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.

Mona Younis directs the Science and Human Rights Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which recently convened a panel of scientists and advocates to highlight successful collaborations that stemmed rights abuses in the D.C. prison system, recruited forensic experts to exhume mass graves in Bosnia, and focused international attention of vulnerable villages in Darfur. Her program just launched a matching service that will pair more researchers and advocates around the world. In her vision for the future, scientists will work with advocates with the same frequency—and with the same impact—as lawyers do today.

The text of this interview has been edited and condensed. For the full conversation, check out the audio available in the sidebar.

Rick Weiss, Science Progress: When people think of human rights, they think of wars, dictators and suffering, and when they think of science and technology they think of laboratories and computers—maybe nerds. To the extent that there’s any overlap at all, I can imagine people think maybe only about negative things like the wiring of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the science of torture. What are the positive connections between science and human rights that your group is trying to foster?

Mona Younis: Well, there are many. Scientists have a history of being very concerned about freedoms of all kinds: freedom to practice science, freedom of expression, freedom of scientific inquiry. And they’ve also had a history of being very actively involved in defending the human rights of individual scientists who’ve been oppressed or under threat around the world. So there’s been a natural affinity between scientists and human rights, but what’s interesting is that increasingly, we’re finding scientists are open to considering additional ways in which they can be engaged in human rights. And that’s what the Science and Human Rights Program at AAAS is about: exploring those openings and interests, and figuring out what else can they do. We are discovering a number of different things.

Weiss: So there are specific science technologies or techniques that can be brought to bear? I think that many people are aware of the fact that in the situations involving genocide or mass graves, conventional forensic medicine can help identify bodies and how they were killed. Does it go beyond that? Do we get into fancier science—genetics or other fields?

Mona: Oh yes—that and much more. In fact, the Science and Human Rights program pioneered in the 1980s the application of forensic and genetic sciences to the exhumation of mass graves in Argentina. In the 1990s the program addressed a large-scale violation of human rights via statistical information management techniques. That was the first time that had been done and the program staffer at the time gave evidence at international tribunal in the former Yugoslavia in the case against Milošević.

Weiss: So this was a matter of having to develop new computer technology just to organize all the information from these bodies?

Younis: It wasn’t so much the technology, but it was organizing the information—how to collect and organize and capture the patterns and predictions of activity. That was unique.

Weiss: Because patterns of abuse are crucial to a conviction of genocide?

Younis: Absolutely, because it’s hard to capture intent. You’re not easily going to get the papers and documents giving the orders. If you are able to identify the pattern, and compare the evidence, then it’s possible.

Weiss: It’s great to see science in the service of bringing perpetrators to justice. It would be great if it could get further upstream. Are there ways science can be brought to bear with the idea of preventing human rights abuses?

Younis: We certainly hope so. In fact we say is, “Imagine what scientists have been able to accomplish with better documenting and reporting of violations.” The Science and Human Rights Program has been engaged in developing geospatial technology applications for human rights. We’ve done work in Darfur and Burma and Zimbabwe. We say “imagine”—and in this case it was a geographer who brought this technology and this tool to human rights—so imagine if scientists in every discipline considered what they might be able to contribute, what tools and expertise might be brought to bear to human rights challenges. Who knows what might be possible in terms of prevention and early warning?

Weiss: How could satellite imagery give an early warning of a problem as opposed to identifying something afterwards, like seeing evidence of mass graves?

Younis: The program worked last year with Amnesty International USA on Darfur and produced the Eyes on Darfur website, which was remarkable. It’s tracking the situation through images of 12 villages in Darfur—the idea is that we have “eyes in the sky,” and it is a signal to the potential perpetrators of further human rights violations that we are watching these 12 villages. We are keeping an eye on what is happening there, and so far, thank goodness, they have been fine. We would like to hope that it was helpful in prevention.

Weiss: Scientists wouldn’t necessarily bump into human rights activists at their usual dinner parties and find out that they have something to share with each other. How can we help people in need find people with the skills that can help human rights work?

Younis: Scientists have so much to contribute to human rights groups, and human rights groups have such a need for science and scientific expertise. The problem is how do they meet? To address that we recently launched a new project we’re calling On-Call Scientists. It’s a project aimed at cultivating the tradition of pro bono science and pro bono scientists, just as are is pro bono lawyers and lawyering for human rights groups. We’re determined to set up the same thing, establish the same tradition of science and scientific expertise for human rights organizations.

