Geo-location and human rights

“…future monitoring efforts should make sure that precise locations are recorded first time. So, here are two questions for our five or so readers: what’s working well on this issue in the real world; and, what’s the most practical way to manage information about electoral boundaries?”

Some thoughts of the cuff, as one avid reader of Paul Currion’s blog and to a post that poses the question above.

• It’s not always possible, in fact rarely so that even today HR activists can get precise coordinates of a violation or incident. The accuracy of geo-location depends on anything from media reports to first or second hand accounts by witnesses to the violation.

• Place names are a problem for any system that records geo-location in English alone. In Sri Lanka, while most major cities and town have standard and well recognised names in English, the smaller villages as well as IDP and refugee camps have no standard spelling in English. This raises the real challenge of multiple records dealing with the same incident, persons or place. (The HR system we developed for Sri Lanka works in the swabhasha and we are working on building semantic intelligence further into the system wherein it will flag records that it feels are duplicates).

• Even with just place names, it’s possible to do visualisations that demonstrate patterns of HR violations amongst certain identity groups, in certain regions and in response to certain events or processes. These patterns, based on rough yet verified incidents, can prove very powerful instruments through which awareness and civil actions can be engendered and sustained to strengthen and proctect HR.

• Current crop of GIS location devices are too conspicuous. They can’t be hidden easily and HR activists lugging them around in war zones is simply a non-starter.

• Not always necessary to have precise place names. It’s a given that there have been more HR violations in cities in the embattled North and East of Sri Lanka than, say, for any city in the South over the 25 years of conflict. You may need precise geo-location if you have more than circumstantial evidence to take a specific perpertrator to court locally or internationally, but for most purposes of HR advocacy, awareness raising and protection, just having information of HR violations over time at a provincial level is better than none at all.

• Most of the really accurate geo-spatial datasets reside with government. If the government itself is a significant violator of HR, as is the case in Sri Lanka today, that pretty much means that these datasets are inaccessible for NGOs and civil society organisations working on HR protection. This means that they have to rely on what may be less acurrate publicly available datasets. With most donors unaware of the vital importance of supporting information services to back-stop HR advocacy, many NGOs can’t afford the significant costs associated with the licensing of commercially available GIS datasets. And with all sorts of varying ways of identifying the same or similar locations – from P-Codes to Post Codes, from old names to new names, from merged Provinces to de-merged Provinces and the entire relocation of towns and cities – what you really need are multiple layers (translucency) on all maps that indicate location data.

• Again, place means different things at different times and in difference instances. For some cases, just knowing that an incident happened in whatever place suffices. In other cases, it is of vital important to know the exact location of the place where the incident occured.

• Finally, as an aside, for myself and others engaged in HR strengthening through the use of technology, these are not just academic questions – they deal with real lives and a bloody reality. Some of our programmers, unused to the gruesome descriptions of a few real records they entered at the initial testing stages of our HR advocacy platform, had to take breaks from work to deal with their feelings. Our system was conceptualised, development and deployed to actively respond to a context where activists who use it are at high risk of losing their lives just for speaking out on HR abuses. We could have gone for the perfect solution or one that meaningfully helped them do their work and responded to urgent and vital needs in a manner robust enough to hold flagrant violators or HR accountable for their actions. Our choice was clear.

Gagging soldiers – The continuing censorship of the US military

He told me that they have a house now and that he set up the Internet. Do you blog, I asked? No, he said. Do they censor what you write? Yes. They didn’t used to but then some guy ruined it. They read everything, and if you have the word “bomb” in a post or an email, they’ll make a copy of it and if you so much as say the word bomb on the phone, they’ll cut the line.

From a post on unpegged comes a quote that goes to show the extent to which the US military is still clamping down on the information produced and coming out of war zones such as Iraq.

As I noted in a post when this was reported in Wired magazine last year:

Aside from the excellent critique on Wired, this latest move quite clearly ridicules the SSTR initiatives fomented by the Dept. of Defense Directive 3000.05, and is an absurd reaction by those who quite clearly do not understand that information invariably finds ways to break free of regressive frameworks that seek to contain it.

Casualties of War – Visualising the dead in Iraq

The New York Times features an interactive info-graphic that is a sombre reminder of the human cost to the US Armed Forces in Iraq. From J.T. Aubin in 2003 to David Stelmat a few days ago, the first tab of the special section is devoted to all in the Army who have died in Iraq, that is now a shade under 4,000.

The second tab is an interactive timeline of the deaths. The two invasions of Falluja alone, we learn, cost over 400 deaths. Over half of those dead are between 18-24 and the majority from the US Army.

This powerful visualisation is a visceral reminder that wars today, fought and reported about like computer games most of the time, is still a costly, brutal affair – sometimes necessary perhaps, but always bloody. I wonder though how many people will change, or at the very least, register a slight shift in their opinion of the war in Iraq by looking at this. Compelling it may be, but I somehow feel that those in support of the war will look at it and use it to suggest that all these deaths should not be in vain, whereas those opposed to the war will look this as grim markers of of a war that has done little or nothing to help their government’s soi-disant war on terror.

What the NY Times significantly does not show are the numbers of private security contractors and mercenaries killed in Iraq. As noted in this article written a little over a year ago:

The dangers faced by contractors working in Iraq were laid bare last night by new figures showing hundreds of civilians employed by the Pentagon alone have been killed in the country since 2003. In a graphic exposé of a hitherto invisible cost of the war in Iraq, it emerged nearly 800 civilians working under contract to US defence chiefs have been killed and more than 3,300 hurt doing jobs normally handled by the military.

The casualty figures, gathered by the Associated Press, make it clear the US Defence Department’s count of more than 3,100 military dead does not tell the whole story. 

In Sri Lanka it’s clearly a different story. As Iqbal Athas notes:

“If you add up all the figures given by the government from the beginning of the separatist war until now, it would have wiped out the population of the north twice over,” says Iqbal Athas, consultant editor and defence correspondent of the Colombo Sunday Times and correspondent for Jane’s Defence Weekly.

“Similarly if one were to adopt the figures put out by the Tamil Tiger rebels, that would have depleted the ranks of the military considerably.”

Picture that.