Preserving Digital Records to Protect Human Rights
Revisionist history is one of many threats to protecting human rights and punishing violators. To preserve interviews conducted with members of the International Criminal Tribunal, which recently convicted leaders responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide, computer researchers from the University of Washington devised a system that would secure the video files against possible tampering, NYT‘s John Markoff reports.
A digital hash, or cryptographic fingerprint, for each file verifies that each video remains unaltered, and the hashes persist in a low-tech format that ensures accessibility in the absence of high-tech equipment: simple text files. One of the researchers explains the importance of such a system:
“The closest analogy are the revisionist histories of the Holocaust, where there are assertions that people weren’t put in camps and put in ovens,” said Batya Friedman, a professor of computer science at the Information School at the University of Washington. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to say that in a period of time some people will say there really weren’t 800,000 people who were massacred with machetes.”
Public policy played a role in spurring the project: Markoff reports that last year, NIST sponsored a competition to encourage development of better hashing technologies.
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