Archival commentaries 2014
January: Photographs of the dead
Point. Tap. Tap again to send. Photography has come a long way from the days of glass plates and darkrooms smelling of developer chemicals. This month photographs are central to a quite astonishing number of events. Add to this the videos uploaded to YouTube that seem to document human rights abuses, and we encountered a relentless flood of images.
Certainly the biggest photo-related story in January was the report from a panel of experts who examined a sample of some 55,000 images of the dead in Syria (see Syria item below). The report not only provides the legal perspective on the possible use of these images but also provides a good primer on the forensic examination of electronic photographic images to see whether they have been altered (the experts concluded that they had not). Photographs of dead bodies featured in a number of other reports. British Pathe released footage and still images its photographers took of executions during conflicts across the world. Photos of U.S. Marines in Fallujah, Iraq, apparently burning bodies led to the opening of an official investigation. And an Afghan government commission investigating deaths from an airstrike on 15 January handed out a dossier that included a photograph, purportedly of the funeral for civilians killed in that attack but actually taken at a funeral in 2009 and distributed at that time by the media.
Photographs of dead bodies were not the only stories in January. The family of a young boy executed in the U.S. State of South Carolina 70 years ago used photographs as part of the argument to reopen the case against him. The usual U.S. practice of making public the photographs of those arrested (“mug shots”) was called into question by legislators in the U.S. State of Georgia who argued that the arrest images should be restricted until a person is proven guilty, a position that is hotly contested by the Georgia Press Association. And a technology story reported that researchers have discovered that by using high-resolution photos of victims of crime they can look at the reflections in the subject’s eyes and see the images of perpetrators and bystanders.
An essay published in the New York Times, written by a professor at New York University, raises important questions about photographs taken by perpetrators. She calls the Syrian photographs “bewildering” and asks, “Wouldn’t such a government want to hide its crimes rather than record them?” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/opinion/advertisements-for-death.html?_r=0 But archivists know that governments and non-governmental groups and individuals regularly document their violent activities, including arrests, deaths, and harm to people. What archivists have to do is make sure that these images—gruesome as they always are, voluminous as they often are—are preserved and protected. In the short term these images are legal evidence; in the long term they are evidence of how we treat each other and the continuous struggle for the right to be human. When such images should be made available and to whom is a separate question, but it cannot even be raised unless archives preserve the images in the first place.
February: Why do repressive entities keep extensive records?
The scene was new but utterly familiar: rebels, curious citizens, and journalists showing cameras partially burned documents, pulling papers from the water of a reservoir, posting items online. It was Ukraine in February 2014 at the residence of former president Viktor Yanukovych, but it could have been Egypt or Libya, Lithuania or Chad. Rebellions prompt destruction and preservation of records.
One constant question is why repressive bodies, particularly secret police who keep such extensive records, don’t destroy them when faced with a revolutionary situation. Security services keep the records they need to carry out their work, and the volume is enormous. Then, faced with riots in the streets, they can and often do destroy a small body of very sensitive records, but they simply cannot destroy everything. That was particularly true when records were mostly paper, but it is also true in the electronic world where wiping computers clean and making the data unrecoverable requires technical skills. Add to that the likelihood that today there are copies of documents on personal computer drives and even personal electronic devices, and total destruction is nearly impossible.
Even if special bodies of records are destroyed, the great duplication of copies, both electronic and paper, means that the destruction of one record usually does not destroy all the information it contained. In the item reported below on the British government giving advice to the government of India (see India/United Kingdom) the U.K. Cabinet Secretary said that although some military files were destroyed, “copies of at least some documents on destroyed files were also in other departmental files.” In Guatemala, the police in Quiche seem to have destroyed the records in that departmental headquarters, but the reports from Quiche to national police headquarters remained in the files in Guatemala City.
Add to the issues of speed and duplication the conviction of the security services that they are permanent and their records are inviolate, and you have another reason records are not totally destroyed. J. Edgar Hoover , the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s longtime director, could never have imagined that a farm girl from Iowa like me would be reading his mail, but that’s what happened when a court in the United States ordered the U.S. National Archives to undertake a comprehensive appraisal of the Bureau’s records in 1980-81. The same would be true for archivists reading the Stasi files, the KGB files in Latvia, or the police files in Paraguay: to the police, the unimaginable happened.
Of course we must constantly fight to preserve records. Of course we need good records laws, strong penalties for unauthorized destruction, and archivists who stubbornly schedule records for preservation in the face of pressures to authorize destruction. Of course in a revolutionary situation the concerned public needs to protect sensitive archives, as the Germans did in 1990 when they prevented destruction of Stasi records. But it can be done, and we can use our collective powers to ensure that the written word endures.
