Syrian Archive
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Deutch, Jeff
Al-Khatib, Hadi
Journalists and human rights groups need to find and use verified visual evidence in order to accurately report about what’s happening in conflict zones. In the case of Syria, there are more hours of online footage online than there have been hours of conflict.
 Okay, so it is said that history is written by the victors, but in the era of information, we just have to dig out the truth and expose the lies. The Syrian Archive is a group of volunteers dedicated to documenting human rights violations committed by all sides during the Syrian conflict. With over 2,000 incidents preserved and more hours of online footage than there have been hours of conflict, the Syrian Archive is the only tool to gather and verify all this data. Without further ado, I present to you the Syrian Archive team. Hello, everyone. My name is Haid al-Khateeb. And I'm Jeff Torek. First of all, I would like to thank you for being here and thank the CCC for inviting us. It's really, we appreciate being able to present here. What we'll be going through in the next 30 minutes is an overview of the project, the background, specific problems that we have identified while working on user-generated content. Our methodology and three case studies as well as our plans for 2017. So we have started this work in Turkey in 2014 working with journalists, lawyers, and human rights activists. And the project is about a platform that collects, verifies, preserves, and analyses visual documentation of human rights violations. And the goal is to create an evidence-based tool that can be used for reporting, advocacy, accountability by journalists, human rights defenders, and lawyers. Since then, we have been collaborating with a number of groups. The United Nations or CHR, which is the investigation team based in Geneva doing investigations on Syria since 2012, we've been working with them on investigation related to Aleppo since they got the mandate to do this from the Security Council a few weeks ago. We've been also working with Human Rights Watch related to class immunizations research in Syria, Amnesty International as well, with their digital verification corps team, which is a group of young professionals from Berkeley University and Essex University who are helping us doing in-depth verification. We've been also collaborating with Billing Cat, which is a collective of investigators specialized in the use of open source investigations. We've also been working with the MEDAN on integrating their platform, which is a collaborative verification platform, also with WITNESS in terms of improving our methodology and workflow with technical technology collective that are supporting us in the development of the collecting infrastructure, as well as, of course, Syrian journalists, lawyers, and human rights defenders as they are our main source of information such as the Syrian Institute for Justice. Since the Tunisian Revolution, we have seen a big shift in how conflict has been being reported. From being reported by journalists and NGOs who have access to the country into, depending more on user-generated content, especially in areas where you can't actually access the country, journalists and NGOs are banned from reporting. In the case of Syria, there are more hours of online footage than there are actually hours in the conflict itself. Hidden in that footage, there is hundreds of untold stories, human rights violations, and possibly war crime evidence. But with this user-generated content that we have been working with, we identified three kind of problems. One of it is the content is being erased and can't be found. Content is not verified. The content is unsearchable. So working with lawyers and human rights activists, they are doing this work in a hostile environment. They have been attacked and targeted by many groups for doing their work. They have been attacked by all kinds of weapons, basically. Their devices get damaged. Their data gets lost. The evidence gets lost. Of course, when they are moving through checkpoints, where they are moving through borders, also their devices are seized, damaged, and of course information is being lost. If they are publishing what they have on social media platform, it's being deleted, it's being removed because it violates the privacy policy of those commercial social media services and also because their accounts get hacked because of what they are publishing. In this case, Physicians for Human Rights has worked on an investigation and documentation related to attacks against hospitals in Syria. It's not there anymore. We lost the evidence that actually refers to this type of attack. And I don't know if we can get it again. It's not just us that are having this problem, but also other investigators such as Billing Katz, Iliot from Billing Katz, who is the director, has been doing a lot of work on chemical attacks that happened in August 2013. And basically most of the evidence that he has been looking for and analyzing has been also gone. The other problem related to this is that content is basically scattered everywhere. It's on different social media platforms, different websites. It's really hard to understand what happened in a specific incident because it's really hard to understand the full image. It's also, of course, scattered offline when there's no internet connectivity in external hard drives or computers. When it's published online, it's not verified. There are hundreds and hundreds of videos. We are not talking about one or two that are coming every day. With this comes a lot of fake information as well, which makes it really hard for journalists and human rights organizations to actually respond to this huge amount of data related to violations. It is so difficult for it to be searchable because it doesn't have any kind of metadata when it's published. Also metadata is being stripped from social media platform when visual evidence is published there. Most reports that are published by human rights organizations or articles by journalists are in different formats, PDF formats, so it's really inaccessible. So we worked to address these three problems in a variety of ways. So for the first problem that content is being deleted or that it's scattered throughout the internet, we worked to develop an automated secure content backup tool. So every day our content is being scraped and backed up externally on servers throughout the world. Also by making the platform, the database online available online, we've kind of centralized the data that's being scattered throughout the internet and put it in