Satellite Images Used to Document International Atrocities

wikkedwoman wrote with a link to a Washington Post story about the use of satellite imagery to detect atrocities around the world. The story details Amnesty International's efforts to identify areas in the world that may have been subject to man-made disasters. By comparing and contrasting imagery captured over time, researchers can produce hard evidence to present to a hard-to-please international community. "Tonight, [Amnesty Researcher Jeremy] Nelson begins his work by making a copy of the [older] shot in the right-hand screen and pasting it directly over the [newer] one on the left. Then he makes the top one nearly transparent. A river that cuts through the scene becomes a marker to help him line up the two. Now he can easily flip back and forth to look for changes. Sudanese huts tend to follow a similar pattern: a solid base ring with a steep, thatched roof. In the earlier image, they show up as small circles, with a slight shading to the dome, depending on the direction of the sun. Nelson draws a small, green circle slightly larger than the area of the average hut and makes several dozen copies of it ... When he finishes, he moves the 2007 shot to the top and begins the analysis again ... parts of this region were burned so thoroughly that there's nothing left but a large black scar. If you didn't know that huts were there before, you'd have no idea they were now gone. 'Whoever did this did a good job,' he says quietly. 'Thorough, at least.'"

Comments

Alternative to Satellites

[sakdoctor]

Google Maps. Street View! Explore secret CIA prisons at the cell level, Virtually from your desktop.

Re:Manipulation at its finest

[Timesprout]

Obviously, there were not 10 individual fires, but some underlying cause.

My guess is spontaneous sheep combustion.

Re:Manipulation at its finest

[Anonymous Coward]

That said, the same could be said about New Orleans. Suspiciously the devastation doesn't expand that much further than the city, so it must have been man-made, eh?

No, 'cos a person with a brain in their head would go "shit, it's right near the ocean, and there's what looks like sediment covering stuff, and one kind of damage follows land contours, and the satellite pic was taken right after this other satellite pic of a fuckass huge hurricane"

And the smart person would figure it's probably flood & storm damage.

Re:that's fascinating

[TheRagingTowel]

... how can you justify that troops are being used in Irak instead of Darfur ... Who said anything about that? In the worst case I can only say it's a bad judgment call to send forces to Iraq (IMHO it should have been Iran), but no organized atrocities are being done by US troops in Iraq.

Re:that's fascinating

[Anonymous Coward]

Exit question: was this a liberal or a conservative troll? Answer: Libertarian, because it says both "nanny state" and "Judeo/Catholic guilt".

Re:Do you even watch the news?

[Foobar of Borg]

The UN is only slightly better than no UN at all.

It's really just a forum for trolling and information exchange, much like /., while business-as-usual continues to drive the world's political processes.

Now, imagine if the UN ambassadors could mod each other...

The Saudi Arabian ambassador is a troll! US Ambassador is flamebait! The British Ambassador is redundant!

And then, someone puts the goatse.cx guy on the main screen.