About Amnesty Decoders Amnesty International’s Decoders is a platform for digital volunteers around the world. It enables them to use their computers or phones to help Amnesty researchers sift through large quantities of pictures, information and documents using aspects of crowd-sourcing, micro-tasking, gamification and collaboration. Thousands of “Decoders”, as they’re affectionately known, complete tasks via…
The summer of 2020 brought new waves of protests around the world some in cities and countries that have long known unrest, and some in places unused to such large-scale demonstrations. In many of these protests, police responded with excessive force. Footage from these locations, some of which have not previously been well documented by…
It has been three years since an estimated 740,000 Rohingya fled the Myanmar military’s targeted campaign of violence in Rakhine State for refugee camps in Bangladesh. Yet for the Rohingya remaining in Myanmar, life is still full of danger and human rights violations continue. In January, as part of an ongoing case about alleged genocide…
Many disinformation or malware campaigns rely on a computer architecture based on several servers and domains, and even if they often try to hide the infrastructure, it has to be accessible online. Investigating these infrastructure links is often a good way to get a broader view of the campaign. This is one of the tools…
Tear Gas: An Investigation is the result of 18 months of research, documentation and analysis by Amnesty International. The multimedia site looks into what tear gas is, how it is used and documents scores of cases of its misuse by security forces worldwide, often resulting in severe injuries or death. As most protests today are…
Amnesty International’s weapons investigator surveys some of the weapon used unlawfully by Iraqi security forces against protesters.
The Crisis Evidence Lab just celebrated the publication of the first-ever textbook providing background, insights and practical tips for human rights investigators in the open source community. The Oxford University Press title Digital Witness: Using Open Source Information for Human Rights Investigation, Documentation, and Accountability officially launched at Amnesty International UK’s Human Rights Action Centre…
Tutorial on using the Google Translate for Chrome when carrying out digital verification in a foreign language.
Tools needed: InVid-WeVerify plugin installed in Chrome or Firefox, Screenshot tool for video searches Skill Level: Basic WHY USE REVERSE IMAGE SEARCH? One of the introductory tools that we share in our trainings is a “reverse image search.” It is the first step we take to verify a piece of visual content in many of…
Tools needed: InVid-WeVerify plugin installed in Chrome or Firefox Skill Level: Intermediate – some verification knowledge required One of the main tools we at Amnesty International’s Evidence Lab recommend to all open source investigators is the InVid-WeVerify web browser plugin for Chrome or Firefox. It is built as a Swiss Army Knife for verification, containing…
Remote sensing is the science of gathering data from a distance and is often for earth-observing purposes. The most common ways the data is gathered is through satellites, planes or drones. Over the last 10 years, remote sensing data and, more specifically, satellite imagery, has become more and more accessible to the general public. The…
With the rise of digital technologies, the ubiquity of smartphones and the expansion of social media, human rights investigators have access to more information than ever before. With this opportunity comes the challenge of sifting through huge volumes of data to find signals of human rights violations. One of the solutions we devised in the…