 exciting open source information at the ICC and that stands for the International Criminal Court and we have somebody who is familiar with that who knows about open source information and information plays a role in the investigation of war crimes and atrocities. This is really important and it's really new and it's really something at the cutting edge especially now in Ukraine. And I give you Sylvia Autanetti in Oaxaca, Mexico. Hi Sylvia. Hello Jay, thank you for having me. Sure so Project Expedite Justice is into technology, information technology and investigation and all those things go together. So I want to know you know what kind of information technology can you use to investigate a war crime? This is really important. It takes us to a new level if you will. Yeah absolutely. Indeed the technology and accountability for international crimes as well as other types of crimes are going hand in hand more and more these days and an incredibly in super sensitive investigations have become an incredibly useful method of investigation. It is getting traction both among the NGOs and the prosecutors domestic and international. So open source investigation like the relevance of open source investigation is the potential that it represents for prosecutions of atrocity crimes. Prosecution of atrocity crimes are a very difficult endeavor and a myriad of issues have hindered the effective prosecution of perpetrators of atrocity crimes at the ICC. These are security threats to investigators lack of access to the territories often because state authorities refuse cooperation as well as intimidation of witnesses and all of this is worsened by the financial limitations that the court is faced with given such a broad geographical scope. So when you think about it like the court has a monumental task potentially universal jurisdiction and high threshold for conviction really makes its job very difficult. So like this is where open source information comes in right. It has created new opportunities to address these shortcomings of international criminal justice and while not being a novel concept because of the open source investigation open source information has long been used by courts including the ICC to range your reports. Now like the coming of the digital age and the huge amount of material that is constantly posted on the internet represents a new potential for the court is open source information is now turning increasingly into digital open source information. So in the past couple of years we've seen many actors that have started engaging with open source investigations to demonstrate the commission of human rights violations and this has produced a sort of democratization of justice where not only state enforcement state or international enforcement authorities participate in investigations but where any individual like provided that I have a laptop and an internet connections are connection are able to find this information. So yeah particularly in the context of Ukraine as you mentioned this is a field of growing relevance for the first time well also in Syria open source investigations play the big role but in Ukraine this role is growing to another level we've seen so many NGOs and other individuals in civil society engaging in these investigations. Some examples for instance are the use of satellite images that can be used to prove different crimes for instance in Mariupol a satellite image which shows like the Russian word for children on Britain on the sides of the theater can be used to prove that the perpetrators have knowledge of the presence of civilians which in the end mean that they violated the principle of distinction which is a very important principle of international humanitarian love and consequently consequently committed a war crime. Other examples are satellite images of butchers that can show that the Russian statements claiming that the bodies had appeared after the Russian retreated from the area were actually untrue and can help disprove these statements. These methods were in the context of Ukraine also pioneered by Bellingcat in the context of the MH17 investigations a couple of years back as well as also already like in 2014 in Crimea. Another just getting more and more traction and we've seen also a lot of Ukrainian organizations involved in these investigations including True Sounds for instance it's one of the main one in this field. Bellingcat was on 60 minutes two weeks a couple of months ago that was very interesting and Bellingcat does great work right? It defines this information turns it over makes it public open source and it can be used and it's worth supporting Bellingcat and organizations like that but are there others like that? Are there others like Bellingcat? Well there are a variety of organizations some bigger others smaller a lot of the advocacy focused organizations still engaged to an extent in open source investigations but obviously the standards that will be put in place when investigating for the purpose of prosecution are also different than those put in place for the purpose of advocacy of human rights advocacy. Other other projects and organizations are for instance C2 that employs satellite and social video to create a virtual reality and rebuild the reconstruction and those can be used to establish the commission of crimes and other organizations such as WITNESS or Videre Skredere specialized in equipping the communities in hard to access areas where the technology that is necessary technology and training necessary to produce video evidence effectively and while not an NGO the Human Rights Center of UC Berkeley has also been a great player in these developments have organized trainings and workshops with NGOs and professionals also including international criminal investigators and their most important contribution is certainly the well-known Berkeley protocol on digital open source investigation which was done in collaboration with the UN Human Rights Office and the protocol is actually like a great source for NGOs and private investigators as well as of course authorities that engage in these activities because it establishes guidelines that can be used when there's investigators to identify, collect, preserve, verify and analyze the information and these overall like these are essential steps in the investigation cycle that if performed correctly can guarantee that the evidence gathered can actually be used. Well that's a big that's a big issue you know open source at least theoretically can come from anywhere open source can come from sources that are questionable there is a lot of questionable information on open source but you know it's gratifying to hear that while Mr Putin uses technology to confuse and bamboozle people in Russia you