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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.'"
While I'll freely admit that I didn't RTFA, the summary has a quote saying "parts of this region were burned so thoroughly that there's nothing left but a large black scar". He's talking about whole parts of the region, not about only the villages being targetted. That's a freakin' huge difference.
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?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Its great to be able to see exactly whats taken place in Sudan, but it was well know that genocide was taking place. This is just more confirmation. Im not sure what value this has. What is really needed is some concrete proof to bring someone to trial for crimes against humanity. The higher up the better.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
I don't think there is really much debate that there are massacres taking place in Sudan at the moment. However is it very easy for the Government to control the flow of information out of the country. Doctors without Borders, who are often the organization on the front line of these crisis, who are willing to speak up about atrocities, got kicked out in 2005. A UN diplomat (http://www.janpronk.nl/index288.html#290) was also expelled for blogging about the Sudanese government.
NGOs have a hard time bringing in any sort of communication equipment (satellites for internet etc etc) and I'm pretty sure that you need to have a permit to take photos in Sudan, and the government controls where people can go. This is the same for many conflict zones, especially those with dubious treatment of human rights.
What this article shows is that there are now ways of documenting what is going on in Sudan, which is beyond the direct control of the Sudanese government. However it is very expensive (the images are costing about $1600 each) and there was an issue, when they couldn't book satellite time over Sudan. Whether this was because the government booked it out to prevent them from taking photos is unsure - but it does show the limitation.
Part of the reason that the international community is dragging their feet (or can drag their feet) is probably the lack of reliable concrete information - and this is what this project provides.
That and the fact that Sudan has oil, which the Chinese are heavily invested in.
Look, I'm not against gathering more evidence, but I'm just pointing out that just one photo (satellite or not) can be massaged into meaning anything you want it to mean.
E.g., do you even know which side was inhabiting that area, if not for being spoon fed that it's an atrocity against the Sudanese?
I'll also point out that history (some of it very near) is full of manipulation and selective confirmation. And often you just need to choose whose side propaganda you want to listen to.
E.g., if you would have asked German prisoners in '39, they would have told you that they're just fighting against the Polish aggressors. (The Third Reich propaganda massively broadcast news of the polish "aggression" and Germany just protecting its borders.)
I'll also point out that tribal warfare _is_ brutal like that. You can find archaeological evidence from the pre-columbian era where whole villages were razed. And most native tribes from all over the world were engaged in endemic warfare long before the Europeans got there. IIRC attrition rates in some areas reached 60%. Of the total population, not of the army. As in, really, if you were born in one of those tribes, chances would be about 60% that you'd die in combat, and not in your bed of old age. (By comparison, even the WW2 barely averaged 1% of the total population of the countries involved.)
As soon as humans invented missile weapons, suddenly in caves everywhere you have crude drawings of groups of archers shooting at each other, often led by some priest with some holy totem. And it didn't take much longer to invent flaming arrows.
Even in civilized nation warfare, the US secession war saw such things as the burning of Columbia. Or the fire bombing of Dresden or Tokyo, in WW2.
Now think that 10-100 times worse, and you have an accurate image of tribal warfare, at least for some tribes. Humans needed some tens of thousands of years to get shocked by the horrors of soldiers dying of all sorts of diseases in the Crimean war, or by the brutal realities of WW1 and WW2, and start getting ideas that maybe we should all act a bit nicer. Whole areas of the globe just didn't get there.
And yes, it would be nice if we somehow dragged them into the 21'st century. But it also helps if you realize that neither side there got in the 21'st century, and it's usually not just one side massacring the others.
Basically, just from the pictures you don't know who did what to whom. And in retaliation to what. It's easy to pin the blame on just one side as the ones cleansing the others, but reality is rarely that neatly divided in the good and the evil. And such pictures can be used to create just such a one-sided view.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Because the whole point I was making _is_ "a photo can mean anything". And I still see nothing wrong with that judgment.
There are entirely too many drawn in taking sides and waving banners just because the nice man on TV told them which side to join, and how loud to shout. I'm thinking the world as a whole would be a much better place if more people stopped and thought, "wait a minute, that can mean anything whatsoever." We probably would have less atrocities to worry about in the first place, if those comitting them in the first place didn't take the media's/imam's/shaman's/whatever word for it unthinkingly.
Again, I'm _not_ making any judgment about the conflict in Sudan or about AI. I _am_ however making a point that an image can mean anything, and it can be manipulated into seeming to mean something completely different than it really does.
I may not have enough data about the conflict in Sudan, but I think I do have enough data to make a judgment about how an image can be manipulated or used as "proof" of whatever you want it to prove. You just need to watch TV these days, really.
So, basically, it's really simple and there's no contradiction there.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
How many people out here just troll google maps for fun sometimes? I know I know, only when a new version is released. But you know what would really be a good tool? If a dual screen or dual map version of a program like google maps was made. One w/ pics that were released on a yearly schedule. With this a community of people could be developed in tracking more then one kind of atrocity. The evidence of any kind ofglobal change could be seen and reported by any one. This would be a great tool for bloggers, reporters, and really any one who want to help gather evidence for a cause of global effect. Wow before and after pics, never looked so relevant to me.
"I don't know what you're trying to prove in your message, but being so disconnected from reality is never a good thing. Maybe you can't wrap your brain around the fact that the long tradition of killing your fellow man has gone on for millennia and isn't all that uncommon. I don't know. I do find your twisted logic, if you can call it that, disturbing."
I'll bite.
Perhaps you can set down the Red Bull for a second and read the OP again.