one place. Dealing with the fact that the content is not verified, we've worked to develop a very detailed methodology. It's an open source methodology that we're going to go into in a little bit. And also an infrastructure so that we can highlight how the verification is actually working. And then relating to the fact that the content is unsearchable, we recognized the fact that we needed to have a very standardized metadata scheme and a filter system so that you can search through all the content that we have. So for the methodology, we found three components. There's a collection in the archival component, there's a basic verification component, and more in-depth investigations. So there's five steps that we've identified for collection in archival. The first step before we have any of the content is to first make a list of all of our sources for that content. So we have identified 200 credible sources made up of a variety of individuals or organizations, local field clinics, individual citizens, and larger NGOs. A lot of the sources that we've been working with have been reporting on the conflict since 2011 or 2012, although some are more recent. So after we have a list of the sources for the content, we needed to develop a list of sources for the verification. You can't verify the content with the same sources who are providing the content, so we needed to develop a separate list. And this is mostly made up of a team of citizen journalists and human rights defenders who are located in Syria. When we need additional information regarding verification of any of the videos, we get in touch with them and they can also help us identify a specific place or item, or item in the videos. And the third step that we have for the collection in archival is to establish this metadata scheme. And we, through our database, decided to use the metadata scheme developed by the UN Office for High Commissioner of Human Rights. And we did this because they are in a unique position to investigate and also to prosecute. So we felt that if we categorize our data by their standards, then it could be useful for future investigations. These are some of the categories that they have in their metadata scheme. And I'm not going to go over all of them now, but you can just see them. We can come back to them later. The fourth step of the collection in archival is to record as much of the metadata that we can. So we want to contextualize the material that we do have to identify the location, the date that it was recorded and uploaded. I can talk about that in a bit. And also the origin of the video, which is a bit harder to identify. As Heidi mentioned, a lot of the metadata is stripped when it's uploaded into social media platforms. So sometimes there's very little additional information and sometimes there's more. And then step five, once we have identified all of the metadata and an incident, we work to collect, store, hash, and timestamp all of the videos that we have so that we can preserve the integrity of the videos and make sure that they're not modified after we have downloaded them and stored them securely. So for the verification, we also have five steps. The first step, once we have the video downloaded and stored in our servers, is to parse and aggregate all the metadata that we have using, as I mentioned, the metadata scheme from UN OHCHR, but also additional metadata fields like type of munitions used, if that's able to be determined, or the weather, unique landmarks that are in individual videos. Once we have all of that, we can start the verification process. So the second step is to verify the source of the video. A lot of the videos that we're getting are sent directly by sources on the ground. So in that case, we know who this is. But when something is uploaded online, we can determine the source by the user accounts, whether it's a media house or whether it's an individual journalist. We determine whether they're credible or not based on their history of uploading and whether or not they're known to us or not. If they're not within our database of credible sources, we have a procedure for verifying them, for vetting them, and I can go into that in a bit. The third step for verification is to verify the location. So this is the whole geolocation component. So there's basic geolocation that we can determine by reading the descriptions of the videos that we've uploaded and also communicating with the people who have uploaded them. In some cases, we also do more in-depth geolocation, as Hadi is going to go over in some of the case studies. And then the fourth step is verifying the filming and the upload dates. So upload dates are able to be determined by the date that it has been uploaded to YouTube, but there's tools developed by groups like Witness and others that help with this process. Sometimes it may be difficult to verify the date that it was actually filmed. People can upload it at the same day or sometimes many months later. So we have to cross-reference this with a lot of news accounts reports by NGOs or international human rights organizations. And then the last step is to publish this into our database. So we make our database publicly available in an open source format, and this is what the database looks like. So you can see on the left, there's an identifier, there's a description, the date that it was recorded, where it was, and the type of violation according to the UN OHCHR standards. So in the red box, you can see the type of violation, and this is using that metadata scheme. Underneath that, you can see the types of weapons identified as in location. And when you click on an individual incident, you can see on the left-hand side, this is where the video is. They don't autoplay because we don't want to expose people to content that they might find disturbing. And if we found that a video is particularly graphic, we always include a warning. In a red banner, this one doesn't have it. On the right-hand side, you can see the initial metadata. At the below it, we've geo-located so you can see where each video was actually filmed. On the right-hand side, you can see more additional metadata, like the weather or weapons used. So when we look at the videos altogether, we've developed a map where you can – it's interactive, this is just a screenshot – but you can zoom in or out and you can find particular areas where particular incidents were filmed. This is all able to be filtered by the type of munition used or the type of investigation that we're doing. For instance, on cluster bombs or chemical weapons. And with that, we've done a number of investigations. So we do this for a couple of