Pharos - Central Idea

First and foremost, Pharos is a mission-driven organization: “To enable, protect, and promote human rights media.” To serve this mission, Pharos has two objectives. First, it enables technical solutions for receiving and publishing human rights media while protecting anonymity. Second, as an independent organization Pharos serves as a leader in promoting awareness of and discussions about the state of human rights media.

To enable, . . .

Fig. 1: Pharos end-to-end diagram

Pharos enables human rights media by facilitating technical solutions for receiving and publishing such media. Figure 1 (left) illustrates how Pharos is situated to accomplish this goal. The left-hand side of the picture shows how Pharos is positioned to receive human rights media, and the right-hand side shows how Pharos is positioned to publish that media.

Pharos is connected to the sources of human rights media - cameras, mobile phones, computers, video recorders, etc. - via the Internet. The options for transmitting media to Pharos are numerous, and are represented in the picture by the blue cloud. Pharos leverages existing technologies to facilitate various paths through the cloud, such as public key encryption, sneakernets, Tor implementations, direct web uploads, email, or any other method that allows individuals to send human rights media to Pharos anonymously. Furthermore, these technologies can be used together. For example, one could imagine a scenario in which a person captures a human rights violation through the video camera on his mobile phone, transfers that video to a computer at an Internet café, then encrypts the video using Pharos’s public encryption key, and finally uses a Pharos-specific Tor network to send the encrypted video to Pharos. Alternatively, if anonymity is less of a concern, the person could simply record the video on his mobile phone and upload it directly to Pharos’s website. In either case, part of Pharos’s mission is to ensure that that such paths through the cloud exist.

In addition to receiving human rights media, Pharos facilitates its publishing, which is depicted on the right-hand side of the “Pharos end-to-end diagram.” Pharos can publish human rights media in two ways. First, Pharos has the ability to publish the media itself, and second, it can also work closely with existing organizations like YouTube and The New York Times to help with distribution. A real-life scenario could work as follows. A person records a small, peaceful demonstration on her mobile phone. Because YouTube is blocked in her country and the New York Times doesn’t deem the small demonstration to be newsworthy, she sends the video to Pharos, which publishes it on Pharos's website. Later, the government cracks down on the demonstrators, claiming that they are violent. But because Pharos has received and published this video, a record of the peaceful demonstration is preserved and later picked up by major news organizations, eventually including the New York Times.

No other organization enables human rights media in this way or this effectively. Using the framework developed in the Existing Services Section, hierarchical organizations that are profit-seeking, such as CNN and The New York Times, may choose not to publish certain pieces of media because they are not newsworthy. Non-hierarchical organizations that publish user-generated content, like YouTube and Facebook, may not filter media by newsworthiness, but as profit-seeking organizations they are susceptible to governmental pressures to take down objectionable content and identify offending individuals. For these reasons, Pharos must have the capability to publish human rights media on its own, since it neither filters content by newsworthiness nor is subject to governmental pressures in the same ways that profit-seeking entities are. On the other hand, non-profit organizations like Witness.org and Amnesty International do not have the resources or the expertise to enable technical solutions for exfiltrating human rights media. For this reason, Pharos must proactively enable such technical solutions for receiving human rights media. By building the two steps required to distribute human rights media to the world - receiving and publishing - into its mission, Pharos accomplishes what no existing organization can.

protect, . . .

A critical piece of Pharos’s mission is to protect the sources of the human rights media that it receives. Anonymity is a necessary component of any solution that encourages individuals to expose human rights violations, as the threat of reprisal is an effective mechanism for chilling the creation of such media.

Pharos protects its sources in two ways. First, Pharos scrubs any technical metadata that might identify the source that submitted a particular piece of media. For example, Pharos eliminates any record of the origin of the submission (e.g. IP address) and any record of the actual device (e.g. mobile phone number or computer MAC address) that was used to create the media. In this way, digital forensic techniques will not lead back to the source of a particular piece of content. Second, Pharos can actually blur the identities of participants in the media that it receives. For example, participants in a human rights protest might face reprisals if their identities become know to repressive governments. Pharos can deploy a combination of automated technical solutions and manual review to ensure that sensitive videos can be published without risking the safety of the participants in those videos.

The protection of anonymity is not unique to Pharos. Traditional news organizations, like newspapers, vigorously protect the identity of their sources. However, extending such protection to user-generated content is unique to Pharos. Organizations like Facebook, YouTube, and Yahoo! have turned over the identities of its users to oppressive governments under certain circumstances, and will continue to do so. This dramatically reduces their effectiveness for distributing human rights media. In contrast, Pharos will guarantee the anonymity of its sources, as do traditional news organizations. While Pharos cannot be “jurisdictionless”, it must exist in an environment where it can legally protect its sources. For more information, see Pharos - Organization and Governance.

and promote . . .

For Pharos to be an effective human rights distribution platform, it must promote awareness both of its existence and how to use it. Furthermore, as an independent organization, Pharos should promote general awareness of the state of human rights media.

Pharos must be top-of-mind for those individuals that have a need for its services. Pharos can only combat the efforts of oppressive governments to chill free speech if the citizens of those oppressive regimes feel that they can effectively create and distribute human rights media without the fear of reprisals. To achieve this level of publicity, Pharos must actively promote itself, both through the mainstream media and by grassroots efforts. For example, Pharos should work with citizen journalists to spread awareness of Pharos “on the ground,” and should partner with human rights organizations like Amnesty International, Witness.org, and others.

On the publishing side, Pharos should work to maximize the distribution of the media it publishes so that it reaches as wide an audience as possible. In addition to publishing content itself, Pharos should work with other publishing platforms to promote its content. For example, Pharos could work directly with regional news sources, such as online versions of local newspapers, to republish its content and thus maximize its distribution.

By promoting itself, Pharos is promoting the creation, publishing, and distribution of human rights media. Pharos is unique in this position as a single entity that serves to promote an end-to-end solution focused exclusively on human rights media. Other organizations solve pieces of the puzzle, but only Pharos puts it all together. For example, Witness.org actively promotes and facilitates the creation of human rights video, but no longer supports receiving and publishing it. Traditional news organizations like The New York Times and user-generated content services like YouTube facilitate publishing content, but not its creation. Furthermore, neither type of organization specifically focuses on human rights media. Only Pharos completes the puzzle.

human rights media.

While Pharos's anonymization services help to solve the suppression of human rights media, they are also susceptible to abuse. In order to remain credible, Pharos must monitor the content that it receives and publishes to ensure that it is consistent with the spirit of Pharos’s mission. This is an immensely challenging problem and a nearly impossible line-drawing exercise, but other organizations have attempted to tackle the problem. For example, CNN’s iReport Community Guidelines provide an interesting point of reference for unwelcome content:

• Content that infringes someone's copyright.
• Content that you know to be untrue.
• Spam, or repeated uploads that flood the site with duplicate versions of the same or similar content.
• Pornography/sexually explicit content.
• Obscene/lewd content.
• Content that advocates violent behavior.
• Content that contains violent images of killing or physical abuse that appear to have been captured solely, or principally, for exploitive, prurient or gratuitous purposes.
• Content that advocates dangerous, illegal or predatory acts or poses a reasonable threat to personal or public safety.
• Hate Speech/Racially or ethnically offensive content.

Deciding on what content is or is not acceptable will be an ongoing challenge (see Challenges and Critiques), and decisions will have to be made on a case-by-case basis. However, adopting a flexible set of guidelines like those adopted by iReport is a big step in the right direction.