know and and other autocrats do the same in this case open source is being used to prosecute them however if I'm a judge on the ICC I need to be satisfied that this information is authentic that it hasn't been manipulated that nobody has you know created it out of whole cloth I need to know that it's accurate I need to know that the people who have gathered it are responsible journalists and technology people who are not you know handing me handing me inaccurate information so how does that work in court this is evidence we're talking about evidence that could put people in jail or even have them executed and so the question is how how can we be satisfied that this open source information is legitimate yeah well of course Jay as you said the admissibility of open source evidence in the courtroom is one of the crucial issues that needs to be addressed to be admissible in the courtroom the evidence must be relevant to have probative probative value and its probative value must outweigh any prejudicial effect on the suspect it must not breach any rights of of the suspect and this means that it's an incredibly challenging task to the investigators especially considering that every minute more than 500 hours of content is uploaded on youtube and in insane amount of photos and videos are posted on instagram on facebook on tiktok on twitter and of course investigators are challenged to ensure the authenticity and the reliability of this evidence this is why verification is an essential step in in the open source investigation cycle and if I'm in court if I know let's let's make a you know a theoretical case study I'm in court and I'm prosecuting somebody and I have for example satellite information that I got from somebody maybe Bellingcat who knows what and I and I submit it to the judges in the ICC in the Hague what what kind of what kind of legal protocols have to take place before the judges are satisfied what kind of questions do they do they ask and what kind of answers does the prosecutor present that's actually a very good question and a question that also needs to be addressed at the ICC level because while there has been some use of open source information in ICC prosecutions it's still rather undeveloped and there are no like strict public guidelines on how this evidence is assessed on how the authenticity of this evidence is assessed so that's indeed something that the court needs to work on also the judges needs to need to be trained and the prosecutor is as well to also know how to like what the verification process of this evidence entails because otherwise they won't be able even to understand like whether the evidence was that taken from from a source that is independent in partial and also like understand also the the content the technical content of the piece of information such as the metadata included in in the picture or video so there are like a series of of steps of course that have been have been like elaborated particularly by the Berkeley protocol and efforts like on like how to verify this source this this piece of evidence and that includes both analysis of the source which needs to be independent in partial you want to understand like whether they're affiliated to any side of the conflict but also requires a technical analysis which as I was saying it includes some metadata analysis and source code and and then a content analysis where you assess the truthfulness of this content perhaps through geolocation chrono location and just as the overall consistency of this piece of evidence some yeah so that you know I think we need to deal deal with the issue of admissibility as it exists in Glasgow courts in the courts for example of the United States where there are certain rules that you know that apply before the evidence will be admitted and you know although judges and jurors are capable of examining circumstantial evidence there's sometimes you're lucky to do that and you know that's one of the things that Donald Trump takes advantage of you know he escapes many times because circumstantial evidence is not good enough to satisfy the trial effect however if you have data analysis tools and it's not only I'm gathering from what you're saying Sylvia is it's not only the open source data it's the data analysis that counts when you take the data analysis you can make some really powerful conclusions they may be circumstantial but in our world today a lot of a lot of proof is circumstantial and we have to trust the tools to give us reliable answers looking this is like AI right a artificial intelligence we have to trust those tools to give us you know reliable conclusions which are essentially circumstantial so if I'm a judge in the ICC and the Hague I have to be Akamai you know that word that's not that's not a Spanish or Italian word Akamai I have to be trained intelligent I have to I have to understand at a significant level of understanding what's going on I have to know about those tools I have to know what you are doing when you are gathering data open source I have to know what you are doing when you apply those tools to analyze the data and come to me with you know conclusions based on that analysis maybe AI analysis I have to be able to test your tools and your analysis if I am going to accept that evidence the circumstantial evidence that data analysis evidence as reliable so this takes the court the judges to a new level am I right yeah exactly compared well compared to the U.S. system the admissibility of evidence the visibility the rules of admissibility of evidence the international criminal court are a bit more lenient and way more like up to the judges the judgment but the civil law system right it's up to the judge to make a finding on the basis of everything the judge knows in the world and he's not locked into or she is not I say she because there's a lot of women judges in Europe maybe more than he was and you know that that person has to has the power in the civil law system in Europe which I think is largely adopted by the ICC to make a judgment based on what the judge knows and what the judge feels and all of the judges experience rather than finding chapter in verse right absolutely absolutely and and this is why training these judges is particularly essential and these are steps that have been taken by the ICC to an extent that has been cooperating with a number of organizations including the Berkeley Human Rights Center that I mentioned but as well as the the IED Vellingat that is part of their technology advisory board so there is indeed like a willingness of the court to also make use of specialized NGOs to better understand and better use the open source information a trial yet like full cooperation with NGOs is still rather problematic to some extent and