Crimes of War

A seminar for editors sponsored by The Crimes of War Project and The Freedom Forum

Day Two, Panel Three: The Scientific Investigation of War Crimes

Moderator: Eric Stover, Director, Human Rights Center, University of California, Berkeley, and Vice President, Crimes of War Project

a) Satellite Remote Sensing and War Crimes
Christopher Simpson, Director, Project on Satellite Imagery and the New Media, School of Communication, American University

CHRISTOPHER SIMPSON: Thank you for inviting me here today. It's an honor to be here. I'm going to talk about several technologies that are useful for journalism in general and for investigating war crimes in human rights abuses or certain types of war crimes and human rights abuses on the other.

I'm also going to talk very shortly about project design and a bit about some of the ethical questions that these tools raise. I'm going to look at three types of tools in particular.

The first of these is satellite imagery. And I'm using that term in its generic sense to mean any sort of overhead imagery, aerial imagery, imagery captured from U2 type of surveillance jets, you name it, unmanned vehicles and so on.

Second, I'm going to talk about geographic information systems software, which is simply a form of database that ties information to particular geographic spots.

And third, I'm going to talk about high-speed access at an editor or journalist's desk top to very large libraries of high-quality imagery of the Earth. Online libraries today hold more than 25 million images of the Earth's surface covering substantially every land feature on the globe.

One of the key themes that I'm going to try to address is the necessity for these tools to work together in order to achieve maximum effect.

First of all, how much does this stuff cost? Well, for archival imagery the cost can be as little as zero dollars, free, to as much as $400. It depends upon the vendor and the timeframe involved. To task a satellite to go out and collect an image of an event that is unfolding that's more expensive for obvious reasons. And the new spot list sets their tasking fee at $2,500. Space imaging, which is the main source for the 1 meter or 1.5 meter resolution imagery, this fancy high-resolution imagery like this stuff here, it's more like $4,000 too $5,000 to task the satellite. But I think those prices are coming down.

The most effective way to use these tools is in much the same way that they have been traditionally used by military agencies, intelligence agencies or companies that use tools like these to search for petroleum or search for mineral deposits. But then to adapt them to the particular needs of journalists and the particular needs of addressing human rights questions.

And the first sort of generic use is as a simple illustration, which is what you see here in this Washington Post story of February of this year concerning Grozny. That's February 2 if I'm not mistaken.

What this gives you is a synoptic view, an overhead view of a situation in which it is either impossible or extremely dangerous for a journalist to be on ground. And also, there's certain virtues in having this overhead view that helps orient the reader and explain spatial relationships to readers that they might not otherwise see. Obviously, this sort of imagery is no substitute for the human face and the human form and the passion of individual stories, individual accounts of their lives. So from a journalist's standpoint it makes sense to combine this sort of thing with face-to-face materials.

A variation on this is emerging. And this is a project that I help with at the Washington Post for their online Web site. And what this illustrates is simply the ability to create interactive sites that use these tools.

And this particular site used getting on towards 100 different images of which roughly 60 were satellite images. And what the reader would do, this happens to do with weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and you could click on the map of the country on the central western part of Iraq, which is where most of the population is located, or on Baghdad.

To continue on, if you chose the fourth quadrant of Baghdad these particular buttons were hot-linked to particular land features that we had been able to identify at that time. And so if you're interested in following on then what you could do here is see both the overhead view of downtown Baghdad and an overhead view, this is from the Defense Intelligence Agency, of Iraqi intelligence headquarters. And it was combined with a description of the function of that particular agency. The point being is that this is an interactive tool that works very well on the web.

The next major use, important type of use of this tool is what might be called simply before and after imagery. This is a project that the New York Times published on the 26th of March this year. This is downtown Grozny. And you can note the difference here and there of buildings that existed as of December there. The black things you see there are the shadows of the buildings. The photograph was taken in the afternoon or in the morning and it was casting long shadows. But the buildings exist there and now they've been destroyed. And much the same pattern can be seen across the city and the rail yards and so forth.

So one of the things that's happening here as far as it's application of war reporting is obvious. The military typically calls this type of thing "damage assessment." The intelligence community typically calls it "change extraction." The scientists call it "temporal analysis" and so on. But the point is that you can see a before and after. And obviously in order to do that you need a baseline to start with. And this is an important concept to which I'll return in a minute.

