"Being charmed with the sound of a whistle, I voluntarily offered & gave all my money for one. I had given 4 times as much for it as it was worth. I cried with vexation; more chagrin than the whistle gave me pleasure." https://americanliterature.com/author/benjamin-franklin/letter/the-whistle

The Whistle is a dynamic team that brings a broad variety of perspectives and experience to work on the problems of inequality and inefficiency in the digital reporting of human rights violations – without losing sight of the values of solidarity, trust and care that are central to human rights work.

We are academics coming from the fields of sociology, development studies, psychology and business, with previous work experience at places like Bain & Company and Google, as well as developers with background in a number of related projects, including the Wikirate project for corporate supply chain transparency.

We are an academic start-up, which means that we both build tools in close collaboration with human rights partners and provide expert advice to projects and organizations interested in incorporating technology in their human rights work.  Our current NGO partner is Global Rights Nigeria, where we are working to support their ‘Rape is a Crime’ campaign, and we are in the process of developing two exciting use cases with new partners.

This is where we need your help. We are for the rest of 2018 who can both provide vision and support the execution of these two test cases.  This is your chance to work on a technology for good project that can enhance the number, variety and quality of reports documenting human rights violations.

As we are funded by with a Horizon 2020 grant from the European Commission and are based at the University of Cambridge, we are limited, by their rules, to offering a salary that is in line with academic pay-scales – which means it is not as much as salaries in the private sector.  We know you could find a more competitive salary elsewhere, and we wish we could offer more, but we hope that the exiting and hands-on nature of our work could provide you an experience that has its own rewards.

We are looking for someone who relishes problem-solving and has experience with and really enjoys working with a diverse team to turn their ideas into pragmatic solutions anchored in the real world.  Please take a look at our job description.  We look forward to any questions you might have and hope to see your application!

The Whistle has been featured as a case study on the University of Cambridge’s Research Impact page.

A mobile app simplifies the process of reporting for the witness, whilst simultaneously prompting them to include the metadata information required for verification. Aside from providing more metadata for the fact-finder to corroborate, The Whistle also serves to educate witnesses about what data is most helpful and why. It can also signpost them to sources of information and support around security and human rights.

Looking forwards, the application plans to facilitate the reporting and verification of civilian witness accounts of human rights abuses in partnership with NGOs across the world.

Click here to read the full article.

Penelope Sonder from The IPF spoke to Rebekah Larsen, a Research Assistant at The Whistle, about the necessity of digital human rights reporting and the challenges associated with verification, privacy, and communication.

Acting as a new kind of mediator, The Whistle aims to help organisations to correctly and quickly verify as many reports as possible so they can actually address the human rights violations. Social media has done wonders for citizen journalism, but it also means that human rights organisations are often short on time and resources because of the sheer volume of material to be verified and the diffusion and complexity of digital tools used in verification.

“The Whistle aims to help human rights organisations verify more reports and more quickly. This way, more voices are heard and more human rights violations can be addressed.”

Click here to read the article on The IPF’s website.

The article provides context as to why digital verification is needed in the realm of human rights fact-finding.

“In our digitally enabled world, a legion of ‘civilian witnesses’ has sprung up: individuals “in the wrong place at the wrong time” who capture an event and then publish the scrap of footage or the incriminating photograph on social media. But amid the fog of propaganda, hoaxes and digital manipulation, how can we tell what’s real and what’s fake?”

It goes on to detail The Whistle’s initiative to provide NGO’s with a tool to help make the verification process more efficient and effective.

“Cambridge researchers are developing an automated tool, ‘the Whistle’, to help verify the authenticity of digital evidence.”

Click here to read the full article on the University of Cambridge website.

Smartphones are critical for refugees, not only to communicate with family and friends but to serve as a potential reporting mechanism for human rights abuses.

Whatsapp, a free app which enables users to make calls, send texts, and share photos and videos globally, provides refugees with a way of communicating with family or friends. Facebook Messenger allows messages and calls between Facebook users and is accessible to anyone with a Facebook account. Maps.me enables user to find their geographical location anywhere in the world, including at sea, wirelessly. Dropbox enables users to store and access and submit critical information, such as immigration forms, using a third-party digital space instead of the individual’s device’s storage.

These apps, stemming from existing web-based services designed to allow free and, essentially, limitless communication and sharing, have empowered refugees by enabling them to access and disseminate critical information.

New apps that have been designed to help refugees, however, are costly as they require individuals to learn how to navigate a new interface, perhaps use more data, and are less trustworthy (due to unfamiliarity) than those that they already use. Indeed, the mere act of downloading an app in the first place requires users to break with existing behavioural patterns on their devices, reducing the probability of successful adoption of any other app, beyond popular social media and communication apps.