reasons. One we wanted the archive to be used as an advocacy tool for people right now. We wanted to keep people updated in terms of what's the current situation. We also want to speak directly to policymakers, people like the ICC, people like the UN OHCHR and others. But also, we recognize that there's a strong amount of trust that's needed between us and the people who are uploading the videos. We need to trust them in order to know that the content that they're providing us with is legitimate or if they're vouching for it that they're making the correct claims. But they also need to trust us that we're using the data for the intended purposes. And this is particularly true when they're sending us information directly. So we have an investigations part of the website, as you can see here. And the first one on chemical weapons is a case study that Hadi is going to talk about now. So the first case study is related to the use of chemical weapons in Syria since 2011 until now. We have geolocated and verified collected hundreds of visual evidence related to this. What we can quickly see from this is first, chemical weapons has been a tool from the beginning of the conflict since 2012. Most of the organizations maybe or human rights community think that it started in 2013 because there is a very big incident there, but it actually started before. We can also see that it's still continuing 2015 and 2016, even after the OPCW, the organization of the production of chemical weapons, announced that they destroyed chemical weapons in Syria in 2015. Another graph that shows the peak in 2013, most of the video has been published there because there was a big incident. The country side of Damascus of the use of saringas against civilians. We can see that it's still continuing, not even November, but also until a few days ago. This is one of the recent incidents that happened in eastern Aleppo, which was the use of clarin cylinder against civilians in also civilian areas. This is the video that has been published by the Senate Institute for Justice, which are lawyers that are based in Aleppo. We can see that they are taking footage of the impact site after the gas cylinder has been dropped. From these type of images, we try to identify structure of the buildings to be able to understand where this actually happens. This is the gas cylinder that was used. They sent us a very close image to it. If we go even closer, we can see that there is the sticker from BBC, which is a Jordanian company that produces chemicals. We also were able to identify the structure of the buildings. As you can see, also the impact site, as has been seen in the videos, the tree that has been seen also in the video. Through that, we go to Google Earth to be able to understand where this actually happened. In the title, there's a description of where it happened. We looked around that area. This is exactly where the cameraman is standing. Then by getting a better satellite imagery, we can see the same buildings on the right, the impact site, and that tree. We know exactly that this is the location in eastern Aleppo that has been attacked. This is not the only attack that used this kind of gas cylinder, but also they have been earlier ones from Kefir Zeta in Hama October 2016. There has been a recent one a few weeks ago in Al Fardos district in Aleppo, December 8th, 2016. There has been another one a few days ago that happened in Masak in Hanano, Aleppo, December 18th, 2016, which all shows a pattern of the use of gas cylinders against civilians. We can identify that this is one of the tactics that has been used by the senior government to take control of Aleppo. All these claimed reports, we can match with the OPCW. Also report that has been published in 2015, proving that the senior government was responsible for the use of chemicals against civilians. The second case study is related to cluster munitions used in Syria. It has been used by the senior government and also by the Russian government, starting in their operation, September 2015, they denied that they have any kind of weapons like this in Syria. But there was a report that has been published by Russia today, sorry, a video. And this video has been published from Hmayim Air Base, which is the main air base of the Russia aircraft. And we can identify two types of cluster munitions. One is incendiary, RBK500Z, 2.5SM. The other one is more as cluster identified cluster munitions, RBK500AO, 2.5RTM. We there were also other footage from Hmayim Air Base that were taken by journalists that were there visiting. And by accident, they also photo this cluster munition that is there. So since then, we started to collect and verify the visual evidence from media activists that have been claims that there was a cluster munition has been used. And with Human Rights Watch in July 2016, we were able to collaborate on a report about cluster munitions used in Syria. And through the database, they have identified specific types of cluster munitions, as we can see in this slide and also on this slide. So the third case study is related to geolocating airstrikes, Russian airstrikes, coalition airstrikes. We started with the Russian airstrikes since the beginning of the operation in September 2015. We have been collecting hundreds and hundreds of also visual evidence related to that. We tried to geolocate as much as possible to understand what happened and where was the most attacked happened and in which areas. And we did some in-depth also investigations of specific videos. This is one of them. It was published by the Jistrashuhur Media Center, which is a group that is based in Idlib. And they were claiming that there was a mosque being bombed. It's called Amar bin al-Khattab. And they were also claiming that it was bombed by Russian aircraft. So after that, the Russian Ministry of Defense has announced that they are not responsible for this type of attack. And this is all fake. And they have published a satellite imagery of the actual mosque saying that this is the actual mosque that was reported. And it's still intact. And this is a recent satellite imagery. So what we did is we asked one of the journalists, our sources, that we work with from Idlib to take a photo of this mosque that has been showing on the satellite image. And he did. And it actually was still intact. But the name was Al-Farouq, not Amar bin al-Khattab. So we geolocated this one through Google Earth just to understand where it is exactly. And then what we tried to do is we tried to look for other mosques from close to this area. And we have found this satellite imagery that was posted on Facebook page of the Jisr-e-Shawor media