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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.'"
Your point is valid but your argumentation is flawed beyond use.
The areas they are looking into are areas with reported atrocities.
Apart from that, if you look at the summary, you'll see a description of the architecture that in no way resembles the 17th centure British capital. The reason that the fire was wide spread was the proximity of the buildings and the ineptitude of the civil servants. Apart from that, there is no documentation to support or point to a massacre (except that of the Dutch and other immigrants)
The reason for New Orleans' destruction is also heavily documented as being anything but a massacre.
The point of the technology would be to act as supporting evidence instead of conclusive. If taken alone, yeah, it could be an accident or a natural occurrence. When taken in the context of a country with millions of refugees and numerous reports of pogroms, ethnic cleansing and massacres... Well, it's less likely that the explanation is accidental/natural (but of course, not impossible)
Gee, someone else is worse than you... that makes all your crimes ok.
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.
"That's only proof if you actually know there's been a massacre there. Otherwise it can mean anything, including a forest fire."
Why a troll such as you got modded "interesting" befuddles me, but I'll bite.
No, it couldn't have been "anything." "Anything" includes meteorite strikes, Acts of Gawd, and other such unlikelihoods.
Systematic burning of _disconnected_ villages over hundreds of miles over long stretches of time is not a "forest fire" especially when there is no forest.
"E.g., take the Great Fire Of London"
No, you take it. Part of the reason that the Great Fire spread so quickly was the density of flammable wooden structures. What we actually see in the satellite photographs is not dense urban construction.
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.
--
BMO
... how can you justify that troops are being used in Irak instead of Darfur4Z5TX
You don't think the international community knows about Dafur - or knew about Rawanda? They don't care. This may strip plausible deniabilty (eg "we had no idea that was happening"), but it won't mean there will be action taken.
I'm surprised TFA does not mention the newly announced by Amnesty International "Eyes on Darfur" website. Oh, Beirut imagery has been updated to reflect the situation after the 2006 Lebanon War.
Here's a few stories in the same vein:
Documenting Humanitarian Crisis with Google Earth
New Google Earth Layers: Darfur and more
The Israel-Lebanon Conflict in Google Earth
Beirut Destruction Through Remote Sensing
Israel - Lebanon Conflict and Geospatial Data Access
Animoog.org
It doesn't take a satellite picture to see that the parent poster is a moron, troll, or both. Manipulation at its finest, indeed.
Evidence is evidence; no one bases anything on a single piece of information. Our military has the most sophisticated satellite imagery in the world, do you think they plan entire missions over a single photo?
You know the image in that article more likely than not is a village murdered. It's more than enough evidence to go look for the bodies.
Why do I suspect the parent poster supported the Iraq war based on its "evidence"?
OK, so I'm pretty sure that this is flamebait, but you did it on my comment, so I took it...
Sudan is already in the top 30 oil exporters in the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chart_of_exports_and _production_of_oil_by_nation), so rubbish about what you're saying about it taking decades to get the oil out of there. Admitted I don't think that it's coming out of Darfur, but it's still the same government.
I actually believe that the biggest problem comes as much from people with close minded views such as your. When people think like that it becomes a "war of civilizations", instead of just an peacekeeping-operation to end genocide, of course the Sudanese government is going to object. Your views of Islam and Muslims are incredibly narrow-minded, and I can only guess, very uneducated. By thinking like that you prevent peaceful dialog from happening.
I have personally spent the last 18 months living mostly in Pakistan and Indonesia - the worlds two largest Muslim countries. Despite standing out as a tall westerner, I didn't have any trouble at all, no terrorists, no jihads. Actually I found most of the people much friendlier than the people back home.
So please take some time to think about the situation, and what will make it better, before spreading such narrow minded rubbish.
Hang with me two seconds.
Change your label for the people you are thinking of from "terrorists" to "people we do not know if are innocent or not".
Feel that thought.
Think about reducing the number of automobile accidents by 2%. Would you accept this behavior for that reduction? Would you accept the disabling of the constitution and the random torture of some innocent and some guilty people to get that 2% reduction?
That's the number of lives we are talking about. And I've rounded up.
Whether there are atrocities in Darfur is irrelevant. What scares me is if people like you are willing to give up having their country be a decent world citizen and a country of law in order to get that 2% reduction. Because "everybody" agree that Darfur is horrible. The question is getting YOU to accept that there are atrocities in the 'civilized' world, too, and that these must stop if we are to have legitimacy in working against other atrocities.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
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...
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.
Similar to the upcoming US election results