*34c3 intro*
Herald: Okay, so again, once again: Good morning to everyone! We are really sorry
for the delay, but as you know this is the Chaos Communication Congress. Chaos is
part of the show. In any case, we are ready to start our first speaker for the
day. This is a talk that I'm personally very excited about. Very interesting in my
opinion. Our first speaker is an architect. He's a professor of spatial and
visual cultures, and the director of a forensic architecture at Goldsmiths
University in London. Please give a big round of applause to Eyal Weizman.
*applause*
*microphone off, inaudible*
Eyal Weizman: excited to be here. My first congress, atually, and I'm sure it's gonna
bring good luck. The fact that we had some technical equipment problem right now. I'm
running in London something that is better described as a counter forensic agency, as
a civil society counter forensic agency. There's no better way to explain what
counter forensics is, a certain turning around, repurposing of the forensic gaze
towards the state, then looking at a series of issues where security forces or
the police are the perpetrator. So, what I'm going to show you today, very fast,
are three cases. The first one in Israel, second one in Germany, third one in Mexico.
Each one involves violence or alleged violence by the police and each one also
involves a different mode of research and technique, in doing so. First one is a
place where I come from, Israel Palestine, and the issue is really the force eviction
of Bedouin communities that have been living in the north part of the Naqab or
Negev desert in the south of Israel, for generations now declared by the state to
be illegally occupying those places and are subject to continuous raids by which the
police... Oops, you don't see the slides.
Slides? Slide? Guys? Okay. Sorry, one second.
*Inaudible*
*laughter*
All right, so I'll tell you a little bit more about forensic
architecture until until they do so. Basically what we are is a group of
architects, filmmakers, some investigative journalists, coders and we join together
to create a forensic agency. It was a kind of an experiment that we
started around 2010, because we felt that both,technological and political changes
enabled and demanded a form of counter forensics that we are now practicing.
Initially, we were working in conflict zones. Towards, or starting, really, in
this millennium, in the year 2000, war became an urban phenomena. Almost all
conflicts that we were looking at took place in cities, in and amongst buildings.
So in a very straightforward way, just like a medical doctor, a physician can
turn into a pathologist, we architects, we're turning the tools of our trade,
understanding of building, a way of interpreting its materiality, its
physicality into an evidentiary technique. So initially, what we were doing was a
kind of archaeology. Archaeology of the very recent past, or archaeology of the
present - this is a term by Gilles Deleuze - and looking at piles of ruin,
of a building that was destroyed in a bomb or in a firefight, and trying to read from
the disposition of the rubble something about what has taken place within
and around it. So it started as a kind of an archaeological practice. But then
again, very often, when we start working in conflict zones, and the first projects we
had were in Palestine and then in... we were working to uncover drone warfare in
the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, we realized very fast...
Technician: Sorry, could you... *inaudible* Eyal: Should I what?
Technician: The presentation on that stick so you can use this laptop.
E: Oh, this gonna take 20 minutes to pass them.
T: Really? E: Yeah.
I mean, because I started to put it on a stick, and... Listen, can you connect this
I'm gonna do something else... Technician: This is connected. Can you...
E: If you can get an image from this, I'm just gonna run things from my website.
So, as I said, the first level of our work was archaeological. Material archaeology,
trying to uncover what has taken place, where people were. But increasingly, we
realized that we cannot really get to the places where it was most important for us
to research. That states, when they violate human rights, or...
T: If you want, you can... E: Okay. Thank you very much.
Often also do two things: They close the
area to any investigator, any human right group, or anyone that works to
collect evidence against them. And they limit the ability of signal to come out of
them. This is actually what happened in 2008, 2009 in Gaza. Very little signal was
coming out of Gaza under attack by Israeli forces and this is what happened when at
the beginning of the American drone strike campaign in Pakistan Afghanistan, they
were effectively limiting it. So what we had to do, and this is what you're
gonna start seeing, is to undertake archeology through looking at media and
interpreting, really, the kind of flood of social media images that were coming our
way.
I'm not used to this.
Okay.
