Salon Data mining mutilations, beatings, murders
""Technology has leveled the playing field between human rights organizations and intelligence services," says Ball. "Back in the '70s, intelligence services all over the world were getting pretty impressive computer hardware. This gave them the ability to track activities, peaceful civilian activists as well as violent [individuals], in pretty precise ways, to infer patterns and to use the data analysis as the basis for oppression."

Today the same tools can be used to build an irrefutable record that documents a history of oppression.

Ball's work is "incredibly important," says Harvey Weinstein, associate director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California at Berkeley. "Patrick has the capacity with this statistical knowledge to develop hard, incontrovertible statistical data to provide the kind of evidence that people need to get a good sense of the kind of human rights violations that occur in these difficult situations. He is one of the leaders in the field of trying to develop and use statistics to provide substantiation for human rights abuses.""

AAAS Science and Human Rights Program Making the Case: Investigating Large Scale Human Rights Violations Using Information Systems and Data Analysis
"Telling the truth in such a way that it cannot be denied is the first need of a truth commission established in the aftermath of gross human violations. The magnitude of violations is often so great that individual researchers cannot apprehend the complex nature and multiple patterns of such crimes, building an official history from a collective memory is essential to truth telling. This is our concern in these proceedings: building such a collective memory, and the analysis of the past through examination of that memory.

While the primary goal of truth telling is to provide massive and objective support for historical facts and patterns that cannot be denied, it also serves an "internal" role for those who analyze the past to make the official record. Without an accurate and precise collective memory that can be readily accessed, they will not be able to check their assumptions about the process of violations, or provide credible analyses.

The official record is derived from the collective memory, and the collective memory is based on information and data. The systematic arrangement of the information and data is the basis of the information management system.

These proceedings are about all aspects of how to build, manage, and generate analyses from such a system."

Human Rights Complaint Analyzer for the Federation of Bosnia Herzegovina How to build a human rights violation analyzer
"This manual has been written for human rights advocates around the world who use the Internet to spread information about patterns of human rights violations. It is based on the development of one such innovation and experiment, the Human Rights Complaint Analyzer. The Analyzer was developed by the Fund for the City of New York for the Ombudsmen of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with principal funding provided by United States Institute for Peace. It is now located on the Web site of the Chicago-Kent College of Law. "

"The basic project methodology was simple, to compile existing information from the complaint database of the Federation Ombudsmen, purge that information of any data that might put anyone at risk of identification, and transfer the information to the project computer in New York. The purged data was then displayed in an interactive query system."

redux [04.16.00]
The New York Review of Books In the Name of Humanity
"What is to be done when hundreds of thousands of people in a hitherto little-known region of the world are hounded from their homes, massacred, or starved to death in a brutal civil war, or even in a deliberate act of genocide? To our credit, we no longer turn away from the face of evil, but we still don't know how to control it. As the new century dawns, one of the biggest problems for international organizations and their member governments is to learn how to react to the great human emergencies that still seem to occur regularly in many parts of the world.

A well-run, democratic sovereign state, with a respected constitution, legislature, and executive, a judicial system, law enforcement, and police, and a standing or reserve army, is usually prepared to deal with evil. Such a state can be expected to forestall potential disasters within its territory and to react swiftly to those it cannot prevent. The constitutional system provides for accepted and allotted responsibility and speedy and effective decision-making; and the resources of the state are likely to be adequate for emergency action. Such constitutional systems have usually taken centuries to evolve; they often fall short of their obligations, but their citizens on the whole support them.

The so-called "international community" is anything but a constitutional system. As far as it is organized at all, it is an institutional arrangement, unpredictable and slow to act. It usually responds only when disaster has already struck and when its members, usually in the UN Security Council, can agree to take action. Even then, since the UN has no standing forces or substantial resources of its own, its action, if it can be agreed upon, is likely to be too little and too late. "