center of a mosque that is close to that mosque, but it's still intact because it was months before the attack. But through the satellite imagery, we were able to geolocate the drone image with the videos that has been published about the attack. This is one of the videos from one of the sources, Hashem al-Abdallah, that we work with him in Idlib. This is another one from other sources, the Jisr-e-Shawor media center. And from there, we were able to use Google Earth again to geolocate the actual mosque that was attacked. And then we saw that the distance is about one kilometer between the claimed mosque that was attacked and the actual mosque. And we can see this clear in this footage from Google Earth right now. So it's about one kilometer away. And we got a clear satellite imagery after the attack where we can see that the mosque was also attacked. We have also noticed that the logo of the satellite imagery published by the Russian Ministry of Defense is covering the actual mosque that was attacked. And we don't know if it happened by accident or if it's on purpose, but we know that there was a fake information or wrong information that was published by the Ministry of Defense. So those are a couple of projects that we're working on in 2016. But for 2017, we have a bunch of plans. And we want to add a lot of new sources to the database that we're using. So these are both platform-based. Right now, we're using mostly videos from YouTube. But we also want to incorporate Twitter and Telegram into our database. And also from organizations and individuals like the Violations Documentation Center, who's doing a lot of really amazing work. But we don't have their information in our system yet. And also groups like the UN and various, various organizations that are working on human rights issues that are currently publishing in PDF format. Of course, we also want to be incorporating offline data sources more into the database that we're using. We're looking forward to continuing the open source investigations that we're doing with Bellingcat and with Amnesty International's Digital Verification Core. And we're looking to develop a toolkit for open source investigations. Open source here meaning information that's publicly available. But the toolkit itself is also going to be open source as in it will be on Git and available for comments. So if you have any feedback, please let us know. And then lastly, we're looking to develop a platform for collaborative verification of large data sets. So right now, there isn't one. There's projects like Check from Meaden that are working on verification on individual videos, which is super, super helpful. But for large data sets, this doesn't currently exist. So thanks so much for all your time. If you have questions, I know we still have a couple minutes left. Otherwise, we're available afterwards. And if you have any interest in helping or supporting us, you can check us out. Here's our website. We're on Twitter. And you can email us. That's our PGP key. Thanks so much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. We have a few minutes for questions. So please, microphone one. So I want to ask, how could you verify the number of casualties for every crime and whether if your archive include crimes, less major crimes than the chemical weapons that's been used since 2011? Right. So we didn't verify the number of casualties as a result of the chemical attacks. There are other organizations who are doing so, like the Violation Documentation Center. And what we are trying to do is to incorporate what they have data set with the visual evidence so we can understand exactly what happened. And whether your archive include other crimes that started since 2011 or whether it just includes crimes since 2014? So we have videos about crimes from 2011. Until now, we were not able to process all this information because we're talking about thousands of footage. But the plan is to go through it for next year. Thank you. Next question, microphone number three. Hi. I just wanted to say that you're doing a great job. It's very important that somebody does this. And please keep this up. It's actually two questions. First question is, do you have a narrative which brings the facts together in a way? I'm not talking about a factual narrative, but what the different parties involved in this war are saying and what they're claiming about these events. So we know what happened, but what are they saying about it? Do you have that on your platform? And the second question is, how can we help? I mean, we have a lot of people here in this room probably want to help, so how can we do that? Right. So the first question, we don't have the narrative from all the groups that are on the ground. What we focus on is just contextualizing the visual evidence and make sure that it has more metadata so it's more understandable and has a value to be used for advocacy purposes, accountability purposes, and so on. In terms of the help, I mean, we are here really to reach to the hackers community and to everyone who is able to help technically and non-technically on this in terms of research, building methodology, technical infrastructure, and more. And just to add onto that, I mean, a lot of the methods that we're using are pretty, they're not that difficult. And all of our methodologies are outlined in every report that we're writing. But we're going to be making this toolkit that's available on Git, so if you have any questions, please help us there, give us some comments, that would be really helpful. There's also a huge backlog of lots of videos. I mean, if you have time, it would be great to help us with some of those. Thanks. Thank you. I think we have one more time. Time for a squeeze and one more question, but please be precise. Maybe the IRC channel. Well, we have questions from IRC. One question is, if you work, it's based on the international human rights definition or if there's a special human rights definition made in Syria? I'm sorry, can you repeat the question? One user wants to know if your work is based on the international human rights definition by the UN or if your work relies on a special human rights definition defined in Syria? So we're using the UNHCR categories, which means we are working according to the international humanitarian law, basically. So some of that is related to also the Syrian code panel, and some of it is not there, but the standard is UNHCR and the international humanitarian law. I'm afraid that's all the time we have. Thank you very much, guys. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