*applause*
Okay, so the first example I would like to show you is work we've done with a
Palestinian human right organization, Al Mezan, and Amnesty in Gaza in 2014. We
could not go. We asked for permission to go to Gaza at that time. Our access was
denied and all we had was about 70 thousand images, that we have collected
during that day and what we had to do, really, is tell a story of one day: August
1st 2014, morning to evening, which was the most violent, and the day where most
Palestinian casualties were sustained. What we didn't have was the metadata on
those clips and images, because of course they were harvested either from mainstream
or social media and we effectively had to develop a technique to look at the bomb
clouds themselves to look at them, and compose the architecture of the bomb cloud
plumes in order to see and collect images that refer to the same explosion and, back
from there, to determine the time and place of each one of those bombs. So those bomb
clouds were for us the metadata, they were kind of like physical metadata. Here
is how we geolocate one of the images that we found - or one of the clips that we
found - by comparing points on a perspective of the video with what we see on a
satellite image, located the place where the photographer was. And by cross-
referencing three of those, of the same cloud, we managed to find the precise
place where the bomb has finally landed. So, this is effectively a way in which you
can reconstruct metadata, a time space location from what we call physical
clocks, that is to say, analog things that exist within the image itself.
However, we can see other things on this photograph, too. If we look at one of
those images, here, we have the videographer capturing two shadow lines in
this photograph. Just a second before closing off the camera, and what we need
to do is to try to establish the time. If we can establish the time on that image,
and we know that form of the cloud is that time, we can triangulate on and establish
the times of other videos, and then move further. So, effectively by building a 3D
model and running a Sun simulation on it, we could arrive at a very precise,
within five minutes margin of error, time on that image. And now we know where this
image, where this video was taken and what time it is taken in. There is, however,
another in the satellite image that we obtained - this is a kind of a very rare
occasion. We saw an actual bomb on the satellite image. Again, this is something...
the satellite image has metadata. And we started looking, started hunting for that
bomb in images from the ground. Again, if we could locate that what we see in the
top view on from a ground view, we will be able to to start establishing times on the
sequence. As you see, this sequence has metadata, but the metadata is wrongly set
at around midnight. So we compose that kind of panorama of the bomb
clouds off of the city around that time and we could identify that cloud. This is
the cloud in side view, this is it in top view. We could find a precise location, a
precise time, and then by confirming that is actually the same, we can move back and
correct the digital metadata. So this is all techniques of actually establishing
the very basic foundational stone of research time-space relations, between
events. Here, for example, we could see in two
different corners of the web we find those images. We can verify it's the same camera
by seeing the same scratch on the lens. Correct the metadata, establish the time
difference between them and now, here again, the same camera man with the same
scratch on the lens. And now we can compose a timeline of bombs during that
day. And after that, of course these kind of cloud atlases are a technique that was
used by artists and by amateur meteorologists all the way from the 19th
century on. What we did is creating that kind of archive of clouds, but here what
you see is that we were able to convert them to information on the ground, and
then invert the image move from cloud to city. What you see here, the model, is
something that we call the architectural image complex. Architectural models are
the only ways to make sense and to place those multiple images in space-time, so
that we can navigate rather than edit them. We can navigate between one image
and the other. What you've seen here is that on one of the images, looking so
carefully at the bomb cloud, we start seeing two images in mid-fall. We found
the craters, where they have landed. And, we could, for lawyers calculate the kind
of like the destruction radius there. You would see now, again those horrific thing
to see a bomb just split seconds before it land on the ground and would kill 16
palestinian, an entire family. But the lawyers asked for the size of that bomb,
in order to bring in a kind of a supply chain action on it. When we see that on
the photo frame we can locate the photo frame within the model of the city
and actually measure those bombs in a very precise, with a very small under ten
percent margin of error and then go to the catalog and find exactly which bomb it was
that landed, and that would enable activists to go after the manufacturer,
after the policy of doing that. So again, here we are moving within the
model, with thermodynamic specialists we look at the way the cloud is changing, in
order to really realize we're looking at the same clouds. We're picking up now
images and events within the city as clouds being the anchors of the
reconstruction and that project has in fact gone later, as evidence was
submitted to the ICC, to the International Criminal Court and was used in various
other form of activism on the ground. And, to certain extent, might have contributed
to a change of policy by the IDF, about the honeybell directives, that is
something that they've enacted during that day. And the bomb cloud were also
something that was very important, were also like memory anchors. The witnesses on the
ground remembered and could sequence their movement according to those bomb clouds.