This is an online system where scientists can go to volunteer to be available to provide their time and expertise and answer questions in the service of human rights organizations or UN field offices that are engaged in human rights work and national human rights institutions. Similarly, we have a database that receives requests from these organizations for scientific expertise. As these fill up we have a committee that will work on the optimal partnerships between them. We are very excited because we just launched this in October, and we already have over 90 scientists who have signed up to volunteer.

Weiss: This is the ultimate online dating service.

Younis: Exactly. What could be better?

Weiss: How did you get into the business of science of human rights? Are you a scientist or a human rights advocate, or have you become both?

Younis: My training is as a sociologist, and I feel that my turning to sociology has something to do with human rights—in the sense that sociologists want to figure out how to fix things. And what’s better to fix than the situation of the human condition?

My first encounter with human rights was in the 70s, working on the Palestine human rights campaign. From then on my passion for human rights grew, and I was very fortunate to find an opportunity where I could combine my scientific training as a sociologist with my passion for human rights.

Weiss: I can see how the science of sociology might reasonably blend with the human rights issues. Have you found some cultural gaps that you’ve had to bridge? How do scientists generally get along as they try to get into the human rights business?

Younis: Well, there are, of course, issues on both sides. One of the things we are working on is looking at the language: developing translation documents for what scientists need to know about human rights, and what human rights practitioners need to know about scientists. There are, of course, issues there. But they’re not anything that can’t be overcome.

In fact working with one another enriches both communities. For some sciences it seems inconceivable that they can contribute to human rights, but then you discover that it is actually possible.

Last year we were contacted by a human rights organization that was working to set up a small human rights group in southern Sudan. They wanted to look at water contamination that they suspected was the result of oil drilling. So we worked to try to find a hydrologist to work with them.

It was fascinating because as I was reaching out to find hydrologists, and one responded with curiosity at first. After several communications, he emailed back and said, “You know what? I feel that water should be a human right.” And I was delighted to respond with several URLs—places where he could learn that water is indeed a human right.

Weiss: A newly radicalized hydrologist.

Younis: And he will not look at human rights in the same way ever again.

Weiss: Scientists are so used to sticking to the evidence, they sort of pride themselves sometimes on not adding interpretation. I can imagine it can be difficult for some of them to make the leap into advocacy. It sounds like from the experience with this hydrologist, something sometimes clicks.

Younis: Yes, you’re right. And there are different comfort levels, and we have to be patient. At the Science and Human Rights Program projects that apply science and technology to human rights problems, those projects are not involved in human rights advocacy directly. We are focused very much on the science piece. But we realize that with human rights work, it’s not gonna happen on its own. You cannot just do the science piece and expect it on it’s own to advance into human rights advances, so all those projects are conducted in partnerships with human rights groups. They do the advocacy directly.

But we are also creating other opportunities where scientists can become advocates for human rights. Since we are celebrating the 60^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there is an article—few people know this—number 27, devoted to the human right to the enjoyment of the advancement of science and scientific progress. That is something that scientists very naturally want to advocate for, or do now indirectly, but once they learn that it’s a human right, we hope that they become human rights advocates.

Weiss: I think there are few scientists out there who know that the work they are doing is actually embodied or described as a human right in a universal declaration created 60 years ago. Let’s just talk for just a minute about how to put some of these things into action in terms of public policy. I imagine at this point in our nation’s history, the U.S. government is not seen around the world as the savior of human rights. There’s been a lot of discussion about that in the course of the last administration. Is there though a role for the federal government, as we have a new administration coming in?

Younis: We certainly hope so. As human rights advocates, our role is to make sure that the governments including—or I should say especially—our own, given we are U.S. citizens, meet their human rights obligations. Our government has obligations to respect, protect and fulfill these various human rights. That is their goal; that is what they should be doing. The question is not, “Is there a role to play?”—it’s their responsibility. So in that sense there is a role for them to play.

Weiss: This year and this week is the 60^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. No better time to reaffirm our commitment to those rights as a nation. You’ve got an interesting conference coming up on this don’t you?

Younis: On January 14 through the 16, we are launching the AAAS Science and Human Rights Collation. This is a network of scientific associations, societies, and science academies that believe that scientists and science are vital to the realization of human rights. Over 20 associations have been working together over the past year to lay the foundations for this collation. We are looking forward to January for launching it publicly. We’re very honored to have Mary Robinson, the former UN high commissioner for human rights and the former president of Ireland, one of the plenary speakers. Her joining us attests to the importance of the human rights community is placing on the engagement of as many segments as possible in the realization of human rights. It’s very clear that they are welcoming this initiative by scientists.

