By Ariela Levy

In Hollywood movies, weapons trafficking is done by secret agents in hidden back alleys; the job of spies and underground networks. But over the last year in Libya, not only have the violations of the arms embargo happened in broad daylight, they are splashed on social media and easily discoverable by open source investigators.

Tools needed: InVid-WeVerify plugin installed in Chrome or Firefox, Screenshot tool for video searches

On 28 June 2019, an aircraft bomb fell on a family home in the village of Warzan, near Ta’iz in southwestern Yemen. The detonation collapsed the front of the home, the pancaking floors killing six civilians inside, including three children, aged 12, nine, and six. Fifteen minutes later, a second strike hit the structure, the pilot returning to ensure the home was destroyed.

Tools needed: InVid-WeVerify plugin installed in Chrome or Firefox

This article is based on a talk given at the 2018 International Journalism Festival “On big data, small tasks and massive audience engagement”

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. 

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. 

Open source information about human rights abuses can frequently be graphic and deeply disturbing. In Amnesty International’s Evidence Lab, responsibly dealing with videos containing violent and distressing imagery, and avoiding the risks of vicarious or secondary trauma is something we take very seriously. We talk about it frequently, check in with each other as a team, and generally strive for best practices to mitigate the risk of exposure to traumatic content and work to support colleagues when we need to. 

Tutorial on how to install and use Youtube-dl to download audiovisual content from Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and thousands of other supported sites

Tutorial on using Snapchat and Snap Map to monitor, discover and preserve content related to developing crises 

Tutorial on building a single panorama image from a video can help with verification in order to protect from repeatedly viewing the most traumatic parts of a video