So think about an element that combines and ties together material evidence, media
evidence and memory evidence at the same time. So that's, I don't even, I'm
basically just improvising. It's not at all the lecture I wanted to show you
before. Here is a very recent investigation we've undertaken in
Cameroon, and were together again with Amnesty International we were able to
expose a secret detention center run by the Cameroonian military where
Boko Haram prisoners or suspects of Boko Haram prisoners were actually tortured. We
had access to people in Cameroonian prisons. It is very rare occasion, we were
able to actually send questions back and forth and reconstruct the architecture of
the prison and the conditions of incarceration.
But what became very important through the questions that we continuously posed and
continuously received from those suspects is that they've actually seen in, at the
beginning we did not know if this was correct or not, they were obviously seeing
people being tortured and killed outside of the detention center, but at some point
they also confirmed seeing something different: American soldiers that were
present on the site.
Now, as you know the US has claimed that it has stopped rendition, and stopped
involvement in torture, but this is something that we started very closely
digging in to see whether we could find any traces of US soldiers and other
European militaries involved within that, sort of, incarceration and torture of Boko
Haram suspect. First thing that we saw, that we noticed was, and sometimes traces
are left in the most kind of unexpected of places. A contract, an American contract
to connect that base to the Internet. The minute that we saw that, that was put on
the public domain we started following on Facebook and seeing some American soldiers
actually forgot to disconnect the location tagging and you know they're kind of like
holiday photographs. Could be very easily located onto the base.
Again we've built a model of the base, in
order to confirm, precisely, where each one of the photograph was taken and we can
see that they had access to the entire base. Again, a base where people are
executed, tortured, etc. And then tracked the unit, and as you see the site is
actually under construction. Something that we could not believe seeing was
American soldiers training the unit that is doing those atrocities and here in this
almost comical film they train them in night-vision equipment by playing
football. So they all play football in the dark with night vision and you could see
that the involvement is very direct. So that the exposure of that base
led to sort of a full American, at the beginning denial, always denial, then
admission, then a full investigation by the US about these allegations.
Another important case that we were involved with recently is the Ayotzinapa
case. I think maybe many of you know the story of the 43 students, Mexican
students, that were forcefully disappeared in Mexico. We were asked by the parents,
and by other civil society group to in fact.. investigate that.
It's one of the biggest controversies in Mexico right now, still, although it's
three years since the disappearance. Students involved in very grassroot, left-
wing politics enter the Intercity that was very much involved in narcos trade and
were destroyed by the police, the military and organized crime. What we've done here
is not really collect new evidence, but look at thousands and thousands of
existing reports and wanting in fact to data mine them. They were, you know,
hundreds and thousands of documents and the only way to to make sense of them was
actually to look at relations between different events in space-time, the
relations between all phone calls, photographs, movements of cars and gunshot
started creating a very different picture, than the Mexican government has actually
was willing to admit and that is that there was some local gang or local sort of
organized crime group that was in charge of these actions. So, we created a
platform in which we placed every named actor in space-time, a timeline in all the
communications so that we could start seeing relation between evidence. Often
it's not a bit of evidence in itself, it's not the casing or a gunshot that matters,
but actually patterns, coordinations and patterns of escalations and other things
that actually expose what was going on and we could show really a direct involvement
between three different police forces and the military and organized crime at the
same time, the location of all CCTV cameras that were there and removed, and somehow
the relationship between phone calls and attacks became most clear indication of
command and control. That these events were actually coordinated by the police.
Here we are analyzing CCTV cameras and what they would have seen. Of course the
state, immediately after the event erased every CCTV camera that existed, that was
available in the city and they said or they didn't show anything. We could show
exactly what they would have shown at that moment.
Another element to this is, we
go... so this is the platform, you can actually go and explore it yourself rather
than as sort of like a work with images. As I said, this is a work with data. In
one of the most important drawing and in fact became one of the very influential
drawing during that, in our investigation, was a kind of a working drawing that we
kept for ourselves, because we had to keep track of where every agent was. What was
the relationship between them, and also the multiple narratives that were told. So
we kind of kept a very very long drawing at the office, plotting the movement of
different actors, until at some point we realize that what we were drawing, that
working drawing became in fact an image of disappearance.