Edited from the full-length audio interview by Andrew Plemmons Pratt and transcribed by Tristan Fowler.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

2008 marks a year-long celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Rick Weiss wrote Monday about scientific work in genetics, forensics, and satellite imaging that has helped nongovernmental organizations combat genocide and human rights abuses and bring war criminals to justice. This week also brings news from the tech sphere about an initiative to ensure the human rights to freedom of expression and privacy.

The “big three” Internet companies, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google, have come together in a group called the “Global Network Initiative,” which has outlined a framework for doing business in countries that restrict the free speech and impinge the privacy of their citizens. You can get coverage at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Mashable asks if business practices will vary from country to country and TechCrunch has info on other possible European signatories.

While it’s great that these companies are thinking hard about human rights issues and synchronizing their guidelines, some advocates argue that the corporations could go further. For instance, the WSJ reports that the director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA said that “More serious questions have to be asked about these company’s legal obligations.” One of the groups that worked to broker the principles and is a member of the coalition, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, also expressed concerns on its blog about missing guidelines on information handling.

But it is also worth pointing out that the tools made available by Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo have greatly expanded the ability of advocacy groups and individual citizens–in countries with repressive regimes and in countries with expansive freedoms–to fight for human rights, circulate coverage of abuses, and share information. As a recent Information Technology and Innovation Foundation report notes:

Blogs, e-mail, and search engines have allowed people all over the world to communicate and shine light on inappropriate action from unrepresentative governments. The recent protests over the repressive ruling junta in Burma were far less violent than in 1988, and one of the reasons suggested is that, unlike the 1988 protests, the more recent demonstrations were all over the Internet and people across the globe could watch how the military treated protestors. In the information age, repressive governments are finding it harder and harder to hide behind national boundaries.

While technology corporations certainly have a role to play in ensuring freedom of expression wherever they do business, the federal government should take a leading role in standing up to human rights abuses. Admittedly, that’s easy to forget given the dismal record of the Bush administration on human rights. But one possibility is for the next administration to incorporate enforceable free expression guarantees into trade agreements–something that can also work for labor rights. (It also wouldn’t hurt to lead by example and review some of the flaws with our own country’s domestic surveillance policies.)

But as Weiss also points out, “because research relating to human rights violations does not fit cleanly into the primary funding silos through which federal grant money flows, there is no obvious source of support for scientific studies of human rights issues.” Supporting research that considers rights in the digital realm in a wider funding framework is another positive opportunity, particularly because freedom of expression is one of the first lines of defense against graver human rights abuses.

Weiss’s Notebook

CAP Senior Fellow Rick Weiss covered science and medicine for The Washington Post for 15 years, and now he brings his investigative eye to science policy. From cloning and stem cells to agricultural biotechnology and nanotechnology, Weiss examines the issues at the intersection of cutting edge research and public policy.

In the political turmoil that devastated Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, tens of thousands of adults were abducted and killed by paramilitary forces, and many of their children were “adopted” by wealthy adults affiliated with the government or the military. The task of reuniting these young victims with what remained of their families seemed impossible in the decades that followed. Impossible, that is, until scientists joined with human rights activists and developed sophisticated genetic tests that could link the youngsters with their surviving grandparents.

In a similar collaboration, experts with Physicians for Human Rights helped unearth hundreds of bodies from mass graves in the Srebrenica region of Bosnia and used their skills in pathology, radiology, and forensic anthropology and archaeology to document war crimes that had been committed there in 1995. The work built on the group’s earlier efforts in Croatia, where it collected scientific evidence that led the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to indict Yugoslav Army officers for the mass killing of hundreds of hospital patients.

And in Darfur, where raping and pillaging janjaweed gunmen have repeatedly overrun villages, activists at Amnesty International last year arranged to have commercial satellites focus on a dozen villages deemed at high risk of attack. The organization invited people around the globe to keep an eye on the targeted areas, and informed Sudan’s president that the world would be watching for human rights abuses. Today those villages remain intact, perhaps the first ever to be protected by global, technology-enabled citizen policing.

These are among a growing number of cases in which technologies developed for routine scientific and medical uses are finding unexpected application in the shrouded world of genocide, torture, and political oppression. In addition to fostering the rule of law around the globe, the collaborative programs are reenergizing experts from both specialties—giving human rights activists the objective tools they’ve long needed to strengthen their cases against those who violate international law, and at the same time rewarding scientists and doctors with the knowledge that their skills are being used for a greater good.

“We can make it harder for people to get away with these crimes,” said Ariela Blätter of Amnesty International USA’s Center for Crisis Preparedness and Response.

Human rights work is inherently political, and scientists often chafe when it comes to adding layers of political interpretation to their basic objective findings.