 Okay, so it is said that history is written by the victors, but in the era of information,  we just have to dig out the truth and expose the lies.  The Syrian Archive is a group of volunteers dedicated to documenting human rights violations  committed by all sides during the Syrian conflict.  With over 2,000 incidents preserved and more hours of online footage than there have been  hours of conflict, the Syrian Archive is the only tool to gather and verify all this data.  Without further ado, I present to you the Syrian Archive team.  Hello, everyone.  My name is Haid al-Khateeb.  And I'm Jeff Torek.  First of all, I would like to thank you for being here and thank the CCC for inviting us.  It's really, we appreciate being able to present here.  What we'll be going through in the next 30 minutes is an overview of the project, the  background, specific problems that we have identified while working on user-generated  content.  Our methodology and three case studies as well as our plans for 2017.  So we have started this work in Turkey in 2014 working with journalists, lawyers, and  human rights activists.  And the project is about a platform that collects, verifies, preserves, and analyses visual documentation  of human rights violations.  And the goal is to create an evidence-based tool that can be used for reporting, advocacy,  accountability by journalists, human rights defenders, and lawyers.  Since then, we have been collaborating with a number of groups.  The United Nations or CHR, which is the investigation team based in Geneva doing investigations on  Syria since 2012, we've been working with them on investigation related to Aleppo since  they got the mandate to do this from the Security Council a few weeks ago.  We've been also working with Human Rights Watch related to class immunizations research  in Syria, Amnesty International as well, with their digital verification corps team, which  is a group of young professionals from Berkeley University and Essex University who are helping  us doing in-depth verification.  We've been also collaborating with Billing Cat, which is a collective of investigators  specialized in the use of open source investigations.  We've also been working with the MEDAN on integrating their platform, which is a collaborative  verification platform, also with WITNESS in terms of improving our methodology and workflow  with technical technology collective that are supporting us in the development of the  collecting infrastructure, as well as, of course, Syrian journalists, lawyers, and human rights  defenders as they are our main source of information such as the Syrian Institute for Justice.  Since the Tunisian Revolution, we have seen a big shift in how conflict has been being  reported.  From being reported by journalists and NGOs who have access to the country into, depending  more on user-generated content, especially in areas where you can't actually access the  country, journalists and NGOs are banned from reporting.  In the case of Syria, there are more hours of online footage than there are actually  hours in the conflict itself.  Hidden in that footage, there is hundreds of untold stories, human rights violations,  and possibly war crime evidence.  But with this user-generated content that we have been working with, we identified three  kind of problems.  One of it is the content is being erased and can't be found.  Content is not verified.  The content is unsearchable.  So working with lawyers and human rights activists, they are doing this work in a hostile environment.  They have been attacked and targeted by many groups for doing their work.  They have been attacked by all kinds of weapons, basically.  Their devices get damaged.  Their data gets lost.  The evidence gets lost.  Of course, when they are moving through checkpoints, where they are moving through borders, also  their devices are seized, damaged, and of course information is being lost.  If they are publishing what they have on social media platform, it's being deleted, it's  being removed because it violates the privacy policy of those commercial social media services  and also because their accounts get hacked because of what they are publishing.  In this case, Physicians for Human Rights has worked on an investigation and documentation  related to attacks against hospitals in Syria.  It's not there anymore.  We lost the evidence that actually refers to this type of attack.  And I don't know if we can get it again.  It's not just us that are having this problem, but also other investigators such as Billing  Katz, Iliot from Billing Katz, who is the director, has been doing a lot of work on chemical  attacks that happened in August 2013.  And basically most of the evidence that he has been looking for and analyzing has been  also gone.  The other problem related to this is that content is basically scattered everywhere.  It's on different social media platforms, different websites.  It's really hard to understand what happened in a specific incident because it's really  hard to understand the full image.  It's also, of course, scattered offline when there's no internet connectivity in external  hard drives or computers.  When it's published online, it's not verified.  There are hundreds and hundreds of videos.  We are not talking about one or two that are coming every day.  With this comes a lot of fake information as well, which makes it really hard for journalists  and human rights organizations to actually respond to this huge amount of data related  to violations.  It is so difficult for it to be searchable because it doesn't have any kind of metadata  when it's published.  Also metadata is being stripped from social media platform when visual evidence is published  there.  Most reports that are published by human rights organizations or articles by journalists are  in different formats, PDF formats, so it's really inaccessible.  So we worked to address these three problems in a variety of ways.  So for the first problem that content is being deleted or that it's scattered throughout  the internet, we worked to develop an automated secure content backup tool.  So every day our content is being scraped and backed up externally on servers throughout  the world.  Also by making the platform, the database online available online, we've kind of centralized  the data that's being scattered throughout the internet and put it in one place.  Dealing with the fact that the content is not verified, we've worked to develop a very  detailed methodology.  It's an open source methodology that we're going to go into in a little bit.  And also an infrastructure so that we can highlight how the verification is actually  working.  