For news media one way to look at this is to think of your evening weather news which, of course, shows a satellite image, although it's an image that covers an entire region or in some cases an entire continent. And the way that that works is that making a weather forecast is, in fact, a very sophisticated skill requiring a great deal of training.

Once a scientist has made a weather forecast, however, that can be illustrated quite effectively in a form that millions of people can understand and millions of people can put to use in their day-to-day lives. You bring an umbrella or not. What are you going to do at work tomorrow or not? Do you plant tomorrow or not? Et cetera, et cetera. And I see a certain similarity here, except the resolution of the image is 10,000 times more precise.

Now similarly, with weather imagery you'll notice in the evening news that the pictures of clouds where the doppler radar tends to go tick, tick, tick, tick, right? All that is is a series of still photographs that have been linked together in a loop to give the illusion of motion. Exactly the same thing can be done in this case although you wouldn't want to do it in this particular case. But the same type of thing can be done to create motion which television is obviously particularly interested in.

All right, now for human rights work by far the most important application has to do with narrowing the field of inquiry, narrowing the number of places where human rights violations might be found. And I'm using this image from Goya to make the point that most or a very substantial portion of human rights violations, activities of death squads, even military activities against civilians rather often involve relatively small numbers of people. And that the process of burying those people or trying to dispose of the bodies is simpler unfortunately than most people would believe.

It's quite difficult to see such things from outer-space. The big question that everybody asks is, can you identify mass graves from outer-space? And the answer is yes, sort of. What I mean by that is that you can identify signatures of large events that suggest that something might have happened in a particular place so that rather than having to look at an entire province for mass graves, for example, you can narrow it down to 6 or 8 or 12 possible sites. And that way you can use your resources and time as journalists much more effectively. This is also a good tool for briefing journalists prior to posting them to a particular region.

This is an example from Bosnia. It was taken by a U-2 plane. It was released by the Department of Defense. Our friends from the Federation of American Scientists, many of you are familiar with them, have this up on their Web site. The story in short terms was this was believed to be a police center. The report was that the police center was abandoned, Serbian police center. And at roughly the same time that it was abandoned this appeared.

And what you can see, see these lines here, tracked vehicles like bull-dozers or tanks leave very characteristics marks on the ground that you can see quite readily from outer-space. And here you can see them even after the Department of Defense has deliberately blurred the picture in order to obscure its capabilities.

So is this a mass grave? Well, you don't know. What you do know is that bull-dozers have been active here pushing around a lot of earth and that that happened relatively recently because the earth is still barren. That it happened we know from other intelligence that approximately the time that this was abandoned and you know that it's a place where it makes sense to send a journalist if you can get there safely to determine what, in fact, did happen.

So there are other types of signatures like this that are characteristic of some kinds of human rights abuses for which satellite imagery is very suitable. It's not suitable for other kinds of human rights abuses. But to give you some examples of what it is useful for is burning villages, burning fields, large-scale deportation, flight of refugees, and desecration of religious sites. It is also useful in circumstances in which an army -- this happened particularly in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict -- where there are Kurdish groups in exile who have complained for some time that the Turkish armed forces crossed the border into northern Iraq and burned their camps. And the Turkish armed forces say, "That's completely ridiculous. We've never done any such thing." There's no journalists within a thousand miles so who's telling the truth? Well, you can determine with considerable accuracy whether or not a convention force has crossed the border and whether or not a village is burning.

Okay, nuclear testing, fires, all that sort of thing. And again to underline a point that I believe Roy made earlier is that this is very useful in briefing journalists before you go out into the field.

Next I'd like to talk just a bit about geographic information software. And these slides are from the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights. They were prepared by Jean Yves Buchareau, and I'm very pleased to acknowledge that he's done this work.

Geographic information systems are simply a computer in which your database is key to a particular spot on the earth. And the reason that this is useful is that it permits identifying and illustrating patterns. Now, the municipalities, municipal governments in the United States are way ahead of news organizations in using this particular tool. They use it for crime mapping, for environmental policy, land-use planning, siting of schools, siting of clinics, census information, calculating how to jury man an election district in order to be most advantageous to your political party and so forth and so on. Newspapers meanwhile with a few exceptions including the Washington Post by and large have not done much of this. Here is how it is built.