March: Records and the prosecution of Ivan Demjanjuk
At the 2014 Ina Irvine Annual Lecture at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Professor Lawrence Douglas examined the prosecution of Ivan Demjanjuk in Germany in 2009. Demjanjuk was a Ukrainian who was drafted into the Soviet army during World War II, was captured by the Germans, and then volunteered to join the German SS which controlled the police forces and ran the concentration camps. Demjanjuk was tried in Israel in 1987, charged as the Treblinka killing center guard known to prisoners as “Ivan the Terrible” who had operated and maintained the diesel engine used to pump carbon monoxide fumes into the Treblinka gas chambers. Although convicted by the lower court, Israel’s Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1993 because of reasonable doubt that Demjanjuk was the guard at Treblinka known as Ivan the Terrible (in fact, he was not).
In July 2009, German prosecutors indicted Demjanjuk on 28,060 counts of accessory to murder at Sobibor. German personnel records from the camp at Trawniki where Demjanjuk trained to be a “police auxiliary” showed that Demjanjuk had served as a guard at the Sobibor killing center from March through September 1943 (these records, captured by Soviet forces, are in the Archives of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation in Moscow). Other records showed that all guards at Sobibor were used in the killing program, or, as Douglas said, there was not a guard who was just a cook. It was clear from the records that the function of all guards was to facilitate mass murder. By the prosecution’s meticulous use of records, showing the organization of the Sobibor camp, the functions of the guards, and the presence of Demjanjuk as one of the guards, the German court convicted him in 2011. Douglas concluded, “Guilt follows function.”
Archivists describe the functions of the organizations whose records they hold; in fact, one of the international standards for describing archives is for describing functions. Creating such descriptions and making them available is our function. We are key participants in advancing the work of human rights.
For further information on the Demjanjuk trials, see http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007956
April: Archives and talks of reconciliation
Two quite remarkable statements were issued within a few days of each other by political leaders in the Mideast. The first came on April 23, the day before the 99th anniversary of the start of the events of 1915 in which hundreds of thousands of Armenians living in Turkey were killed or driven from their homes. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a message in nine languages—including Armenian--that concluded, “It is our hope and belief that the peoples of an ancient and unique geography, who share similar customs and manners will be able to talk to each other about the past with maturity and to remember together their losses in a decent manner. And it is with this hope and belief that we wish that the Armenians who lost their lives in the context of the early twentieth century rest in peace, and we convey our condolences to their grandchildren.” He called again for a joint historical commission to study the events of 1915 and declared “we have opened our archives to all researchers.” Turkish media described Erdogan’s message as a “surprising statement,” while the Armenian president “brushed off” the condolences, demanding that Turkey recognize the killings as genocide. http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/04/armenian-genocide-erdogan-message-condolences.html for statement in English http://www.todayszaman.com/news-345906-erdogan-offers-turkeys-first-condolences-to-armenians-for-1915.html; http://www.voanews.com/content/analysts-call-turkish-pms-condolences-on-armenia-a-political-ploy/1903147.html
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issued a statement in English, Arabic and Hebrew on April 27, the day before Israel’s official Holocaust Remembrance Day, in which he said, “What happened to the Jews in the Holocaust is the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era” and expressed sympathy “with the families of the victims and many other innocent people who were killed by the Nazis.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded by saying the statement was a “public-relations stunt.” http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/04/abbas-holocaust-was-heinous-crime-201442715735582213.html; for statement from the Palestine News and Information Agency http://english.wafa.ps/index.php?action=detail&id=25007
Clearly the Turkish and Palestinian statements are steps in the right direction. The formation of a joint historical commission and the opening of all relevant archives would also be good steps. But what is interesting about these asymmetric gestures from an archivist’s point is view is how they fit into the records of diplomacy. These are diplomatic initiatives through the state media, but apparently without any direct delivery to the other government that has the principal interest in the issue. Where is the official copy of Erdogan’s statement in the Armenian government archives or Abbas’s in Israel? We can assume that multiple copies exist in at least the records of the prime minister, the foreign ministry, the intelligence service and the defense ministry, perhaps a foreign broadcast monitoring unit. But unlike the direct communications between one government and another which go through foreign ministries and are filed in those archives, these statements—directed, to be sure, to a people not to a specific government—do not have a similarly obvious official place within the records of the government. Yet someone somewhere in the government has to make sure that these overtures are completely and accurately preserved in Armenia and Israel as well as in Turkey and Palestine.