And then relating to the fact that the content is unsearchable, we recognized the fact that  we needed to have a very standardized metadata scheme and a filter system so that you can  search through all the content that we have.  So for the methodology, we found three components.  There's a collection in the archival component, there's a basic verification component, and  more in-depth investigations.  So there's five steps that we've identified for collection in archival.  The first step before we have any of the content is to first make a list of all of our sources  for that content.  So we have identified 200 credible sources made up of a variety of individuals or organizations,  local field clinics, individual citizens, and larger NGOs.  A lot of the sources that we've been working with have been reporting on the conflict since  2011 or 2012, although some are more recent.  So after we have a list of the sources for the content, we needed to develop a list of  sources for the verification.  You can't verify the content with the same sources who are providing the content, so  we needed to develop a separate list.  And this is mostly made up of a team of citizen journalists and human rights defenders who  are located in Syria.  When we need additional information regarding verification of any of the videos, we get  in touch with them and they can also help us identify a specific place or item, or item  in the videos.  And the third step that we have for the collection in archival is to establish this metadata  scheme.  And we, through our database, decided to use the metadata scheme developed by the UN Office  for High Commissioner of Human Rights.  And we did this because they are in a unique position to investigate and also to prosecute.  So we felt that if we categorize our data by their standards, then it could be useful  for future investigations.  These are some of the categories that they have in their metadata scheme.  And I'm not going to go over all of them now, but you can just see them.  We can come back to them later.  The fourth step of the collection in archival is to record as much of the metadata that  we can.  So we want to contextualize the material that we do have to identify the location, the  date that it was recorded and uploaded.  I can talk about that in a bit.  And also the origin of the video, which is a bit harder to identify.  As Heidi mentioned, a lot of the metadata is stripped when it's uploaded into social  media platforms.  So sometimes there's very little additional information and sometimes there's more.  And then step five, once we have identified all of the metadata and an incident, we work  to collect, store, hash, and timestamp all of the videos that we have so that we can  preserve the integrity of the videos and make sure that they're not modified after  we have downloaded them and stored them securely.  So for the verification, we also have five steps.  The first step, once we have the video downloaded and stored in our servers, is to parse and  aggregate all the metadata that we have using, as I mentioned, the metadata scheme from  UN OHCHR, but also additional metadata fields like type of munitions used, if that's able  to be determined, or the weather, unique landmarks that are in individual videos.  Once we have all of that, we can start the verification process.  So the second step is to verify the source of the video.  A lot of the videos that we're getting are sent directly by sources on the ground.  So in that case, we know who this is.  But when something is uploaded online, we can determine the source by the user accounts,  whether it's a media house or whether it's an individual journalist.  We determine whether they're credible or not based on their history of uploading and whether  or not they're known to us or not.  If they're not within our database of credible sources, we have a procedure for verifying  them, for vetting them, and I can go into that in a bit.  The third step for verification is to verify the location.  So this is the whole geolocation component.  So there's basic geolocation that we can determine by reading the descriptions of the  videos that we've uploaded and also communicating with the people who have uploaded them.  In some cases, we also do more in-depth geolocation, as Hadi is going to go over in some of the  case studies.  And then the fourth step is verifying the filming and the upload dates.  So upload dates are able to be determined by the date that it has been uploaded to YouTube,  but there's tools developed by groups like Witness and others that help with this process.  Sometimes it may be difficult to verify the date that it was actually filmed.  People can upload it at the same day or sometimes many months later.  So we have to cross-reference this with a lot of news accounts reports by NGOs or international  human rights organizations.  And then the last step is to publish this into our database.  So we make our database publicly available in an open source format, and this is what  the database looks like.  So you can see on the left, there's an identifier, there's a description, the date that it was  recorded, where it was, and the type of violation according to the UN OHCHR standards.  So in the red box, you can see the type of violation, and this is using that metadata  scheme.  Underneath that, you can see the types of weapons identified as in location.  And when you click on an individual incident, you can see on the left-hand side, this is  where the video is.  They don't autoplay because we don't want to expose people to content that they might  find disturbing.  And if we found that a video is particularly graphic, we always include a warning.  In a red banner, this one doesn't have it.  On the right-hand side, you can see the initial metadata.  At the below it, we've geo-located so you can see where each video was actually filmed.  On the right-hand side, you can see more additional metadata, like the weather or weapons used.  So when we look at the videos altogether, we've developed a map where you can – it's  interactive, this is just a screenshot – but you can zoom in or out and you can find particular  areas where particular incidents were filmed.  This is all able to be filtered by the type of munition used or the type of investigation  that we're doing.  For instance, on cluster bombs or chemical weapons.  And with that, we've done a number of investigations.  So we do this for a couple of reasons.  One we wanted the archive to be used as an advocacy tool for people right now.  We wanted to keep people updated in terms of what's the current situation.  We also want to speak directly to policymakers, people like the ICC, people like the UN OHCHR  and others.  