One solution to this problem is incorporating a reporting mechanism within a familiar app such as Facebook messenger, using bots. Since many refugees already utilise Facebook messenger to communicate, there is not only a higher level of trust in the app, but they already possess the knowledge of how to use the app. By including a bot in Facebook messenger, a refugee would be able to submit information about a human rights abuse by simply sending a message and responding to questions. These questions would be designed to prompt users for verifiable information, and would also record their geo-location and other important metadata needed to verify their report.

Nevertheless, another more pressing barrier to these new initiatives is the lack of Internet access. Although refugees have data plans from their home countries, they lose connectivity at sea and in rural areas, often only establishing connection through an international carrier once they have reached their destination. The places refugees live, such as camps or rural areas, often lack digital networks and infrastructure or have expensive connectivity available. This short clip created by BBC Media Action and their research with DAHLIA simulates the reality of a refugees access to internet as well as their use of social media and communication apps.  Due to the scarcity of Internet that refugees face on a daily basis, many mobile apps created in response to the refugee crisis will have little, if any, impact on the real situations of refugees.

Technology designed to aid refugees must therefore aim to fit into the daily lives, which often includes limited or no access to Internet and the afore-mentioned communication apps. It is however possible to produce scripts, which when combined with platforms and tools such as Twilio and Google Sheets, are able to act as SMS bots capable of surveying phones and collecting data, without the need for a data plan. Such an endeavour would nevertheless still leave open-ended questions in terms of security, dissemination and trust.

Any form of technology which aims to aid refugees must be directly related to problems they encounter on the ground while also be adaptable to other circumstances. Overall, it’s important that the design of such technologies result from a sustained relationship between local NGOs on the ground, refugees, and technologists.

For more information about refugee connectivity, see the UNHRC’s Introduction to Refugees and Connectivity.

While the use of video to record human rights violations is not new, the drastic impact of new technologies, stemming from the increased availability of mobile phones and the proliferation of digital social networks, have profound implications for human rights researchers, NGOs, and international organisation. For example, a large amount of videos on YouTube are in fact small scrapes that have been re-uploaded. These recycled clips lack the original meta-data necessary to verify time, location, or contextual information. Consequently, this common practice ha required researchers to develop and learn new tools and methodologies to identify the original source. Such new techniques often deviate from analysing traditional photographic video materials collected during field research.

In the age of ubiquitous camera usage, editing capabilities, and citizen media, the risks of getting digitally shared information wrong is high if the proper steps are not taken. While citizen media provides an extreme level of detail (including landmarks, signage, or vegetation), a permanent record of violation (if preserved correctly), as well as visual documentation of violations that would otherwise go undetected, it does not require a proper verification methodology.

PHEME, an organisation which focuses on the veracity of big data, relies solely on algorithms to verify social media content by analysing its information (lexical, semantic, and syntactic), criss referencing data sources with open-source data bases, and the information’s diffusion (how, when, and by who was this information transmitted and received). This algorithm based verification practice presents diffusion patterns in the form of “message types” (neutral, confirming, denying, or questioning rumour) in order to verify or dispute a digital source. PHEME’s emphasis on algorithms undoubtably has the potential to speed up the verification process, but should ultimately be coupled with a human element of verification.

Algorithmically, it is possible to identify both verifiable and non-verifiable traits belonging to a video by, for example, running a reverse image search to determine the videos originality, the geo-locations authenticity, and in what context it was captured. Thumbnails can also be matched to specific locations identified on Google street view, although this process often requires more human input.

Even if an algorithm deems a video to be original and the geo-location to be authentic does not mean the video is purporting to be true (or vice versa). It is this no surprise that, traditionally, human rights reporters, NGOs, or international organisations deploy fact-finders on the ground to verify the situation, either by conducting interviews or field reports. For this reason, we believe that the proper approach to social media verification is still mainly human centred. The challenge for new tools with be to facilitate the circumvention of the inherent dangers and obstacles of hard-to-read places, by allowing a greater degree of overview of the context of reported media, via the provision of means for better cross-referencing. This enables fact-finders to make a more sound judgement.

Instead of relying solely on algorithmic verification techniques, albeit an important part of the verification process, we believe that analysing citizen media should by no means be considered a separate endeavour from traditional fact-finding, which is largely centred on witness testimony and fact-finder reports. The Whistle cross-checks social media reports by employing both top algorithmic indicators and human input. We are aware of the current field and how time consuming it is for fact-finders to verify information, so The Whistle does the work for you by facilitating human input and involvement in the verification process. The art of verification, for The Whistle, is a mix of both algorithmic and necessary human involvement.

The Whistle aims to speed up and simplify the verification process by prompting users to supplement their human rights reports with metadata and corroborating information form other witnesses. The Whistle app then engages the back-end cross-checks involving a variety of third party information sources and tools, such as weather and map databases. By doing so, The Whistle provides human rights researchers, NGOs, and international organisations with a wealth of cross-referenced information, reducing both the time and digital expertise necessary to verify digital reports of human rights violations.