Alex Boraine was the deputy chairperson of the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In his book A Country Unmasked he mused on the problem of reconciliation, quoting Philippine poet J. Cabazres’ poem on reconciliation which says, in part, “Talk to us about reconciliation/ Only if your words are not products of your devious scheme/ To silence our struggle for freedom.” Archives must preserve that talk of reconciliation over months and years, trusting that it will help, in the long term, change a divided past into a shared future.
May: The record and the right to be foRgotten
Judges at the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) declared that Europeans have a “right to be forgotten” and archivists worldwide shivered. Costeja Gonzalez of Spain and the Spanish Agency for Data Protection (AEPD) brought a case to the ECJ to force Google Spain and Google Inc. “to remove or conceal the personal data relating to him so that they ceased to be included in the search results and no longer appear in links” to the newspaper in which “an announcement mentioning Mr. Costeja Gonzalez’s name appeared for a real-estate auction connected with attachment proceedings for the recovery of social security debts.” Costeja Gonzalez argued “that the attachment proceedings concerning him had been fully resolved for a number of years and that reference to them was now entirely irrelevant.” He also originally asked the AEPD to order the newspaper to “remove or alter” the pages where the information appeared, but the AEPD rejected that because the newspaper published it “upon the order of the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and was intended to give maximum publicity to the auction in order to secure as many bidders as possible.” ECJ ordered Google to remove the links as requested. http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsessionid=9ea7d2dc30d58be3c845fd10412fab108b7a7423eb7f.e34KaxiLc3qMb40Rch0SaxuNbh90?text=&docid=152065&pageIndex=0&doclang=en&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=49823
As categorical as the court’s “right to be forgotten” language is, another part of the court decision shows that there are cases in which the public interest overrides the privacy of the individual: “Whilst it is true that the data subject’s rights . . also override, as a general rule, that interest of internet users, that balance may however depend, in specific cases, on the nature of the information in question and its sensitivity for the data subject’s private life and on the interest of the public in having that information, an interest which may vary, in particular, according to the role played by the data subject in public life” (paragraph 81). This statement is so general that it is unhelpful: what, indeed, do the judges consider “public life”? In this case, the information was ordered printed by a government agency acting in its official, legal capacity. If that is not public life, what is? “In the first few days after the ruling, about 1,000 Europeans asked Google to take down links, with about half having criminal convictions and half not,” reported the New York Times.
In contrast to this case that led to the ECJ decision, the public seems blasé about massive data breaches that expose personal data to the world. Just in this month there were data breaches in the United States at, for instance, a university, a seed corn company and a gambling casino, while earlier this year Target, a mass retailer, had a breach that affected 110 million credit and debit accounts. Breaches have become so common that insurance companies are now offering policies to cover data breaches. And yet the public outrage is muted: a shrug and shake of the head (unless, of course, your data is used by a criminal).
Where does this leave archives and the archival record? The European case turned in part on the ease with which information can be found; after all, the court did not require the printed records to be expunged, just the link to them. It is especially troubling that this is a link to a public record, and we will have to see how broadly it will be applied to other government information. Presumably archival finding aids with names and digitized items can still be put on line, but the decision will affect researchers: the only way to locate information on a person of interest to the research would be to guess that the records exist in a particular archives, even if the archives site does not appear in a search of information about the person. In a sense, the court is sending research back to the pre-internet days where thinking about the likely location of information was step one and directly contacting the archives was step two. Just as there was paper before print, there were guides before Google. We may all have to learn to use them again. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/business/international/on-the-internet-the-right-to-forget-vs-the-right-to-know.html?_r=0 ; http://siliconangle.com/blog/2014/05/30/data-breach-burnout-the-biggest-threat-of-all/; http://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2014/05/30/All-62-000-workers-at-UPMC-may-now-be-victims-Data-breach-at-UPMC-may/stories/201405300188; http://www.arkansasbusiness.com/article/99018/arkansas-state-notified-of-data-breach-up-to-50000-could-be-affected; http://www.cbronline.com/news/security/monsanto-hit-by-data-breach-4281671; http://www.lowcards.com/data-breach-hits-11-casinos-nevada-24549; http://www.bostonglobe.com/busin
June: Redacting records and risks
The ship sails grandly across the sea at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, Tunisia. Made of tiny pieces of stone called tesserae, the ship is created in extraordinary detail. This mosaic technique has given its name to a reason that institutions refuse to release information: as the United States Department of Justice writes in its Guide to the Freedom of Information Act, the “mosaic” approach is “the concept that apparently harmless pieces of information, when assembled together, could reveal a damaging picture.” It provides another argument for withholding information, whether information relating to national defense or foreign policy or personal privacy. http://www.justice.gov/oip/exemption1.htm
Redacting information—that is, taking pieces of information out of a document so that the rest of the document can be released—makes it possible for researchers to use many more research resources than they would if, for instance, a six page document would have to be withheld because one sentence or one paragraph has information that would violate a person’s privacy. However, for the archivist redacting documents is a time-consuming process that requires great concentration and attention to detail. Most archivists who have redacted documents can recount episodes when pieces of information were missed and therefore released by accident.
