Identifying Difficult Problems in Cyberlaw - User contributions [en]

Pharos - Organization and Governance

2011-02-06T03:33:57Z

Kbharris:

Pharos will be built around its core mission: to enable, protect, and promote human rights media. The challenge will be to interpret the mission into clear principles, upon which the organization will be able to function deftly and responsibly.

It will have two bodies, the board of directors and the day-to-day team, to establish and implement these principles. The first will be responsible for formulating a clear statement of Pharos's principles and, in difficult or changing circumstances, interpreting how they should be applied. The implementation team will oversee the functioning of the site, protect the security of the data, and manage relations with other content publishers and users.

[[Image:Internal structure.png|300px|thumb|right|Pharos's Organizational Chart]]
Alongside Pharos's formal organization, we envision a worldwide network that Pharos can promote active and appropriate submissions, as well as providing information to submitters about how to do so securely. The network can also supply Pharos with the necessary contextual information to provide alongside the video. While Pharos does not want to reveal any information about the people in the video, it does want to provide information that will help explain where the event occurred, in what circumstances, and related to what underlying factors. This context will be crucial in ensuring that the video will not be ignored by news outlets or dismissed as a forgery by state actors.

== The Board of Directors ==
The Board of Directors will include a variety of professionals and experts with proven experience in human rights, freedom of expression, human security, and international relations. Like other mission driven organizations, we want to draw members from several different fields to ensure that the principles are written in a rich and thoughtful way.<ref> Amnesty International's structure may be one possible model for Pharos [http://www.amnesty.org/en/who-we-are/our-people/international-executive-committee Amnesty's International Executive Committee Structure]</ref> We envision some of the members may be human rights attorneys, former diplomats, professors, journalists, activists, and IT professionals.

Their initial task will be to draw up a clear mission statement and list of principles, upon which Pharos will accept, process, and distribute content. We envision that the mission statement will be 'To Enable, Protect, and Promote Human Rights Media'. It should provide a clear, but general, vision of why Pharos exists. Ideally, these principles will be sufficient guidelines for how the operations will be carried out day to day. After its initial meetings, the Board will only have to meet infrequently to review the operations of Pharos. But in the event that there are submissions that are particularly difficult to evaluate, the Board will need to be on call to make a decision whether or not to publish those submissions according to Pharos’s mission and principles.

The list of guiding principles will necessarily be more specific. These will determine which videos Pharos will process, publish, and distribute, and which it will not. Other organizations, like CNN's I-Reporter and Witness' The Hub, have formulated content policies that provide useful baselines for Pharos.<ref>[http://hub.witness.org/en/ContentReview Witness' Content Standards]</ref><ref>[http://ireport.cnn.com/guidelines.jspa CNN I-Report's Community Guidelines]</ref><ref>[http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines YouTube's Community Guidelines]</ref>
[[Image:Cnn i report.PNG|200px|thumb|left|CNN I-Report's submission guidelines]]
[[Image:The hub2.PNG|200px|thumb|left|The Hub's submission guidelines]]
We envision Pharos's list may be similar. It may contain prohibitions against which types of content will not be allowed, unless justifiable to the message -- like on the grounds of extreme violence, cruelty to animals, or explicit sexuality. But because of Pharos's concern for human rights abuses, it must expect that many legitimate videos may include violence, foul language, and sexuality in the context of abuse. The Board will draw up a general rule upon which legitimate versus illegitimate content can be distinguished. Their public guidelines about submissions may resemble CNN I-Report's -- general and user-friendly -- but privately they can hold detailed discussions about particular videos that may walk the line between appropriate and obscene.

In its guiding principles, the Board must also spell out how to approach videos that have been sent anonymously and cannot be verified. Pharos's general policy is that it will accept any content sent to it, and will only publish content related to human rights. The goal is to have a quick turn-around, so that all submissions, after being evaluated and scrubbed clean, will be posted and distributed immediately. Pharos can have a badge system (like CNN's I-Report) that declares whether the video has been verified as accurate and reliable by Pharos standards.<ref>[http://ireport.cnn.com/faq.jspa#vetted CNN I-Report's Vetting Policy]</ref> A video without a badge will be understood as not necessarily real or trustworthy.

