other people's abilities seems more
indirect.
It seems like this image recognition is
also a way of using technology to more
directly impact things.
I kind of wonder if there are other
directions that would come to your mind
as far as having a direct impact
on an atrocity or potential
atrocity?
Well, actually, just to correct you, I
think I think what I'm aware of the
obvious in general, I think like
I've seen a lot of apps, which is don't
really make much sense.
It's basically just like a website and an
app and a nap umbrella,
um, just kind of repackaging content.
Um, actually did the math that
I would not have we found comparatively
very, very, uh, kind of smart in
the way they thought about it.
Um, so there's the other part
of your question. What I think about
other ways of.
Yeah. Kind of what we've been talking
about so far besides eyewitness is like
image recognition, where it seems like
clearly the technology itself is
playing an integral role in preventing
or documenting an atrocity.
So I was wondering if there are other
ways that the technology can be used
to directly impact
either the prevention or
the results of an atrocity.
Mm hmm.
Well, to be honest, I'm not really sure,
like whether we thought about image
recognition in that sense, as you
describe it, um, but I mean, that's
part of why we're here, because, like,
we kind of want to get input on a lot of
different things. I mean, obviously,
like, you can you can research a lot,
but just getting like a human feedback on
things would be very valuable.
So, uh, if if, uh, you can
stick around a couple of minutes later, I
would be able to talk more.
That's OK.
Thank you very much, Nicolai.
Please give them a warm round of
applause.