Blätter was one of a half-dozen experts in science, medicine and human rights who told their stories at an event last week sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Washington-based general science organization has a Science and Human Rights Program that has long sought to foster synergy between the two fields. Last week it launched the latest of those efforts: an “on-call scientists” database to facilitate the matching of appropriately skilled scientists with human rights organizations that could use their help.

Sometimes all that is needed of scientists is a means of showing the world what has happened—through land- or satellite-based photographic images, for example. In a growing number of cases, commercial satellite images are not only providing important legal evidence but, equally important, they are evoking pangs of compassion from a world that at times seems all too willing to ignore rights abuses.

In one case, a simple pair of before-and-after pictures taken in Zimbabwe resulted in a huge outpouring of outrage and calls for justice, Blätter said. In the first picture, a village is intact. In the second, 850 homes have been destroyed in an apparent act of political punishment by an oppressive regime—an act that left thousands of residents homeless and violated international law.

“It’s the ‘seeing is believing’ concept on steroids,” Blätter said.

Scientists and human rights workers are products of very different kinds of training, and the gradual integration of the two communities—a delicate pas de deux that AAAS geographer Lars Bromley called “flirting, dating, and then marriage,” —has not been easy. For one thing, human rights work is inherently political, and scientists often chafe when it comes to adding layers of political interpretation to their basic objective findings.

Yet many are warming to the idea that they can have a role in advocacy. Chris Beyrer, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said he has been working with the DC Prisoners’ Project to assure that prisoners’ healthcare rights are not violated while they are incarcerated—a commitment that he said has added a lot to the satisfaction he gets from his work.

Unfortunately, as a matter of public policy, there are few mechanisms in place to foster such collaboration between scientists and human rights workers, and there are a fair number of obstacles that need to be lowered, especially in the arena of federal rules and procedures. Indeed, given the current administration’s legacy with regard to secret extraditions, abridged rights of accused terrorists, and the rewriting of rules relating to torture, most human rights organizations at this point consider the U.S. government a less-than-welcome partner. But that does not mean there is no role for federal dollars or federal policy-making bodies in the fight for human rights at home and around the world.

Beyrer recounted the hassles he faced when he sought to initiate a study in which DC prisoners’ attorneys were to be recruited, without the jail’s knowledge, to gather information about how their clients’ healthcare needs were being met. Since the study would involve human beings, it had to pass muster with the Johns Hopkins institutional review board, which is charged with the protection of human subjects in research. Thinking conventionally, the board wanted evidence that the prison had signed off on the project.

It took some “educating” to convince the board that secrecy was the whole point, Beyrer said. In other human rights cases, IRB’s have had to adjust to the idea that anonymity is sometimes crucial to getting at the truth. As a matter of policy, it may be that the rules that typically govern federally funded research will need to be reinterpreted to more easily accommodate this important class of work.

Similarly, when U.S. government investigators do show up at scenes of suspected human rights abuses abroad—in many cases, it’s the military that arrives—they often dominate the crime scene and compete, rather than cooperate, with nongovernmental human rights groups that also are there, panelists said. And while the quality of the government’s science may be good, the military’s approach to such investigations tends undervalue the emotional context of the crimes being investigated, including the importance of helping families gain possession of their loved ones’ remains for proper burial, said Susannah Sirkin, deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights, adding that a little training in this regard could buy the government a lot of good will.

Finally, because research relating to human rights violations does not fit cleanly into the primary funding silos through which federal grant money flows, there is no obvious source of support for scientific studies of human rights issues. There is no institute within the National Institutes of Health that explicitly focuses on the topic, nor is there a branch of the National Science Foundation that is a natural fit with human rights concerns.

IRB policies, on-site investigator behaviors, and funding channel scopes are not written in federal stone. It would be a powerful first step down the road of global justice if, as the next administration’s new agency heads parse their 2009 policies and budgets, a few of these procedural wrongs could be righted.

Rick Weiss is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Science Progress.

This change hasn’t happened, but that raises questions of what else the West can do to promote human rights in this totalitarian country, and whether the West should facilitate freer electronic communication in such contexts.

In September, 2007, when the monks in Myanmar protested in the streets, the government cracked down, stripping, beating, and arresting them. Protesters filmed the violence with cell phones and emailed the images across the world—until the junta shut down Internet servers, all of which it owns and tightly controls. When cyclone Nargis devastated large parts of the country in May 2008, the junta impeded delivery of relief aid to victims and detained activists for distributing aid to needy villages.

The West can also help by considering ways to facilitate electronic freedom.