Because disappearance is not about, enforced disappearance of people, is not
only about grabbing people, killing them and hiding the bodies. Disappearance is
also an attack on evidence. It is the continuous withdrawal and destruction of
evidence. It is the introduction of false narratives and subterfuge. So
disappearance is in fact a narrative form in itself and so here that drawing we
could actually kind of like show how the state narrative, here in black, I'm not
going to go exactly into what everything means because we lost a lot of time in
this presentation, but these are the movement of the students according to the
state narrative. A state narrative that is still officially holding, although it's
being currently revised in response to many things, but including also our
investigation. And now you would see that the victim, the survivor's narrative
completely different. Starts... they enter the city at a completely different time. They
move through it and the divergence between the black and the red narrative in
fact is the space of denial and disappearance. Disappearance as an ongoing
crime, disappearance as a crime on narrative etc. I'm gonna skip forward,
just that you could see how the drawing is built up with another here on top the
purple images are, the purple lines, those of the narcos and, so, each one
tells a different story, and the multiple stories are in fact that kind of space of
disappearance. Here you would see these are movements of police, throughout the
city and you would see how that police force is precisely next to the students
all throughout the attack and moving along with them. In fact, what we have finally
done - and this is now green, is the military, etc - is built that we knew about
the, you know, who is it ...
So this is the complete drawing that we've
actually printed as an enormous mural. In Mexico, murals are kind of sites of
political pedagogy, you can think about Diego Rivera's great murals in Mexico, in
the US, where their narratives about the history of the state and about the
struggle of the working class. In a certain sense, we thought that this is a
kind of a mural of the 21st century, feel like a kind of a data mural, that is
complicated to read but its complication is in fact the image of disappearance.
These, the entangled line and interruptions within it, is what makes
that space.. hold on...
exhibition... I want to show you the image of that mural in the
space, and it has become, ever since, a kind of a site of political assembly and
political activism, of protest, for the families and others, and it kind of shows
for us the use of cultural and art spaces in the context of our work. Index is another
problem in counter forensic. Very often our evidence cannot enter the very
official spaces of state justice, they cannot. It's very rare that one can
actually take the state, challenge the state legally in its own institutions.
What we need to establish are alternative forums, and for us these could be public
spaces, exhibitions, etc. I think some of you might know about the work that we've
done on the NSU, on the Temme, or the Verfassungsschutz agent, that was suspected
to be present in an internet cafe in Kassel during the time of a racist
killing, and us showing that he was there. He could not have missed this event, that
was presented in Documenta, and Documenta offered for us another very interesting
forum. The fact it was shown there has in fact mobilized the process,
including in a German federal investigation, and also in a Hessen
parliamentary investigation, where different delegations from
this parliamentary investigation came to Documenta to see it. And finally, that work
was presented to Temme. He was forced to look at it and to comment upon it.
I think, I should probably leave some time to question. I'm sorry about the chaotic
presentation, but I guess this is the nature of this event, so I'm happy to have
had at least a chance to present to you some work. Thanks for listening.
*Applause*
Herald: So, thank you all for a very interesting talk, despite of the
difficulties. If you have any questions, then there are four microphones, here in
the center aisle and two on the side. And you can line up and ask your questions,
and first question microphone number one. Microphone 1: How much has any official
state tried to shut down your investigations, or...
Eyal: Well, this is... shutdown is a complicated term. First of all,
we face interruptions initially in not being allowed access to sites. And this is
very much the question in the West Bank and Gaza. Our investigators, when they
land in Tel Aviv Airport, sometimes are interrogated, sometimes they're turned around.
Nothing of that is comparable to what the Israeli state would have done if these
were Palestinians trying to do the same thing, so to a certain extent me being an
Israeli Jew, I'm privileged by the state. And the attempt is to use those privileges
to undo those privileges to a certain extent. We continuously had interruptions
from the FBI, for example, when we did the white phosphorus research, that included
work on their attacking Fallujah, Iraq, with white phosphorus. We had some of our
collaborators in the US's home being raided. We have, you know,
been trolled and threatened. But, it's kind of a continuous sort of
dance of us being to, kind of protect our staff, protect our data, and attempt to
penetrate it. Attempts to smear us on a public domain, and feel very little
victories sometimes.
Herald: Microphone 4.
4: Thank you very much for your talk. Two part question here, the first one is about
the framework. Have you developed it special for this case, do you have it
available, if you build new ones for each research, and the second part is: How
do you sustain yourself financially. Eyal: Actually, it's the same question,
because our aim is to develop new evidentiary techniques, so we kind of
never do the same investigation twice or we never use the same methodologies twice.
What we do, after we develop any software, is that we put it on the public domain, we
put it as an open source code. And we, or if it is kind of techniques of more
architectural or editing image based techniques, we have academies, we teach
activists how to do it, so we try, whenever we work with partners on the ground, to
leave capacity behind us. And that is also the reason... or what enables this to us is
that we are sustained on research grants, rather than only on commissions.