because it might exacerbate some of the challenges that that open source investigations already pose to even even the prosecutor you know I imagine tell me if this is accurate or not I imagine that open source also includes somebody doing research on open source information that is newspapers articles journals of all kinds academic journals public journals from one end of the spectrum to the other and picking up information events names places data you know it it reminds me of the black box technique the US use after 9 11 which was only yesterday and not 9 11 showed us that we could do data analysis by looking for keywords in printed material and then we could examine how many times a given keyword popped up how many times it appeared next to or close by the name of another say suspected terrorist and and and made conclusions on that basis and by the same token you could have somebody anybody me you anybody from Project Expedite Justice did at a computer and do this kind of black box research and with the right software connect up this name and that name and make a case and make a case based on that of course that person has to be credible that person has to be you know informed and educated about how to do this but if that person came to me as a judge if I assuming for a moment I'm a judge at the ICC and said look I you know I did some data gathering from open source materials all over the world I checked this that and the other thing here's what I found and this is the software I used to connect up the keywords and this is the conclusion I drew and these are the algorithms by which I drew that conclusion I would be I would be impressed and I would treat that as reliable if the individual and his organization or her organization was reliable so you know in the case of Project Expedite Justice you know they could go anywhere do anything and they could do it in Oaxaca Mexico for example and learn a lot of things about a lot of people without even standing up and then they could analyze that data as open source open information okay and submit it to a prosecutor for him to submit it or her to submit it to a judge in the ICC. Is this happening? Should it happen? Is it valuable? Yeah this is happening this is very valuable and I think it should happen even more frequently provided that like some issues are addressed and as you said that anyone can do it but not anyone will know the investigative principles and standards that they're required to comply with in order to eventually they're like for their evidence to eventually end up in court so this is actually a huge problem amongst NGOs even because why some have developed all this knowledge others are still employing methods that are typical of advocacy and they won't it doesn't require to comply with the strict standards there are instead required for for prosecution very important as you were also saying is the transparency of the methods utilized if you are able to show how you reach a certain conclusion and the judges and the defense then everyone will be able to trace back your steps and understand your reasoning throughout it this means that the evidence will likely be easier to authenticate and will be deemed more reliable however like specific guidelines that on how to conduct open source investigations that for the ICC are largely lacking there are some guidance guidelines that the court has developed within the prosecutor's office but there is definitely a need to better standardize this framework and make it available to individuals that want to contribute to well eventually to international criminal justice what really strikes me is that we have right in front of our eyes you know on a daily basis we have war crimes and crimes against humanity going on in Ukraine you know the whole study of Buka is not yet done and we we have a lot of people in Ukraine doing research but we also have a lot of people outside Ukraine doing research and finding out who's responsible for what with the notion of bringing that before the ICC and other courts in the world as violations of human rights and so this is a this is a war that's different from all other wars in that sense we have not only project expedite justice but all kinds of other NGOs I'm doing that kind of research with a view to presenting it to tribunals that can hold people accountable for war crimes and I think the world will never be the same if you want to do war crimes you're going to run into these organizations and they will be able to get the goods on you and they will be able to take you to and so you know not only is it a discovery of sorts another chapter of sorts it's also a test because we have to see the ICC actually take this data take this evidence and go somewhere with it and actually hold these people accountable and that you know it may be a long road to do that but that that's the test and hopefully you know I can be we can be optimistic that will happen but here's one more step in it Julia and this is so interesting this is a reinvention of criminal investigation it's a reinvention of prosecution not only for war crime but for any crime that involves you know a social violation a violation of a larger law a morality an ethical crime and I think in the future this will be irresistible even in the United States you know where we have starved incisors and in the rule of precedent and all that and other countries in Europe you know UK comes to mind you know our our legal our legal founders are are in the UK and so I think there may be a time in the next two distant future when what you are doing what you are talking about may have an effect on the classical mode of criminal investigation criminal justice because you know it's it's hard to prosecute sometimes and and the criminal has the advantage in a in a demographic sense and get away with things um and people will say to me oh no Jay no no no we have to have our you know constitutional rights and all that and the and the question is whether you can put the constitutional rights together with open source investigation you think you can I think so yes for sure like there are there are issues that need to be safeguarded by NGOs they're conducting these investigations especially like the risk of constitutional rights are vertically prominent when NGOs are involved again because of the guidelines the lack of guidelines and lack of of knowledge as to the proper processes legal processes to to follow throughout their investigation well I think that provided that a framework had an effective comprehensive framework on how to conduct these investigations in compliance with with constitutional rights with the rights of the defense and all those that are involved is something that is possible and uh i'm potentially very beneficial through