Two groups of journalists that deserve special credit for using this I think are Dan Keating and Sarah Cohen at the Post and Paul Overberg at U.S.A. Today and others as well.

In any case, the same type of capabilities that a municipal government can use on a limited budget with a relatively modest computer can be put to use to detect, to document, to visualize human rights abuses. In the case of the U.N. high commissioner on human rights you had a village assessment form that gathered information from refugees and from a variety of other sources. And it would determine the amount of road access, the population of a particular village, whether leaders were present and similar information.

Meanwhile, data was collected on the condition of housing, the extent of destruction of housing in the particular village involved. And that just to take a sidetrack for a minute, could be verified or at least reinforced in using imagery. In this particular case you see a housing that has been destroyed. And the reason that you know it's been destroyed is that see how the hollow spots on the roofs? That means that the most likely explanation is that it's been burned out from the inside and the roofs have collapsed into the building.

Moving on. Having gathered this information you can display it in forms and it can be quite compelling. And I would argue that this has a democratic function. There are many ways to display information. You can display it in large lists of numbers. You can display it in graphs and in other ways. But this form of display is like the weather forecast, I think something that is relatively easy for people to understand and to understand reasonably accurately. And that that in turn is part of the democratic process.

Here what you see is damaged buildings, the total number of houses in particular regions as of November/December of 1998. And then you see it in May/June of 1999. This is in the wake of the bombing campaign, the military action in Kosovo. And the difference obviously is quite dramatic. You always have to read the footnotes here. Part of the explanation for the dramatic difference is that in parts of Kosovo it was impossible to gather information for parts of Kosovo during the first urvey.

The second survey also includes additional sources of information. You can call this footnotes, you can call it medi-data, whatever you want to call it. You've got to read it and make sure that your audience understands it.

Next step. Having established something about the housing stock in the country, number of refugees, where they are, their nationality, the extent to which they have any place to go back to. You can set priorities for shelter. And what has happened here is an overlay of topographic information, the geographic contours of the land. And by doing that you can determine what villages are most likely to be most effectively served by refugee relief so that you can use your limited resources more effectively, especially with winter coming on.

Okay. The same sorts of capabilities of identifying patterns and tying them to specific geographic places can be used for a number of things that pertain to reporting war and human rights. For example, patterns of killings by particular military units or particular death squads, correlating damage in war zones with particular troops or with particular tactics such as bombing, issues such as environmental justice, environmental destruction particularly when it's associated with war, as you've seen in the Sudan. And perhaps most importantly, the impact of structural violence more commonly known as poverty on who suffers from disasters whether they're manmade or natural disasters.

Okay. Now, traditionally GIS has been comparatively, computationally intensive and not particularly user friendly. I've made this seem easier than it actually is thanks again to the U.N. High Commissioner. In reality there are constant glitches with file formats; survey standards; memory capacity; medi-data, that's description about the data; information analysis and on and on and on.

And in fact, even comparing the 1990 census to the year 2000 census is very problematic. But what is happening now with faster computers is that many jobs that a journalist would do are becoming point-and-click matters. So that it's become considerably simpler to use these tools.

Next I'd like to talk just a bit -- oh, one more bit about geographic information systems. They can be used to determine information particularly about refugee relief and how to cope with large masses of people who have been either deported or driven from their homes. This is an example, again, from the Kosovo situation.

All right. High-speed access to data libraries. Now, this particular Web site is a Web site that's maintained at American University. It's a journalists' guide to remote sensing. And my particular choice here is for image indexes, data site indexes, gazetteers and so on. What I want to find out is what sort of imagery is available concerning the current crisis in the Philippines. It's not broadcasting. I can see it on the screen really great.

What I'm going to do is to first of all go to a resource site that tells me where there are gazetteers. In other words, lists of the geographic coordinates of particular areas. Follow that down.

The best international gazetteer that I'm familiar with is provided by the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. You have to walk through it. But once you get into it like this you choose the name that you want to search. Let me get it for you in just a minute, okay? There's no problem. You can get it -- the quickest way to get it is by way of that resource page that serves as a jump station.

Philippines, where did you go? All right, now I submit the query. It cooks. It matches eight records and you see the latitude and longitude of a particular place named Jolo in the Philippines. And part of the reason that explains the difference between -- notice the difference in the latitude and longitude here? Part of the difference that explains this is that in some cases the listing is towards the center point of an image. And in other cases it's at the edge of an image.