If the content arrives from an unknown source, Pharos must be concerned that it has been edited to misrepresent reality or is an outright forgery. We recognize that there has been a history of forged abuses, including with videos of abuses that have been manufactured to give the appearance of an abuse when there has not been one. We are aware that competing groups, particularly in long-standing conflicts, use allegations of human rights abuse as tools to promote their political agenda, rather than strictly to protect human rights principles. The possibility of a video being used to spur on violence must also be a concern.<ref>For example, France 24's 09/17/10 report on an amateur video showing abuse in Kashmir -- which may or may not be a forgery--inciting violence in the region [http://observers.france24.com/content/20100917-kashmir-video-human-rights-violations-adds-fuel-deadly-protests-india-army "Kashmir video showing human rights violations adds fuel to deadly protests"]</ref> We do not want Pharos to be drawn into such disputes, or be used to facilitate the escalation of violence, if it is possible.

The Board, relying on its own knowledge and its network of contacts, will have to make the difficult calls whether to publish videos that are suspected of being edited or forged.<ref>This decision could possibly be lengthy and resource-consuming task, but we expect it only to be so in exceptional circumstances. [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6980113.ece "Tamil Tiger video killing is genuine, declares the UN", The Sunday Times, 01/08/10]</ref> It can determine whether a state's argument, claiming that an abuse video has been forged, is strong enough to merit taking a video down.<ref>See Human Rights Watch's response to Pakistan's objections that a video documenting abuse was a forgery. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11455858 BBC News, "Pakistan army says 'extra-judicial killing' video faked" 10/01/10], with more information on the video dispute at [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/world/asia/30pstan.html?pagewanted=all "Video Hints at Executions by Pakistanis", The New York Times 09/29/10]</ref> Other human rights organizations must make similar determinations in whether to publish accounts of abuse, that may have been exaggerated or falsified. Pharos can borrow their insights into how to maker responsible choices on questionable content.

== The Implementation Team ==
The Implementation Team -- made up of a Tech Team and a Content one -- will work according to the directives established by the Board. It will be responsible for ensuring the site operates smoothly, that the content is protected, and that it is distributed promptly and fully to the appropriate publishers. If Pharos hosts content on its own site, the team will ensure that the media is presented in a timely and usable manner.

The Tech team will be charged with matters of security and stability. They will maintain the website, and scrub each video of all identifiable content and metadata.

Pharos may be besieged with videos at certain times (like, if there is a high-profile crisis going on) and it should be built not to crash during an intense spurt of activity. The site may also be subject to DDOS attacks, or other attempted take-downs.<ref> See, e.g., the Berkman Center's December 2010 report on DDOS attacks directed against human rights groups [http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheon/2011/01/ddos Berkman Center's Interactive DDOS Report]</ref>
The tech team must devise a strategy -- whether it involves mirroring, hosting with a major company, or otherwise -- to insulate Pharos from such attacks. Pharos should be reliably available, particularly in the face of attacks from those actors who do not want a certain video to be seen, and during times of crisis when more users want to upload and to view human rights media.

Security of the content must also be a priority of the Tech Team. If Pharos retains unscrubbed versions of the content it receives -- the videos with distinguishing features still visible, or with metadata attached -- they must be protected from any possible intrusion. Pharos must be able to guarantee its promise to uploaders that no one will ever be able to trace the video back to them. If Pharos keeps any logs of the videos have been submitted, like how they arrived or when they did, these logs should receive similarly high levels of security. We expect that Pharos may want to preserve logs and unscrubbed media for the sake of future investigations or historical documentation. If, for instance, the author and the subject of the video decide to go on the record, and wish to be identified in the video, Pharos should be able to provide them a copy of their media that has not been obscured. The original, untouched media could be useful to them as evidence, and Pharos can act as the media's safekeeper when the user's own hardware may be taken or wiped clean.

[[Image:Pharos_Slide_-_Encryption_Key_Distribution.png|300px|thumb|right|Pharos's public key encryption]]

If Pharos decides to offer uploaders a public key encryption service, then the Tech Team will have to ensure the absolute security of its encryption process. The private key it uses to decrypt the submitted files will have to be guarded so that no technological or human infiltration is possible. We expect the Tech team to hire out a private security firm that can ensure the utmost security is possible.

The Content Team will focus more on soliciting media, determining whether it fits the mission, and publishing it as widely and fully as possible. They will use the Board's guiding principles as the basis for their decisions about whether a submission is appropriate for Pharos. They can approach the Board if a video is particularly challenging. We expect that the principles will be a sufficient guide for most submissions, and that the team will only have to approach the Board in rare occurrences of a particularly controversial or confusing submission.