But also, we recognize that there's a strong amount of trust that's needed between us  and the people who are uploading the videos.  We need to trust them in order to know that the content that they're providing us with  is legitimate or if they're vouching for it that they're making the correct claims.  But they also need to trust us that we're using the data for the intended purposes.  And this is particularly true when they're sending us information directly.  So we have an investigations part of the website, as you can see here.  And the first one on chemical weapons is a case study that Hadi is going to talk about  now.  So the first case study is related to the use of chemical weapons in Syria since 2011  until now.  We have geolocated and verified collected hundreds of visual evidence related to this.  What we can quickly see from this is first, chemical weapons has been a tool from the  beginning of the conflict since 2012.  Most of the organizations maybe or human rights community think that it started in 2013 because  there is a very big incident there, but it actually started before.  We can also see that it's still continuing 2015 and 2016, even after the OPCW, the organization  of the production of chemical weapons, announced that they destroyed chemical weapons in Syria  in 2015.  Another graph that shows the peak in 2013, most of the video has been published there  because there was a big incident.  The country side of Damascus of the use of saringas against civilians.  We can see that it's still continuing, not even November, but also until a few days ago.  This is one of the recent incidents that happened in eastern Aleppo, which was the use of clarin  cylinder against civilians in also civilian areas.  This is the video that has been published by the Senate Institute for Justice, which  are lawyers that are based in Aleppo.  We can see that they are taking footage of the impact site after the gas cylinder has  been dropped.  From these type of images, we try to identify structure of the buildings to be able to understand  where this actually happens.  This is the gas cylinder that was used.  They sent us a very close image to it.  If we go even closer, we can see that there is the sticker from BBC, which is a Jordanian  company that produces chemicals.  We also were able to identify the structure of the buildings.  As you can see, also the impact site, as has been seen in the videos, the tree that has  been seen also in the video.  Through that, we go to Google Earth to be able to understand where this actually happened.  In the title, there's a description of where it happened.  We looked around that area.  This is exactly where the cameraman is standing.  Then by getting a better satellite imagery, we can see the same buildings on the right,  the impact site, and that tree.  We know exactly that this is the location in eastern Aleppo that has been attacked.  This is not the only attack that used this kind of gas cylinder, but also they have been  earlier ones from Kefir Zeta in Hama October 2016.  There has been a recent one a few weeks ago in Al Fardos district in Aleppo, December  8th, 2016.  There has been another one a few days ago that happened in Masak in Hanano, Aleppo, December  18th, 2016, which all shows a pattern of the use of gas cylinders against civilians.  We can identify that this is one of the tactics that has been used by the senior government  to take control of Aleppo.  All these claimed reports, we can match with the OPCW.  Also report that has been published in 2015, proving that the senior government was responsible  for the use of chemicals against civilians.  The second case study is related to cluster munitions used in Syria.  It has been used by the senior government and also by the Russian government, starting  in their operation, September 2015, they denied that they have any kind of weapons like this  in Syria.  But there was a report that has been published by Russia today, sorry, a video.  And this video has been published from Hmayim Air Base, which is the main air base of the  Russia aircraft.  And we can identify two types of cluster munitions.  One is incendiary, RBK500Z, 2.5SM.  The other one is more as cluster identified cluster munitions, RBK500AO, 2.5RTM.  We there were also other footage from Hmayim Air Base that were taken by journalists that  were there visiting.  And by accident, they also photo this cluster munition that is there.  So since then, we started to collect and verify the visual evidence from media activists  that have been claims that there was a cluster munition has been used.  And with Human Rights Watch in July 2016, we were able to collaborate on a report about  cluster munitions used in Syria.  And through the database, they have identified specific types of cluster munitions, as we  can see in this slide and also on this slide.  So the third case study is related to geolocating airstrikes, Russian airstrikes, coalition  airstrikes.  We started with the Russian airstrikes since the beginning of the operation in September  2015.  We have been collecting hundreds and hundreds of also visual evidence related to that.  We tried to geolocate as much as possible to understand what happened and where was  the most attacked happened and in which areas.  And we did some in-depth also investigations of specific videos.  This is one of them.  It was published by the Jistrashuhur Media Center, which is a group that is based in  Idlib.  And they were claiming that there was a mosque being bombed.  It's called Amar bin al-Khattab.  And they were also claiming that it was bombed by Russian aircraft.  So after that, the Russian Ministry of Defense has announced that they are not responsible  for this type of attack.  And this is all fake.  And they have published a satellite imagery of the actual mosque saying that this is the  actual mosque that was reported.  And it's still intact.  And this is a recent satellite imagery.  So what we did is we asked one of the journalists, our sources, that we work with from Idlib  to take a photo of this mosque that has been showing on the satellite image.  And he did.  And it actually was still intact.  But the name was Al-Farouq, not Amar bin al-Khattab.  So we geolocated this one through Google Earth just to understand where it is exactly.  And then what we tried to do is we tried to look for other mosques from close to this  area.  And we have found this satellite imagery that was posted on Facebook page of the Jisr-e-Shawor  media center of a mosque that is close to that mosque, but it's still intact because  it was months before the attack.  