Encryption helped break the silence over Guatemala’s “vanished” children.
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The
truth about Haiti
The revolution
in human rights work isn’t just about securing data, it’s also about uncovering and
analyzing the right information. A case in point is Haiti’s Truth Commission, which
has worked with Dr. Ball since 1995. After conducting about 5,500 interviews, the
commission documented more than 18,000 reported human rights abuses before analyzing
the data to determine the truth about what happened in Haiti under military rule,
specifically in 1993-94.
“When we took a list of all the people who were killed and made a graph of it, we
saw that political murders bunched up in a couple of different points in time,” says
Ball. When the team timelined the data against other events, they discovered a surge
in human rights abuses at the same time as a U.S. troop carrier entered the waters
around the island—a possible first step to military intervention.
“What was interesting is that a lot of apologists for the Haitian regime had argued
that this violence in the streets was just nationalist fever—that it was really the
fault of the U.S. by threatening to intervene. But over time, you see the same fights
all over the country implying a kind of co-ordination of those who were committing
the terror,” says Ball. “You also wouldn’t expect detention by state authorities
to increase at the same time as extortion by paramilitary organizations.”
The most logical conclusion, says Ball, was that Haitian paramilitary groups created
state-sanctioned terror in the streets to intimidate and dissuade Haitian society
from calling for U.S. intervention and the restoration of President Aristide.
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From
Guatemala to Kosovo, human rights groups have taken a page out of a spy thriller
by learning the art of encryption
A quiet revolution is
creeping through human rights groups around the world. Don’t expect to see noisy
marches through the streets of Guatemala or angry protests in Kosovo, though both
places are hotspots in the transformation. The revolution is running through electronic
ether and human grey matter.
Computer technology, and particularly cryptography software (which uses secret codes
to transform data into a stream of seemingly random characters), is subtly changing
the balance of power between repressive governments and the human rights groups that
watch them. From Cambodia to El Salvador, grassroots human rights organizations are
embracing software that allows them to track government abuses and then hide their
data in order to protect sources.
A driving force in this revolution is Dr. Patrick Ball, deputy director of the science
and human rights program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science
(AAAS). For the past nine years, Ball has been discreetly travelling in the wake
of wars and insurrections to train human rights workers in the science of information
gathering. He has shaped and protected databases in places such as El Salvador, Guatemala,
Haiti, Ethiopia, Albania, Kosovo and South Africa, among others.
Crucial
testimony under lock and key
When
Ball first began this training in the early 1990s, most human rights workers were
technophobes. Technology, used for so long as a tool of spying by repressive governments,
was clearly the enemy. Every project was tough work, as Ball tried to convince people
in the field to adopt increasingly cheap computer software as a means of deftly turning
the tables on governments. About three years ago however, the climate began to change.
“Human rights groups are beginning to recognize the tremendous analytic power large-scale
data brings to us and you simply cannot do that without technology,” says Ball. While
visiting groups in Cambodia who were learning to use this technology, I was struck
by the enormous piles of paper on every desk. It could take two weeks to extract
one simple figure, such as how many rapes were reported in Cambodia in a month.
Cheap computers and, more importantly, easy-to-use software programmes are changing
that, says Ball. Database, spreadsheet, word processing and communications programmes
have made it possible for even small organizations to track abuses with scientific
rigour.
This analytic precision makes a powerful weapon. It also makes a logical target for
political opponents. Witnesses often risk life and limb when they come forward to
report an abuse committed by the government. As a result, “human rights groups are
using cryptography in the field to secure databases, investigations, field reports
and witness identities—all data that might put somebody’s security or liberty at
risk,” Ball says.
In fact, encryption played a key role in breaking the silence born from 36 years
of terror and civil war in Guatemala, which killed more than 100,000 people, most
of them Mayan Indians. Until recently, most Guatemalans would have been shocked by
the fact that the following testimony was publicly documented: “My sister went shopping
in Rabinal, but when she got to the hamlet of Plan de Sanchez the army was already
there. There they grabbed her and raped her in a house. There were fifteen girls
raped and then they were riddled with bullets. Afterwards, they were buried by the
people in a clandestine cemetery.”
New
flashpoints in the crypto-wars
This
personal account, from a report by AAAS and the International Center for Human Rights
Research (CIIDH) in Guatemala City, was one of many given by witnesses who wanted
their names kept secret for fear of retribution. The CIIDH and several partner organizations
gathered more than 5,000 testimonies between 1994 and 1995.
CIIDH was one of the first human rights groups in the world to secure its database
by using PGP, now the most popular cryptography software in the field. Workers smuggled
laptop computers and solar panels into remote mountain areas where they spent months
scouring the region by foot and mule to gather testimony from people forced to hide
from the military. They systematically burnt every paper trace of their work and
encrypted the data before sending it back to the capital for analysis. They later
emailed PGP-encrypted copies of the material overseas to a safe back-up site.
Guatemala remains one of the best examples of how a human rights community embraced
technology, according to Ball. They continue to use security software to protect
the identities of witnesses as well as the integrity of the data—to ensure that political
opponents don’t sneak into databases to corrupt the information and discredit the
group’s work.
Nevertheless, “some groups choose not to use cryptography because hiding their work
would make the government consider them a national security threat,” says Ball. “I
don’t really think that any of the human rights groups is a security threat. They
may embarrass certain military or police officials who have committed atrocities,
but all the groups I know are dedicated to their country’s democratization and civil
liberties.”
Throughout the 1990s, the U.S. government and activists fought a political war over
the right to use and to share strong cryptography with the rest of the world—a war
that Ball says has now finished in the U.S. “At the end of the day,” he says, “the
U.S. government decided the economic and civil liberty costs of regulating crypto
were greater than the rather shrill claims made by law enforcement and national security
officials,” who maintained that the tools would assist criminals and terrorists.
While he has not seen any crypto-wars waged in the countries where he has worked,
there are still places that either control the use of cryptography or are hoping
to do so in the future. According to Ball, “the war front in the fight for widespread
human rights access to crypto is currently in North Korea, Iran, Vietnam—and the
UK.” To avoid this battle, many groups don’t admit to using encryption. Why advertise
the fact that a computer screen of seemingly random characters can be transformed
into witness reports of killing and torture?
The report,
State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-96: A quantitative reflection, can be found
at: http://www.hrdata.aaas.org/ciidh |