[[Image:Pharos_Diagram_-_right_side_-_dsitribution.png|300px|thumb|right|Content distribution]]

The Content Team will be responsible for distributing the media to as many sources as possible. They may also provide contextual information alongside the actual file -- with any information that they can verify about where it was created, at what time, and under what circumstances. They will not reveal anything that could identify how they received the video or who is involved in it. They will decide which videos are 'Pharos certified', according to the standards set by the board, and which videos don't receive the badge.

Pharos, via both the Content Team and the Board, will cultivate a network of human rights organizations, journalists and academics worldwide, upon whom it can rely when trying to evaluate a video. If the Content Team needs to learn more about the circumstances in which the video was produced, they can call upon this network for general information about the context. If a video is suspect, they may also contact this network to try to determine more about its reliability.

The network will also be useful in soliciting videos. Pharos can distribute its public key via these organizations, which may produce human rights media on their own, or which may be the local contact points for people who are not activists, but have ended up with documentation of abuse on their hardware. These local organizations can instruct people on how to submit their media securely, directing them to Pharos and with guidance on using public keys, Tor, or other methods that will ensure some security.

== A Wider Network ==
Pharos need not consist solely of a well-protected office in a Western country. Though this may be its headquarters, the organization could include a worldwide network of localized publishers. Taking the model of human rights organizations, there could be regional or continental Pharos Hubs, all connected loosely to a central body. The local versions could have more translation and language support tailored to the area, and it could have distribution networks that are focused less on US news media, and more on local media. The Board of Directors could include members from each of the Pharos Hubs.

A less centralized system would help insure that Pharos does not make decisions that are divorced from local realities. Local hubs will be more attuned to which videos may be forgeries or editing; they will also be able to contextualize videos and provide consumers with fuller explanations of why the abuse occurred and what response would be best.

There could be two main problems with a more dispersed Pharos. First, local offices may be more biased about the content submissions. Because the employees will be more directly invested in the region, they may not publish any video that they consider could harm their political party or movement. A centralized Pharos organization would be more separate from local realities (and though that makes them less knowledgeable about the context of a video) it makes them less biased in deciding which content to distribute.

Second, local Pharos operations will be more liable to security attacks or governmental requests. If they are working in a country that does not have strong protections on freedom of expression, their site may be blocked or their employees may be subject to prosecution for their work. Moreover, their offices, records, and stored content may be infiltrated or subpoenaed. It will be harder to guarantee uploaders security if the office itself is not immune to attack or investigations. If they use public-private key encryption systems, the key may be more easily compromised as well.

The ideal would be for Pharos to be balanced between a centralized, Western-based office and a worldwide network that can offer more local support and contextualization. Security concerns may be the overriding ones. Pharos must be able to guarantee its uploaders absolute anonymity, and protect its own employees from prosecution or attack. If the organization could maintain this high level of security while still partnering with organizations worldwide, and perhaps even delegating some decision-making and hosting to them, that would ensure that Pharos is better attuned to situations on the ground and protected from forged content.

==References==
<references/>

Pharos - Organization and Governance

2011-02-06T03:32:28Z

Kbharris:

Pharos will be built around its core mission: to enable, protect, and promote human rights media. The challenge will be to interpret the mission into clear principles, upon which the organization will be able to function deftly and responsibly.

It will have two bodies, the board of directors and the day-to-day team, to establish and implement these principles. The first will be responsible for formulating a clear statement of Pharos's principles and, in difficult or changing circumstances, interpreting how they should be applied. The implementation team will oversee the functioning of the site, protect the security of the data, and manage relations with other content publishers and users.

[[Image:Internal structure.png|300px|thumb|right|Pharos's Organizational Chart]]
Alongside Pharos's formal organization, we envision a worldwide network that Pharos can promote active and appropriate submissions, as well as providing information to submitters about how to do so securely. The network can also supply Pharos with the necessary contextual information to provide alongside the video. While Pharos does not want to reveal any information about the people in the video, it does want to provide information that will help explain where the event occurred, in what circumstances, and related to what underlying factors. This context will be crucial in ensuring that the video will not be ignored by news outlets or dismissed as a forgery by state actors.