The techniques used for redacting paper documents are well-known and time-tested (see, for example, the advice in the International Council on Archives’ “Technical Guidance on Managing Archives with Restrictions” http://www.ica.org/15369/toolkits-guides-manuals-and-guidelines/technical-guidance-on-managing-archives-with-restrictions.html ). Techniques for redacting electronic records are seemingly easier, but great care is needed to ensure that the redacted information cannot be restored. Two reports this month illustrate the problem. In one case, the story began last February when the details of nearly 10,000 asylum seekers were included in an electronic publication posted to the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection’s website, including full names, nationalities, locations, arrival dates and boat arrival information. When The Guardian called attention to the publication, the data was removed. Now the official investigation into the breach says the data “was accessed 123 times” from 104 different electronic addresses and factors contributing to the breach may have included “time pressures, unfamiliarity with certain functionality of Microsoft Word, lack of awareness of roles and responsibilities, and limited awareness of IT security risks associated with online publishing.” http://www.zdnet.com/au/immigration-data-breach-caused-by-human-error-kpmg-7000030508/ In the other case, New York City officials responded to a public records request by releasing details about 173 million taxi routes in the city after they redacted the driver’s license and medallion numbers (a medallion is the taxi registration). A software developer took the data and in under two hours de-anonymized the entire file, which gave “unfettered access to the full map of routes and schedules for every taxi service in New York, potentially putting privacy and security of millions of passengers and their drivers at significant risk.” As the man who decoded the information wrote, “Anonymizing data is really hard.” http://vpncreative.net/2014/06/25/173-million-taxi-records-lost-massive-location-data-heist/; https://medium.com/@vijayp/of-taxis-and-rainbows-f6bc289679a1
Both of these incidents involved relatively straightforward redaction problems. But data mining to create a mosaic of withheld documents presents a more complicated problem. A team of historians, mathematicians, computer scientists and statisticians abased at Colombia University is working on a “multimedia research project” called the “Declassification Engine” in which they are gathering electronic versions of “large numbers of federal documents and creating analytic tools to detect anomalies in the collections.” The team suspects “that by spotting something as subtle as an uptick in a diplomat’s telephone activity they may be able to reveal the existence of historical episodes that the US government has largely suppressed from the public record.” A member of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Historical Review Panel told Columbia Magazine that CIA officials worry that the Declassification Engine “could enable foreign spies or terrorist groups to conduct more powerful data-mining analyses of the nation’s public record than they could otherwise” and this will lead the declassification reviewers to say to themselves, “We’re going to have to work more scrupulously than ever.” http://magazine.columbia.edu/features/winter-2013-14/ghost-files
What does this mean for archivists? It means that anyone involved in electronic redaction needs to have the assistance of a very good computer engineer to make sure redaction cannot be reversed and the information restored, whether in two hours or two days. But it also means that archivists who work to persuade officials to release ever more records in electronic form may find them more and more cautious, as data mining shows how easily a mosaic can be assembled. The institution’s ship will undoubtedly sail on, but it may leave smaller and smaller sets of publicly available electronic records in its wake.
July: Unauthorized use of genetic material
Ebola. Malaysian Air MH 17 crash. Fighting in an arc from Gaza to Baghdad. Unaccompanied children at the southern U.S. border. July was a bad month. All those events received massive, international media coverage. An issue that has not had similar international attention is the developing story of the unauthorized use of genetic material from the Huaorani people of Ecuador, taken from them by U.S. scientists under questionable circumstances. Archives may provide keys to understanding the human rights violation that occurred and perhaps even lead to accountability and compensation.
First, some background. The Huaorani people live in the eastern Amazon region of Ecuador. Exploration for oil began in the Huaorani homeland in the 1930s by Royal Dutch Shell, and starting in the 1960s a number of major oil companies began exploring for oil there. In the early 1990s (the date varies among reports) the Ecuadorean government gave Maxus Energy Corporation from Dallas, Texas, the right to drill and to construct a pipeline and an access road in the Hauorani land.