But through the satellite imagery, we were able to geolocate the drone image with the  videos that has been published about the attack.  This is one of the videos from one of the sources, Hashem al-Abdallah, that we work with him in  Idlib.  This is another one from other sources, the Jisr-e-Shawor media center.  And from there, we were able to use Google Earth again to geolocate the actual mosque  that was attacked.  And then we saw that the distance is about one kilometer between the claimed mosque that  was attacked and the actual mosque.  And we can see this clear in this footage from Google Earth right now.  So it's about one kilometer away.  And we got a clear satellite imagery after the attack where we can see that the mosque  was also attacked.  We have also noticed that the logo of the satellite imagery published by the Russian  Ministry of Defense is covering the actual mosque that was attacked.  And we don't know if it happened by accident or if it's on purpose, but we know that there  was a fake information or wrong information that was published by the Ministry of Defense.  So those are a couple of projects that we're working on in 2016.  But for 2017, we have a bunch of plans.  And we want to add a lot of new sources to the database that we're using.  So these are both platform-based.  Right now, we're using mostly videos from YouTube.  But we also want to incorporate Twitter and Telegram into our database.  And also from organizations and individuals like the Violations Documentation Center,  who's doing a lot of really amazing work.  But we don't have their information in our system yet.  And also groups like the UN and various, various organizations that are working on human rights  issues that are currently publishing in PDF format.  Of course, we also want to be incorporating offline data sources more into the database  that we're using.  We're looking forward to continuing the open source investigations that we're doing with  Bellingcat and with Amnesty International's Digital Verification Core.  And we're looking to develop a toolkit for open source investigations.  Open source here meaning information that's publicly available.  But the toolkit itself is also going to be open source as in it will be on Git and available  for comments.  So if you have any feedback, please let us know.  And then lastly, we're looking to develop a platform for collaborative verification  of large data sets.  So right now, there isn't one.  There's projects like Check from Meaden that are working on verification on individual  videos, which is super, super helpful.  But for large data sets, this doesn't currently exist.  So thanks so much for all your time.  If you have questions, I know we still have a couple minutes left.  Otherwise, we're available afterwards.  And if you have any interest in helping or supporting us, you can check us out.  Here's our website.  We're on Twitter.  And you can email us.  That's our PGP key.  Thanks so much.  Thank you very much.  Thank you very much.  We have a few minutes for questions.  So please, microphone one.  So I want to ask, how could you verify the number of casualties for every crime and whether  if your archive include crimes, less major crimes than the chemical weapons that's been  used since 2011?  Right.  So we didn't verify the number of casualties as a result of the chemical attacks.  There are other organizations who are doing so, like the Violation Documentation Center.  And what we are trying to do is to incorporate what they have data set with the visual evidence  so we can understand exactly what happened.  And whether your archive include other crimes that started since 2011 or whether it just  includes crimes since 2014?  So we have videos about crimes from 2011.  Until now, we were not able to process all this information because we're talking about  thousands of footage.  But the plan is to go through it for next year.  Thank you.  Next question, microphone number three.  Hi.  I just wanted to say that you're doing a great job.  It's very important that somebody does this.  And please keep this up.  It's actually two questions.  First question is, do you have a narrative which brings the facts together in a way?  I'm not talking about a factual narrative, but what the different parties involved in  this war are saying and what they're claiming about these events.  So we know what happened, but what are they saying about it?  Do you have that on your platform?  And the second question is, how can we help?  I mean, we have a lot of people here in this room probably want to help, so how can we  do that?  Right.  So the first question, we don't have the narrative from all the groups that are on the ground.  What we focus on is just contextualizing the visual evidence and make sure that it has  more metadata so it's more understandable and has a value to be used for advocacy purposes,  accountability purposes, and so on.  In terms of the help, I mean, we are here really to reach to the hackers community and  to everyone who is able to help technically and non-technically on this in terms of research,  building methodology, technical infrastructure, and more.  And just to add onto that, I mean, a lot of the methods that we're using are pretty,  they're not that difficult.  And all of our methodologies are outlined in every report that we're writing.  But we're going to be making this toolkit that's available on Git, so if you have any  questions, please help us there, give us some comments, that would be really helpful.  There's also a huge backlog of lots of videos.  I mean, if you have time, it would be great to help us with some of those.  Thanks.  Thank you.  I think we have one more time.  Time for a squeeze and one more question, but please be precise.  Maybe the IRC channel.  Well, we have questions from IRC.  One question is, if you work, it's based on the international human rights definition  or if there's a special human rights definition made in Syria?  I'm sorry, can you repeat the question?  One user wants to know if your work is based on the international human rights definition  by the UN or if your work relies on a special human rights definition defined in Syria?  So we're using the UNHCR categories, which means we are working according to the international  humanitarian law, basically.  So some of that is related to also the Syrian code panel, and some of it is not there, but  the standard is UNHCR and the international humanitarian law.  I'm afraid that's all the time we have.  Thank you very much, guys.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.
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