== The Board of Directors ==
The Board of Directors will include a variety of professionals and experts with proven experience in human rights, freedom of expression, human security, and international relations. Like other mission driven organizations, we want to draw members from several different fields to ensure that the principles are written in a rich and thoughtful way.<ref> Amnesty International's structure may be one possible model for Pharos [http://www.amnesty.org/en/who-we-are/our-people/international-executive-committee Amnesty's International Executive Committee Structure]</ref> We envision some of the members may be human rights attorneys, former diplomats, professors, journalists, activists, and IT professionals.

Their initial task will be to draw up a clear mission statement and list of principles, upon which Pharos will accept, process, and distribute content. We envision that the mission statement will be 'To Enable, Protect, and Promote Human Rights Media'. It should provide a clear, but general, vision of why Pharos exists. Ideally, these principles will be sufficient guidelines for how the operations will be carried out day to day. After its initial meetings, the Board will only have to meet infrequently to review the operations of Pharos. But in the event that there are submissions that are particularly difficult to evaluate, the Board will need to be on call to make a decision whether or not to publish those submissions according to Pharos’s mission and principles.

The list of guiding principles will necessarily be more specific. These will determine which videos Pharos will process, publish, and distribute, and which it will not. Other organizations, like CNN's I-Reporter and Witness' The Hub, have formulated content policies that provide useful baselines for Pharos.<ref>[http://hub.witness.org/en/ContentReview Witness' Content Standards]</ref><ref>[http://ireport.cnn.com/guidelines.jspa CNN I-Report's Community Guidelines]</ref><ref>[http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines YouTube's Community Guidelines]</ref>
[[Image:Cnn i report.PNG|200px|thumb|left|CNN I-Report's submission guidelines]]
[[Image:The hub2.PNG|200px|thumb|left|The Hub's submission guidelines]]
We envision Pharos's list may be similar. It may contain prohibitions against which types of content will not be allowed, unless justifiable to the message -- like on the grounds of extreme violence, cruelty to animals, or explicit sexuality. But because of Pharos's concern for human rights abuses, it must expect that many legitimate videos may include violence, foul language, and sexuality in the context of abuse. The Board will draw up a general rule upon which legitimate versus illegitimate content can be distinguished. Their public guidelines about submissions may resemble CNN I-Report's -- general and user-friendly -- but privately they can hold detailed discussions about particular videos that may walk the line between appropriate and obscene.

In its guiding principles, the Board must also spell out how to approach videos that have been sent anonymously and cannot be verified. Pharos's general policy is that it will accept any content sent to it, and will only publish content related to human rights. The goal is to have a quick turn-around, so that all submissions, after being evaluated and scrubbed clean, will be posted and distributed immediately. Pharos can have a badge system (like CNN's I-Report) that declares whether the video has been verified as accurate and reliable by Pharos standards.<ref>[http://ireport.cnn.com/faq.jspa#vetted CNN I-Report's Vetting Policy]</ref> A video without a badge will be understood as not necessarily real or trustworthy.

If the content arrives from an unknown source, Pharos must be concerned that it has been edited to misrepresent reality or is an outright forgery. We recognize that there has been a history of forged abuses, including with videos of abuses that have been manufactured to give the appearance of an abuse when there has not been one. We are aware that competing groups, particularly in long-standing conflicts, use allegations of human rights abuse as tools to promote their political agenda, rather than strictly to protect human rights principles. The possibility of a video being used to spur on violence must also be a concern.<ref>For example, France 24's 09/17/10 report on an amateur video showing abuse in Kashmir -- which may or may not be a forgery--inciting violence in the region [http://observers.france24.com/content/20100917-kashmir-video-human-rights-violations-adds-fuel-deadly-protests-india-army "Kashmir video showing human rights violations adds fuel to deadly protests"]</ref> We do not want Pharos to be drawn into such disputes, or be used to facilitate the escalation of violence, if it is possible.

The Board, relying on its own knowledge and its network of contacts, will have to make the difficult calls whether to publish videos that are suspected of being edited or forged.<ref>This decision could possibly be lengthy and resource-consuming task, but we expect it only to be so in exceptional circumstances. [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6980113.ece "Tamil Tiger video killing is genuine, declares the UN", The Sunday Times, 01/08/10]</ref> It can determine whether a state's argument, claiming that an abuse video has been forged, is strong enough to merit taking a video down.<ref>See Human Rights Watch's response to Pakistan's objections that a video documenting abuse was a forgery. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11455858 BBC News, "Pakistan army says 'extra-judicial killing' video faked" 10/01/10], with more information on the video dispute at [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/world/asia/30pstan.html?pagewanted=all "Video Hints at Executions by Pakistanis", The New York Times 09/29/10]</ref> Other human rights organizations must make similar determinations in whether to publish accounts of abuse, that may have been exaggerated or falsified. Pharos can borrow their insights into how to maker responsible choices on questionable content.