international criminal law as you said or law like a justice in general um well let me ask you about this you know language you know I I remember our earlier discussion where I was charmed to find out that you're Italian you speak Italian at the time you were living in Madrid so you had to learn Spanish you know let me let me say Spanish Spanish and now you're in Oaxaca and you're learning South American Spanish and that's not exactly the same not exactly the same as Spanish Spanish and it raises the question of um of language you know if I'm one of these researchers and I'm dealing with multiple open source sources um I need to be able to speak many languages I can't I can't just do English English is simply not enough when you're when you're trying to gather reliable sources from all over the planet uh how does that work how does that work in your observation of it um do you need to have three four five six languages to do this uh how do you get across the language barrier yeah absolutely it is uh it is something that needs to be taken into account and generally NGOs as well as the prosecutor will have stuff uh this multi-lingual um and especially it's especially essential of course to have stuff that is fluent in the language of the situation on there of the country within the situation under investigation uh but also um oftentimes the uh translation software can be of very much help at least for uh preliminary investigation online and a preliminary research uh I have uh used the google translator other translators to google um information in different languages and then with a click you can translate the whole page of course as you go on in the investigative process uh you need more a more a deeper understanding of the language which can definitely be um definitely be an issue but um multi-lingual stuff is definitely the answer to that yeah the other thing that flows out of that same line of thought is um you know you don't have to be in kiv um to do this investigation maybe you don't want to be in kiv to do this investigation although right now kiv seems to be in better shape than it was a couple months ago yeah certainly but um you know of course it's good to be on the ground but if you're looking for open source data coming from any source any language any you know any organization um you can am I right you can be anywhere you can be in hawaii you can be in haka um you can be anywhere you have broadband and you can get on the machine you can look at google and other research uh software you can you can use that uh you know the special analysis ai kind of uh software you just collected data in a responsible database and and then you analyze it with responsible analytics and before you know it you have some really valuable information that would be of interest to the judicial community so to speak uh so I'm wondering from your observation uh wahaka uh gee whiz uh a ball guitar uh anywhere right it could be anywhere in the world right anywhere with stable internet connection and certainly like the advantage in terms of security is uh it's notable um because of course like you um uh you will not put the the life of the investigators that's at least in the first process oftentimes the open source investigations do need to be complemented with investigation on the field but they provide a very good guidance and objective the information that can be gathered from from anywhere and be used to then corroborate other types of evidence that may be gathered on the field as well yeah well that suggests that one of the things uh in the future will be the the the corroboration in other words an organization that takes information that you have uh um you know accumulated that I have accumulated uh my analysis your analysis and and it doesn't other people to another level will a level where somebody can corroborate large conclusions um based on a higher level of analysis with a lot of source a lot of open source anyway that you know that's what comes to mind but I wonder my my last question to you Sylvia is uh where do you see this going where do you see it going in terms of acceptance unreliability where do you see it going in the organizations that participate the the uh the software the hardware uh the analytical software that you know it will be in play and the effect of it uh on international justice where is it going say in five years well I think the future is bright um a lot of organizations that and the domestic and international courts have shown a willingness to use this type of information um and also willingness to to adopt uh uh their frameworks to disemerge in type of information um so well it's certainly um the potential is is is huge um some safeguards that need to be respected and there is a need especially for the international criminal court even also like the attraction that these investigations are gaining in Ukraine there's a need to adopt their their system and that includes develop adopting its tools for receiving evidence and for the preservation of evidence and uh the presentation of evidence at trial which are now often fine tuned to record all the data that is perhaps needed to um to prove the authenticity of a piece of evidence as well as like more and more softwares are being developed by a variety of organizations including uh apps that allow you to um take pictures and videos in conflict areas or pictures and videos of abuses and um they will record all the necessary data that will be useful for prosecution one of these is eyewitness to atrocities um so certainly like there is an increasing willingness to rely on this and I think that as long as that keeps the gaining traction um open source investigation will be able um to not only corroborate but perhaps even prove more substantial elements of crimes in the future good for you Sylvia good for project expedite justice I'm not going to ask you really I'm not going to ask you exactly what you're doing because uh we've agreed that I wouldn't but let me say that whatever you're doing we appreciate all of us we appreciate you know the effort you're making everywhere in the world um and I I kind of wish I was younger so I could be you I want to be you Sylvia I want to do this uh you know if anybody has an interest in information technology and analysis of data what a wonderful career this would make anywhere it's exciting it is exciting very exciting Sylvia Artanetti with Project Expedite Justice in Oaxaca Mexico thank you so much for joining us today thank you very much today thank you so much for watching think tech hawaii if you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on youtube and the follow button on vimeo you can also follow us on facebook instagram twitter and linked in and donate to us at think tech hawaii dot com Mahalo