All right, moving on. At least I hope I'm moving on. This is a place at the Center for Remote Sensing at the University of Singapore. And it's quite useful for anything that has to do with Southeast Asia. Here I put in my user ID. This particular place is free. And you can get an account on request.

All right, I'm going to look for Spot, of course, is a French company. There's quite a number of sources of imagery available today. The major private sources are space imaging in the United States, Spot in French, government agencies or para-government agencies in Canada, India, Japan, the European community, some of the national governments in the European community and so on.

So if I click that what I can do if I remember the specifications properly the latitude was about 6.3 degrees and the longitude was 121.01 degrees. And I'm going to stick with the center point approach to this particular task. Submit the query. And here you have a picture of Jolo Island and also the red frames are the frames of the images that have been collected. And you can see here that some of the imagery has been collected as recently as of the first of May. Now, I happen to know because I already looked at it that this particular image here is a bit nicer to look at so I'm going to go to that one. And you have an image of Jolo Island.

Now the point is, for a journalist or an editor they can in a very short time determine whether or not this is suitable for use as a map, as an illustration and so on. This is a thumbnail. This is made up of a few kilobits of information. The whole image has much more data in it and much greater resolution. You can get a little bit bigger shot to determine whether or not this is useful to you from a news standpoint using that procedure there.

Another aspect of this, by the way, is that they rather frequently have interesting stories about fires, natural disasters and so on that can be had for free.

So let me wrap us by speaking -- I'm going to skip the project design stuff. But I would like to speak very briefly about some of the ethical concerns. The main ethical concerns that come up with this particular group of tools tend to fall into these categories: privacy and trade secrets, spoofing, national security or security of troops. There's also a more exotic issue that has to do with asymmetrical destabilization of national relations between countries. I'm going to pass on that one this afternoon and talk about the others.

Now, privacy is an issue with geographic information systems just as it is with any computer database that has information about identifiable individuals. But there is something -- privacy is not really an issue, even at 1 meter resolution with satellite imagery. But there is something magic about this idea of satellite imagery that spooks the public. Many people do not like the idea of so-called spy satellites looking at them. So there's a certain gut response against it.

But speaking more generally, the issue of privacy in the news media is, at least in my view is extremely important. It's complex. And for the most part it's beyond the scope of this talk. I don't think that news organizations have resolved the problem of invading peoples' privacy by way of databases any more than marketers have resolved that problem.

And for news organizations I think that's a time bomb that's waiting to go off. But having said that, compilation of data about death squad activities, leaders of death squads, specific targets, I don't see this as an invasion of people's privacy and I have no hesitation whatsoever about using these tools to collect that kind of information.

On spoofing, can people be spoofed by looking at these images? You bet. Any digital image today can be distorted or remapped, remade, changed in such a way that even the most advanced photo interpreter cannot detect that that change has happened, anyone. So the issue of spoofing is built into all use of photography by news media. It's not substantially different here.

Okay, I'm wrapping up. Military security has been the topic of extensive chatter in the press and concern within the military itself. But I would say this, that the U.S. Military has by far the largest and the best funded counter measure program, electronic counter measure program in the world. Jamming transmissions, preclusive buying, voluntary cooperation by satellite companies and so on can be used by particularly the United States military and NATO to obstruct news organizations' ability to get this kind of information.

I'm not suggesting that anybody put anybody else' life in danger. But I do feel that military security is primarily up to the Armed Forces themselves, not to the news media. The Armed Forces take it quite seriously. They spent quite a bit of money on it and they are quite good at it. So it seems to me that editors have to follow their conscience when it comes to imaging Armed Forces. But it seems to me that just because the tools are new the basic ethical rules concerning holding governments and Armed Forces at arms length continue to hold true.

Summarize. Media is already using satellite imagery, and to good effect. The tools can be used differently as the situation merits ranging from simple illustrations to really quite complex analysis.

And finally, the ethical questions that are associated with these tools are quite real. But by the same token they are routed in existing ethical questions which most of us are familiar with these days and can be addressed through that prism.

Thank you very much.

Christopher Simpson , Bio.
Director, Project on Satellite Imagery and the News Media, American University, School of Communication