== The Implementation Team ==
The Implementation Team -- made up of a Tech Team and a Content one -- will work according to the directives established by the Board. It will be responsible for ensuring the site operates smoothly, that the content is protected, and that it is distributed promptly and fully to the appropriate publishers. If Pharos hosts content on its own site, the team will ensure that the media is presented in a timely and usable manner.

The Tech team will be charged with matters of security and stability. They will maintain the website, and scrub each video of all identifiable content and metadata.

Pharos may be besieged with videos at certain times (like, if there is a high-profile crisis going on) and it should be built not to crash during an intense spurt of activity. The site may also be subject to DDOS attacks, or other attempted take-downs.<ref> See, e.g., the Berkman Center's December 2010 report on DDOS attacks directed against human rights groups [http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheon/2011/01/ddos Berkman Center's Interactive DDOS Report]</ref>
The tech team must devise a strategy -- whether it involves mirroring, hosting with a major company, or otherwise -- to insulate Pharos from such attacks. Pharos should be reliably available, particularly in the face of attacks from those actors who do not want a certain video to be seen, and during times of crisis when more users want to upload and to view human rights media.

Security of the content must also be a priority of the Tech Team. If Pharos retains unscrubbed versions of the content it receives -- the videos with distinguishing features still visible, or with metadata attached -- they must be protected from any possible intrusion. Pharos must be able to guarantee its promise to uploaders that no one will ever be able to trace the video back to them. If Pharos keeps any logs of the videos have been submitted, like how they arrived or when they did, these logs should receive similarly high levels of security. We expect that Pharos may want to preserve logs and unscrubbed media for the sake of future investigations or historical documentation. If, for instance, the author and the subject of the video decide to go on the record, and wish to be identified in the video, Pharos should be able to provide them a copy of their media that has not been obscured. The original, untouched media could be useful to them as evidence, and Pharos can act as the media's safekeeper when the user's own hardware may be taken or wiped clean.

[[Image:Pharos_Slide_-_Encryption_Key_Distribution.png|300px|thumb|right|Pharos's public key encryption]]

If Pharos decides to offer uploaders a public key encryption service, then the Tech Team will have to ensure the absolute security of its encryption process. The private key it uses to decrypt the submitted files will have to be guarded so that no technological or human infiltration is possible. We expect the Tech team to hire out a private security firm that can ensure the utmost security is possible.

The Content Team will focus more on soliciting media, determining whether it fits the mission, and publishing it as widely and fully as possible. They will use the Board's guiding principles as the basis for their decisions about whether a submission is appropriate for Pharos. They can approach the Board if a video is particularly challenging. We expect that the principles will be a sufficient guide for most submissions, and that the team will only have to approach the Board in rare occurrences of a particularly controversial or confusing submission.

[[Image:Pharos_Diagram_-_right_side_-_dsitribution.png|300px|thumb|right|Content distribution]]

The Content Team will be responsible for distributing the media to as many sources as possible. They may also provide contextual information alongside the actual file -- with any information that they can verify about where it was created, at what time, and under what circumstances. They will not reveal anything that could identify how they received the video or who is involved in it. They will decide which videos are 'Pharos certified', according to the standards set by the board, and which videos don't receive the badge.

Pharos, via both the Content Team and the Board, will cultivate a network of human rights organizations, journalists and academics worldwide, upon whom it can rely when trying to evaluate a video. If the Content Team needs to learn more about the circumstances in which the video was produced, they can call upon this network for general information about the context. If a video is suspect, they may also contact this network to try to determine more about its reliability.

The network will also be useful in soliciting videos. They can distribute their public key via these organizations, which may produce human rights media on their own, or which may be the local contact points for people who are not activists, but have ended up with documentation of abuse on their hardware. These local organizations can instruct people on how to submit their media securely, directing them to Pharos and with guidance on using public keys, Tor, or other methods that will ensure some security.