Although, you know, I mean, if a prosecutor, human right group, or any other
civil society group would like to commission us, we would... they would pay
for part of the investigation, but the large part of it is actually research
grants that translated into open source stuff, and the investigations are being
put in the public domain. It's kind of, when you look at our videos, they're a little
bit like cooking programs, because they both tell you what we find, and they tell
you exactly how to do it. It's kind of, take you step-by-step, this is what you do
here, then that, then this, etc.
Herald: Microphone 4
4: Thank you so much for your work on this. My question is like, how would any
of us be able to get involved in this, support you in one way or another.
Eyal: We, in fact, we are now about 15 architects, coders, and filmmakers and we
are recruiting because we're growing. I will stay here for the day, so anyone that
wants to come and work with us in London or remotely, I'll be delighted to speak to
you. Herald: Microphone 4
4: I have a question about which tools, which techniques and tools do you use to
perform the 3D reconstruction, and if you have partnered with any kind of company
that already has *inaudible* and already does *inaudible* 3D *inaudible* as a
baseline. Eyal: We started doing now
photogrammetry, as 3D reconstruction from existing open source images. So
imagine, you know, a place in Syria, let's say, that has been photographed or video-ed
by many users. We are able to reconstruct it. In fact this is one of
the techniques we use in order to identify the gas attack on Khan Sheikhun in
Syria by the regime forces. Reconstructing precisely, to the millimeter, the shape of
the crater. And we were able to reconstruct from it the level of explosives etc, and
that they were fitting only that particular rocket. We don't really work
together with companies, we try to take existing softwares and kind of
adjust them to our aim. But initially, what I want to leave you with, is
the question of why architecture is really
important here. In a situation when you don't have only like two images of the
scene, let's say police brutality or an attack on a city etc, but you have 70,000
and you need to cross-reference them and you need to place them within a space, the
only way to do it is in architectural models. Architecture is like the optical
device that allows us to sync up and locate, you know, those cameras that are
in space and moving in space. So, it is really the necessity of work
of architects, filmmakers, and coders is fundamental, because space replaces the
kind of modernist montage as a relation to images. Montage is the edits in film, that
is kind of, you know, the basic of cinema, of political cinema, the dialectic montage,
if you like. You splice film and put it together.
That makes no sense for us, because we need to move within space, pick up one
film, not to cut it, we never cut the films that we have, we just leave them
within the model in the full duration, but the investigator can move and navigate in
space and time between them, and as I showed you in a Mexico case, you know,
these are like tens and tens of thousands of data points that create kind of
intersections, between data image and architecture, where the story starts
to unfold at all. So yeah. Herald: More questions. Microphone 3.
3: When you publish the videos and the time and place from which they were taken,
how do you ensure that you're not putting in danger the people who took the video.
Eyal: Yeah, this is a really good question. We..., the work to sync up those
70,000 images from Gaza, where... took us a year. Think about it, a year... we're
working a year on one day. That's about the right kind of ratio in forensic time that
we are operating within it. What protects people during war, during when
they will do it, we'll never place their location, but months after the conflict it
was deemed by our partners in Palestine and by our partners in Amnesty, that this
is safe to do without going back to each source and in fact asking them. We would
never do it in real time, though. Herald: Microphone 4
4: Yes, the work you do strikes me as very similar to what bellingcat do, so can you
comment on how forensic architecture compares to bellingcat?
Eyal: No, we work a lot with bellingcat and Elliot, I mean some some of our
projects are together, I guess that our... the difference is not, we engage
more in sort of big environment and kind of like data analysis, from many sort of
data points, where architecture, or architectural models, are kind of the arena
that holds and cross-reference all those images together. The overlap in our work,
really, is a kind of image identification: What do we see, where the image is located
etc, and on these issues we work with them together. We tend to work more against
states', western states', militaries, holding them to account, we feel, is that these
techniques are actually much more useful directed at the British, American, Israeli
militaries and that we are able also to draw responses that are effective in these
fields and I guess bellingcat has slightly different sort of field in which
they work. Herald: Okay, I think with that, that
would be our last question. So again, a big round of applause to Eyal for a great
talk. Eyal: Thank you.
Herald: Thank you very much.
*Applause*
*34c3 outro*
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