By the 1990s, medical researchers had become interested in the Huaorani, who may possess a genetic mutation that provides immunity to some diseases including hepatitis. So in an arrangement that is unclear, in 1991 two medical researchers from Harvard University went to Ecuador and “with the help of an oil company liaison” (according to a 2013 article in The Scientist) took as many as 3,500 blood samples from 600 Huaorani members along with some tissue samples. In a report issued in July 2014, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a U.S.-based non-governmental organization, wrote, “Fewer than 20 percent of the participants signed an authorization for the procedure, and all were further under the impression that their blood was being extracted to conduct personal medical examinations.” The samples were brought to the U.S. and in 1994 were provided to the Coriell Institute for Medical Research, based in the U.S. State of New Jersey, which in turn sold Huaorani DNA and cell lines to medical research labs in eight difference countries.
The Huaorani never received the medical reports that they expected, and in 2010 a representative of the people filed a complaint with the government. The Ecuadorian government’s ombudsman opened an investigation, and in June 2014 the President of Ecuador in a radio broadcast announced that he plans to take legal action against the American entities, as Ecuador’s constitution prohibits the use of genetic material and scientific experimentation that undermines human rights. The President acknowledged that there is “no federal law in the United States that provides a legal basis for the claim in court against Coriell, Maxus or researchers from Harvard,” adding, “the law even protects copyright, but does not protect individuals if their blood is taken without their consent.”
http://www.coha.org/biopiracy-the-new-tyrant-of-the-developing-world/; http://www.ecuadortimes.net/2014/06/14/extradition-huaorani-blood-will-difficult-according-correa/ http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34325/title/Bad-Blood/
The case is similar to that of Henrietta Lacks, whose cancer cells were used around the world for 62 years and were the subject of more than 74,000 studies—all without the permission of either Ms. Lacks or her family (see HRWG News 2013-08). In the Huaorani case, many archival records might help strengthen the case for compensation to the Huaorani. First, the government of Ecuador should have the records of the lease to the Maxus oil company, which could clarify the rights the company was given. The government should also have records of the medical personnel coming into the country; presumably they made contact with the ministry of health. Second, if the U.S. Embassy in Quito facilitated the research trip, both the Ecuadorean Foreign Ministry and the U.S. Embassy would have a record. Third, Harvard Medical School records should include information on the researchers and their project, the records of negotiations with Maxus to gain permission to work in its concessional area, the records of the permissions given by the estimated 20% of the Huaorani who gave assent or from the leaders on behalf of the group, and the research done with the samples. Fourth, if the research trip was funded by an external body (as most all are), there should be a record of the proposal and the final report, both at Harvard and at the funding agency. Fifth, as we learned in the case of the Guatemalan STD experiments (see HRWG News 2010-10), the personal papers of the researchers might also contain valuable information and provide insight into the research trip. Sixth, Coriell Institute should have the records of its acquisition of the samples and the records of their sale and distribution; it might also have used the samples in its own research, and those records should be there, too. And seventh, the Maxus oil company should have records of its agreement with the government of Ecuador, its agreement with Harvard to permit the researchers to work in its area (and likely providing them housing and transport as well). Maxus is now owned by the YPF energy company in Argentina, which was nationalized in 2012, making its records government records of Argentina. However, it seems unlikely that the older records of Maxus would have been sent to Argentina.
So, as in many human rights cases, to unravel the story and understand the events, we need the records of government, of business, of educational institutions, and possibly the personal papers of the individuals. It is no wonder that pursuing human rights cases can be a very costly research business.
August: Records of anti-state groups
Watch beheadings? Yes, if you follow jihadi social media. View murder and maiming? Yes, if you tap into a social media feed from a Mexican drug cartel. Surely intelligence agencies around the world are downloading, analyzing and preserving these horrible images, which—along with the rest of the agency files--will one day become part of the nation’s archives.
But what of the perpetrators? Are they preserving their videos? Do they keep archives? Given the size of the major jihadi groups and drug cartels and the finances they control, they must have archives somewhere.