The U.S. government voiced protest and sent to the region four ships laden with relief, along with aircraft for delivering it. The junta has allowed a small amount of the aid that is needed to enter into some regions, but refused to grant permission for the ships to land, or for necessary supplies to reach the hardest-hit areas. Though activists urged the United States to deliver the supplies anyway, airdropping them if necessary, on June 5 the United States capitulated and withdrew the ships.

Yet in an increasingly global community, we will increasingly face moral dilemmas of whether and when to intervene in humanitarian ways. The Internet is creating global communities. But global communities mean global responsibilities. As reformers in a country communicate with the outside world, sending vivid images directly in “real time,” and seek to establish close bonds with us, how should we respond? When, if ever, do we have any responsibilities to them, and if so, what are they?

Many observers around the world have predicted that the Internet would readily lead to democratization and peace. Yet despite the Web’s spread, free speech is still limited or threatened in most countries in the world. Fierce battles for freedom rage from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

A critic can argue that we must respect first and foremost the sovereignty of a regime over the emails of its citizens. But what if the legitimacy of that government is questionable? As walls between nations shrink, we need to consider how best to help reformers in a repressive country. We must consider what rights they have, and what rights we have to intervene. As the world becomes more global, in many ways we are entering a new Internet-driven era of “post-nationalism.”

The full implications of this development are not wholly clear, but in the case of Myanmar, we can do several things.

The West can first supply and deliver more humanitarian aid, and second can apply further political pressure. India, China, and Thailand all still support the junta, and Chevron is involved in building an oil pipeline, supplying the regime with about $1 billion last year alone. Congress is considering ending tax breaks for Chevron as a result, but could apply more pressure.

But importantly, the West can also help by considering ways to facilitate electronic freedom. For example, in October, Burmese protesters asked U.S. and U.K. embassies and the United Nations to make free wireless Internet access available. It didn’t happen. But in countries where regimes control Internet use, questions arise of whether the West should ever make Wi-Fi freely available, and if so, when. Just as the Voice of America reached millions in totalitarian countries, should we not develop the Web of America?

The junta also uses California-made censorship software to limit the availability of websites to the Burmese. The West could consider scrutinizing the sale of such censorship tools to repressive regimes, perhaps as it monitors sales of armaments.

Relatedly, the United States needs to protect and promote human rights more vigilantly and consistently. More reformers will need to feel that they will be supported. Their dreams will only be dampened by the United States disrespecting human rights and overlooking human rights violations in Iraq and elsewhere.

Three years ago, I wondered what the monks beside me were writing. I didn’t know, but sensed hope. The media seemed the message.

Unfortunately, it is not enough. Over the past few months, the tragedies in Myanmar have saddened me all the more. These men were reaching out to new worlds that I wish don’t now let them down.

I could not see their words—only their fingers flying rapidly over the keys. But I will never forget their intense and hopeful gazes. The screens before them revealed both distorted reflections of the small dark room around us, and the great World Wide Web beyond.

Robert Klitzman is an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and the Director of the Ethics and Policy Core of the HIV Center at Columbia University.

So, renewable energy advocates and environmentalists should support the rapid expansion of this industry, right?

Well, not exactly and certainly not unconditionally. The key thing to realize is that land is finite and there are competing demands for its use. In many cases, using land for energy means not using it for other human needs. Nowhere is this clearer than in the history of the Brazilian sugar cane industry.

Sugar has long served as an important cash crop for the Brazilian economy. In the 1960s and 1970s, many sugar cane plantations consolidated and expanded their operations—often using foreign capital—with the result that poor workers were pushed off lands they had used to supplement their food intake. As described in devastating detail by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and others, losing these small plots led to famine, poverty, sickness, and in many cases, death.

This story is not particular to Brazil. Throughout the world, particularly in areas colonized by European powers, there has long been a tension between using land to grow food for locals versus using land to grow cash crops for foreigners. Sadly, cash crops have won this battle more often than the needs of locals. In many areas, this has created slow starvation, cyclical poverty, and environmental degradation.

We must not repeat this history. If Brazilian ethanol—or any other bio-fuel—is to be part of our energy solution, we must ensure that it does not come at the expense of the world’s rural poor. President Bush visited Brazil this past March to discuss an ethanol agreement with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Any trade agreement emerging from these discussions should require limits to the overall land use of the Brazilian ethanol industry, ensuring that sufficient land remains for the rest of Brazil’s population.

Solving global fossil fuel dependence is a tricky issue that will require some hard choices to be made. However, outsourcing these costs onto the world’s poor is not the answer. We should only support bio-fuels as part of the solution if human rights are protected.

This post by Chris Jones originally appeared on Smarter Energy.