His point was (clearly enough to me anyway) NOT that massacres didn't happen in Sudan. His point was that the original article's analysis (you did RTA, yes?) was that this was some sort of panacea, proving genocidal massacres etc BY ITSELF. That's *patently* untrue, and I thought his point was a bit obvious, really.
Apparently not.
There is no question that there is genocide going on in Sudan. But simply overlaying pictures of areas from year to year, and even the subsequent recognition that a village that WAS there has been entirely eradicated, is not ipso facto proof that the village was "massacred". In fact (his point continues) there are SO many possible explanations that the utility of the photos without contextual ground investigation is essentially nil.
I don't think his point is that complicated, nor does it deny the horrific realities of this specific case in any way.
-Styopa
Your point about the viability of photographs as evidence for other things is well-taken. But I did RTFA - before it was on /.'s front page - and there are important other goals in this process. Forgive my long-windedness here, but hopefully it will clarify some of those.
You say you're not familiar with the Sudanese conflict, but you're right that there is more to the story. In particular, the conflict in Darfur is just the latest episode in a long, sad story of civil war and political stupidity, to put it nicely. The net result there is that the Sudanese government is acting largely with impunity in Darfur, as the African Union has a mere 7,000 troops in the region and the EU and UN are sitting on their thumbs.
One thing Nelson and the Amnesty/AAAS program in general are trying to do by releasing these photographs is let the Sudanese militias and government know that they are being watched. They're coupling the technological aspect with info from the ground.
Independent researchers, Amnesty workers, and refugees provide stories to go with the pictures, which helps corroborate the theory that it was violence that caused the fires. But they're also providing tips to the Amnesty/AAAS people that certain villages in Sudan might be next in advance. From my reading of TFA, I think they have two goals with these pictures: the first is that they want to let the Sudanese government know that they have their eye on those sites that appear to be at risk, and the second is that they want to be able to immediately commission new photos of those regions when word comes down that it has been attacked. Then their before/after photos are fresher, more reliable.
Second, these guys are not shy about saying they want to drum up support for the "Save Darfur" movement. They figure, probably correctly, that attaching photographs of villages burnt to a crisp to stories from refugees and survivors will strike a chord in the general population. So some of your comments are on-target, but they're already admitted.
Third, these photos provide information about regions the Sudanese government and militias have blocked off. TFA talks about one region no one has gotten into in years, not even Oxfam or the Red Cross. If the militias won't let them in, there's a good chance things are really bad there. These photos could provide meaningful intelligence about the situation on the ground.
Finally, let me reiterate what someone else said, though not so nicely: go find out more about Darfur. It's really a terrible story, but you're right that the media's depiction is one-sided. It really ignores the larger historical context and the political machinations that have made the situation what it is today. Harper's had a good write-up on it a year ago or so, and I'm sure there are myriad other resources. Cheers.
So you can laugh all you want to...
4Z5TX
Actually, that's sorta the whole point: context is _everything_. And the context you're given can be misleading (deliberately let you connect the dots in the wrong direction), or outright a lie.
Yes, if you also have the right context, you can make an informed judgment. But do you? That's the question I'm asking.
Since you mention Nazis and mass graves, there is already at least one case where that was a lie. There are mass graves in Poland which the Soviets blamed the Nazis for. Turns out that it was the _Soviets_ themselves who were responsible for that. Stalin's NKVD had rounded up what they thought would be potential problem elements there, such as the Polish army officers, and summarily executed them.
Atrocity? Yes. But the context was an outright lie. Now I'm not saying the Nazis were nice guys, far from it, but in this case they had just provided a convenient scapegoat for NKVD's own atrocities.
And before someone says that's revisionism: no, it's not. The USSR finally owned up in the end. It's as official a confession as it gets.
Also, since you mention Nazis, those guys pioneered another thing: whole "war documentaries" that were entirely produced in a movie studio. Yay for first-hand front-line footage. You can believe that, can't you? I mean, the images surely speak for themselves, right? Well, too bad it came from a studio in Berlin instead of from France.
That's the whole point: if I show you a small pile of corpses in a mass grave, it's emotional and all, but you're entirely dependent on the context provided. How do you just know from that image alone whether that's Jews massacred by the Nazis, or "kulaks" (rich peasants, i.e., any peasant who wasn't starving) massacred by Stalin's NKVD, or maybe some the victims of the post-WWI flu epidemic (think like the bird flu, but it could be transmitted from human to human), or whatever else? The context is _everything_. And by just giving you the proper lie as a context, that image can be made to mean almost anything.
The point isn't to grow complacent or "post-modernist" but to start realizing when you don't have enough reliable context to make an informed judgment.
E.g., in this case, sure, burned villages is an emotional thought and all, but who burned whose houses?
One context particularly used as a battle-banner by a lot is that the Darfur conflict is some muslims-massacring-christians case. That's actually false, as both sides involved are muslims. It's an ethnic/racial war, not a religious war. There you go, an outright false context that's been used a lot lately.
Or how do you know which of the two sides burned the villages down? There are at least two sides in any conflict. And even the arab militias were funded in response to the insurgent forces of the other side. Are all the burned houses on the rebels side, or did the rebels do some burning of their own? In the absence of some first-hand information from down there, how _do_ you draw the right conclusions from just a satellite photo?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...Not harder! Are these guys seriously messing around with transparency layers and hand-drawing circles? Just subtract one image from the other. Their way is a waste of time, and time is money; money that could be used to help fight these problems instead of inefficiently-identifying them. (No, I didn't RTFA.)
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.