Evidence for recordkeeping by anti-state groups comes from captured records, primarily electronic, for example:
*a laptop used by the FARC guerilla group in Colombia (captured by the Colombian military in a 2008 raid) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/world/americas/10venezuela.html?_r=0;
*a laptop of Al-Qaeda in Iraq’s Abu Al-Zarqawi, (seized by U.S. forces in 2005) http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0427/p03s01-woiq.html;
*a laptop of an Indonesian militant said to be behind the bombings of hotels in Bali and Jakarta, showing links between Indonesian groups and Al Qaeda (captured in 2009) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/world/asia/18indo.html?_r=0;
*laptops, hard drives, computer disks, thumb drives and DVDs captured during the U.S. raid on Osama bin Laden’s residence, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bin-laden-phone-numbers-help-spin-intel-web/ and
*a laptop of an ISIS rebel that contained 35,347 files (captured by a Syria rebel group in 2014) http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/08/28/found_the_islamic_state_terror_laptop_of_doom_bubonic_plague_weapons_of_mass_destruction_exclusive
Paper documents also have been recovered, including in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s residence. Some of the most notable items were found in May 2013 by the Associated Press “in a building occupied by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in Timbuktu.” At the end of December 2013 AP published an article on the documents, headlined “Al-Qaida meticulously records every expense, like 60 cents for cake”: “The accounting system on display in the documents . . is a mirror image of what researchers have discovered in other parts of the world where al-Qaida operates.” The documents “also include corporate workshop schedules, salary spreadsheets, philanthropy budgets, job applications, public relations advice and letters from the equivalent of a human resources division,” leading the AP to conclude that al-Qaida “is attempting to behave like a multinational corporation.” http://storify.com/AP_CorpComm/ap-exclusive-the-al-qaida-papers
Like any organization that does not operate exclusively by face to face contact, these violent organizations engage in actions and transactions over time and space. Although the exact contents of most of the computer records are known only to intelligence agencies, experts say they contain financial information, orders from central commanders to operational units, lists of unit members and coordination between groups. Somewhere a computer must hold the items uploaded to internet sites. For groups selling drugs or crude oil on the black market, a computer somewhere controlled by the finance officer must have records of these massive cash revenues and the expenditures on arms and living expenses (at least for the leaders) and, of course, computers and communications equipment. So yes, they create records and maintain them while needed for current business.
But do they preserve them? That we don’t know, and we won’t until one day a the records of a demobilized or disarmed or defeated group are made available for access by researchers other than intelligence officers. Until then we will know only what has been obtained by reporters or what intelligence agencies tell us. And that, surely, is a partial picture of the records of anti-state groups.
September: Vido evidence and archival appraisal
Courtland Milloy, a columnist for the Washington Post recently asked, “Does it have to be on video to get us to do the right thing?” He discussed the cellphone video of a man who jumped the White House fence, the business surveillance video that recorded the last image of a university student who then disappeared, the “body cameras” that black youths in Ferguson, Missouri, have begun wearing to “record their encounters with police” (in Ferguson an unarmed back teenage boy was fatally shot by police last August), an elevator surveillance camera that showed a professional football player knocking out his fiancé, and ISIS-made videos of its members beheading captives. But, he noted, for domestic crimes, including when parents murder children, usually no video images catch the violence. http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/2014/09/23/756b7750-4365-11e4-9a15-137aa0153527_story.html
This issue of HRWG News is full of references to videos. As records that might be used to prosecute crimes or protect human rights, videos will be weighed for their evidential value by prosecutors and judges. Their acceptability will vary: video from a “neutral” camera in a place of business may be found credible; videos from official cameras worn by police officers and mounted on police vehicles will be seriously considered, as will be the videos of police interrogations and confessions. Videos from cellphones will be harder to judge, particularly if no date or caption is included. Videos retrieved from social media—and not by the person who posted the images—will need close scrutiny. Raw television footage may be credible; edited clips shown on the air may be less so. And so on.
And every video will have to be judged forensically, for editing and deletions, manipulation and distortion. This is not new: courts have been examining documents for centuries and photographs for all of the last century. Photographs have regularly been manipulated, not only for artistic purposes but for political ones: see, for famous examples, the book by David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia.
But what is new is the volume of images. As cameras proliferate in the justice sector, particularly with police forces, archivists will be faced with appraisal decisions on vast amounts of image material. Videoed confessions are one thing; a videoed interrogation lasting hours is another. And as courts increasingly record their sessions on video, archivists for the courts will have to decide which videos of which trials to retain. Think of the situation of a video of a court hearing where the video of an interrogation is shown: should both the interrogation video in the records of the police and the video in the records of the court be retained?
No doubt digital video is the mode of evidence today and in the near future. As we appraise records of the justice system where video images are replete, we archivists really do have to make up our minds about the long term value and the costs that will be involved in the preservation of this important flood of records. To change the columnist’s question: If it is on video, what is the right thing to do?
October: Interviews, investigations, preservation
Persecution, privacy and prosecution are linked by more than the alphabet. Nongovernmental human rights groups rely heavily on interviews for their reports; although they try to get official records, government data and statements from leaders, these attempts usually fall short and interviews are the only way to learn what happened. United Nations investigating bodies, such as the Joint Human Rights Office in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (see below), also rely heavily on interviews, often for the same reasons. These groups promise confidentiality to the persons interviewed, particularly if the person has a well-founded fear of persecution. For example, Amnesty International published a report in October on the Ethiopian government’s persecution of the Oromos people, the largest ethnic group in the country. It was based on over 240 interviews, all conducted outside Ethiopia because Amnesty is barred from entering the country. In the “Methodology” section of its report, Amnesty wrote, “Many interviewees feared repercussions if their names were revealed, particularly those who still have family members in Ethiopia. For this reason the names of all interviewees have been withheld. In some cases, the location of interviewees has also been withheld to avoid endangering them. In some cases, the location in which the events described took place has also been withheld for the same reason.” In addition to the fear of persecution, information gathered by the investigators may have significant privacy issues, particularly if the interviewee talks about sexual or medical matters.
But what if, after these reports expose serious crimes, there is an effort to prosecute the wrong-doers? Can the reports and the interviews on which they are based be used by the prosecutor? This is a problem.
Take the case of Laurent Gbagbo, the former president of Cote d’Ivoire, on trial at the International Criminal Court on four counts of crimes against humanity. He was arrested and transferred to the Court in late 2011, and in February 2013 the Court held a “confirmation of charges hearing” on his case. The ICC Prosecutor used reports of nongovernmental organizations as part of the evidence supporting the charges against Gbagbo. In June the Court postponed its decision, asking the Prosecutor to present more evidence, writing, “[A]lthough there is no general rule against hearsay evidence before this Court, it goes without saying that hearsay statements in the Prosecutor’s documentary evidence will usually have less probative value. Reliance upon such evidence should thus be avoided wherever possible. . . . Heavy reliance upon anonymous hearsay, as is often the basis of information contained in reports of nongovernmental organizations (‘NGO reports’) and press articles, is problematic for the following reasons. Proving allegations solely through anonymous hearsay puts the Defence in a difficult position because it is not able to investigate and challenge the trustworthiness of the source(s) of the information . . it is highly problematic when the Chamber itself does not know the source of the information and is deprived of vital information about the source of the evidence. In such cases, the Chamber is unable to assess the trustworthiness of the source, making it all but impossible to determine what probative value to attribute to the information.” After the Prosecutor submitted additional information, the Court did confirm the charges. The resubmission referred to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports, but only in scattered references, with witness statements making up most of the evidence.
Why not use the interviews themselves? The answer is that the group conducting the interviews gave promises of confidentiality, and if those are not kept, it will make it difficult if not impossible for the group to continue its investigative work. Their reputation as trustworthy is vital. One option would be for the prosecutor to ask the group to secure the permission of the person interviewed to share the information; that is a burden that the group might not be willing to accept. Alternatively, the group could provide information to the prosecutor to be used for background only, allowing the prosecutor to decide whether the information a person provided is so vital to the case that an effort should be made by the prosecutor’s staff to find the person and re-interview him or her and use the later interview as evidence.
But if groups cannot allow the raw interviews to be used for prosecution, will the groups preserve them? They should, not only because the interviews provide the background to the published report but also because they could be used later by the group to try to determine what happened to the people interviewed during the crisis. And, of course, they provide an incomparable record of what happened.
That leads us to the final question: when will scholars have access to the raw interviews? This is a matter of timing. We would all agree that records of interviews with people who were subjected to human rights violations by, say, Napoleon’s forces could be made available today. We would probably be willing to open such records from World War I, as both perpetrators and victims are likely to be dead (see the Ireland entry below for an example of opening similar records from the early part of the 20th century). But if we want human rights investigations to continue (and we do) and if there is a need to promise confidentiality to get information (and there often is), then we need to recognize that future access will be sure but not swift. Anything else risks jeopardizing lives, the possibility of future investigations, and prosecutions. http://www.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/doc/doc1599831.pdf; http://www.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/doc/doc1783399.pdf; http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AFR25/006/2014/en/539616af-0dc6-43dd-8a4f-34e77ffb461c/afr250062014en.pdf .
November: Five years of HRWG News
This issue marks the end of five years of monthly publication of Human Rights Working Group News. Here are a few thoughts about coverage since that first, brief issue of December 2009:
First, hacking and tracking: reports of hacking, of systems holding personal information that have had unauthorized intruders, are so frequent that I have stopped reporting all but the largest or those that are in some way distinctive. I do report on studies of the phenomenon; one is in the “general” section below. Similarly, particularly since the revelations made by Edward Snowden in June 2013, there are so many stories on government surveillance that it is impossible to list them all.
Second, although I report on the mishandling of large blocks of paper and audiovisual materials with human rights information, there are so many “I found a medical file on the side of the road” cases that I no longer list them. It is hard to tell whether this seeming epidemic of mishandling physical records is because they are not electronic and therefore viewed as “old stuff” or whether there is simply carelessness unbounded.
Third, there is a wealth of stories on the rapidly increasing use of satellite imagery to track conflict and physical facilities, often with remarkable results. And the immediacy of the images flowing from conflict, picked up and retained outside the conflict zone, is also now a daily phenomenon.
Fourth, corruption, especially governmental, surely has at least secondary human rights implications (siphoning off funds that could be used for health programs, for example), but I list only stories that show a relatively clear link between the corruption and an issue that the Working Group follows. I would be happy to hear contrary arguments about this practice.
Now some thanks: first of all, to Cristina Bianchi, who for all five years has translated the News into French, and to Roman Lescano, who for the past several years has been translating it into Spanish. They never complain about grammar or sentences that are too complex; they just do the job. What a gift to us all.
Thanks, too, to Jens Boel, who sends the News out to a UNESCO mailing list; to Bryan Corbett, who makes sure the ICA listserve runs; and to all those people who repost the News. And thanks to all the people who have sent in items to be included. More, more!
A big thank you to all those journalists and essayists and bloggers who write stories about human rights topics and to groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Center for Transitional Justice, and the International Crisis Group who investigate and report. Thanks, too, to the news digests: RAINbyte, Documentary Heritage News, Social Action Foundation for Equity, Eurasia Review and so many others. None of this would be possible without your work.
The News began as an effort to show the wide range of archives that are important to human rights and the diversity of issues that have an archival angle. That has been easy, it turns out. Government records are key, of course, but we have had stories on business records, archives of faith-based groups, medical records, items from colleges and universities, oral histories and maps and satellite images, databases and diaries. The hard part is moving from observation to action, from knowing that the records are important to preserving them and making them available. For that we have to rely on individuals being aware of human rights issues as they go about the regular business of the archival world. We must rely on the practitioner, remembering always that human rights rest on records.
December: 2014 in review
A few of the stories we followed in the year 2014:
January. Some 55,000 photographs, nearly 30,000 of which were taken and smuggled out of Syria by a Syrian police photographer of detainees who were killed, were reviewed by an inquiry team of three lawyers (two former chief prosecutors of the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the former lead prosecutor of the Slobodan Milosevic case at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) and three forensic specialists, who concluded that the photographs were authentic.
February. Agence France Press reported that declassified French documents show the “radioactive spread from French nuclear tests in Algeria in the 1960s” was much greater than previously acknowledged, stretching “across all of West Africa and up to southern Europe.”
March. Videotaped testimonies by prisoners “recorded on mobile phones, smuggled out of prison and obtained by journalists” include claims of torture and forced confessions and deplore the conditions in Egyptian prisons, reported Al Jazeera.
April. Irish Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams was arrested by the Police Service of Northern Ireland for questioning about the 1972 murder of Jean McConville. Information from oral history interviews held in the archives at Boston College was central to the arrest.
May. Judges at the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) declared that Europeans have a “right to be forgotten.”
June. The Swiss Cabinet announced “that it had removed access restrictions to archive files associated with capital and other export transactions with South Africa during the apartheid era,” reported swissinfo.ch.
July. The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a U.S.-based non-governmental organization, issued a report on the unauthorized use of genetic material taken from the Huaorani people of Ecuador by U.S. scientists under questionable circumstances. The Council wrote, “Fewer than 20 percent of the participants signed an authorization for the procedure, and all were further under the impression that their blood was being extracted to conduct personal medical examinations.”
August. The National Truth Commission in Brazil allowed Reuters to review documents providing evidence that businesses during the military dictatorship in Brazil “secretly helped the military identify suspected ‘subversives’ and union activists on their payrolls.”
September. During negotiations in Havana, Cuba, between the Colombian government and the FARC guerilla group, the FARC representative called upon the government “to open-up all the archives, to declassify and lift all the legal prohibitions covering the most responsible people, and to impede the destruction of archives that has been occurring,” reported telesurtv.net.
October. Inter Press Service news agency reported that records published by India’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) show that 92 women are raped every day, and in 3,860 of the 5,337 rape cases reported in the past ten years, “the culprits were either acquitted or discharged by the court for lack of ‘proper’ evidence.”
November. The Punjab (Pakistan) government is computerizing its land records, but the Board of Revenue told the Express Tribune that it is “facing strong resistance from the land mafia and certain revenue functionaries. In several districts, some records, including the register haqdaran zameen, field books, garwari, taghaurat and mutations, have gone ‘missing.’”
December. The United Nations decided to open a new investigation into the death in 1961 of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold and asked member governments to declassify relevant documents.