== A Wider Network ==
Pharos need not consist solely of a well-protected office in a Western country. Though this may be its headquarters, the organization could include a worldwide network of localized publishers. Taking the model of human rights organizations, there could be regional or continental Pharos Hubs, all connected loosely to a central body. The local versions could have more translation and language support tailored to the area, and it could have distribution networks that are focused less on US news media, and more on local media. The Board of Directors could include members from each of the Pharos Hubs.

A less centralized system would help insure that Pharos does not make decisions that are divorced from local realities. Local hubs will be more attuned to which videos may be forgeries or editing; they will also be able to contextualize videos and provide consumers with fuller explanations of why the abuse occurred and what response would be best.

There could be two main problems with a more dispersed Pharos. First, local offices may be more biased about the content submissions. Because the employees will be more directly invested in the region, they may not publish any video that they consider could harm their political party or movement. A centralized Pharos organization would be more separate from local realities (and though that makes them less knowledgeable about the context of a video) it makes them less biased in deciding which content to distribute.

Second, local Pharos operations will be more liable to security attacks or governmental requests. If they are working in a country that does not have strong protections on freedom of expression, their site may be blocked or their employees may be subject to prosecution for their work. Moreover, their offices, records, and stored content may be infiltrated or subpoenaed. It will be harder to guarantee uploaders security if the office itself is not immune to attack or investigations. If they use public-private key encryption systems, the key may be more easily compromised as well.

The ideal would be for Pharos to be balanced between a centralized, Western-based office and a worldwide network that can offer more local support and contextualization. Security concerns may be the overriding ones. Pharos must be able to guarantee its uploaders absolute anonymity, and protect its own employees from prosecution or attack. If the organization could maintain this high level of security while still partnering with organizations worldwide, and perhaps even delegating some decision-making and hosting to them, that would ensure that Pharos is better attuned to situations on the ground and protected from forged content.

==References==
<references/>

Pharos - Organization and Governance

2011-02-06T03:30:39Z

Kbharris:

Pharos will be built around its core mission: to enable, protect, and promote human rights media. The challenge will be to interpret the mission into clear principles, upon which the organization will be able to function deftly and responsibly.

It will have two bodies, the board of directors and the day-to-day team, to establish and implement these principles. The first will be responsible for formulating a clear statement of Pharos's principles and, in difficult or changing circumstances, interpreting how they should be applied. The implementation team will oversee the functioning of the site, protect the security of the data, and manage relations with other content publishers and users.

[[Image:Internal structure.png|300px|thumb|right|Pharos's Organizational Chart]]
Alongside Pharos's formal organization, we envision a worldwide network that Pharos can promote active and appropriate submissions, as well as providing information to submitters about how to do so securely. The network can also supply Pharos with the necessary contextual information to provide alongside the video. While Pharos does not want to reveal any information about the people in the video, it does want to provide information that will help explain where the event occurred, in what circumstances, and related to what underlying factors. This context will be crucial in ensuring that the video will not be ignored by news outlets or dismissed as a forgery by state actors.

== The Board of Directors ==
The Board of Directors will include a variety of professionals and experts with proven experience in human rights, freedom of expression, human security, and international relations. Like other mission driven organizations, we want to draw members from several different fields to ensure that the principles are written in a rich and thoughtful way.<ref> Amnesty International's structure may be one possible model for Pharos [http://www.amnesty.org/en/who-we-are/our-people/international-executive-committee Amnesty's International Executive Committee Structure]</ref> We envision some of the members may be human rights attorneys, former diplomats, professors, journalists, activists, and IT professionals.

Their initial task will be to draw up a clear mission statement and list of principles, upon which Pharos will accept, process, and distribute content. We envision that the mission statement will be 'To Enable, Protect, and Promote Human Rights Media'. It should provide a clear, but general, vision of why Pharos exists. Ideally, these principles will be sufficient guidelines for how the operations will be carried out day to day. After its initial meetings, the board will only have to meet quarterly to review the operations of Pharos. But in case there are some submissions that are particularly difficult to evaluate, the Board should be on call for

The list of guiding principles will necessarily be more specific. These will determine which videos Pharos will process, publish, and distribute, and which it will not. Other organizations, like CNN's I-Reporter and Witness' The Hub, have formulated content policies that provide useful baselines for Pharos.<ref>[http://hub.witness.org/en/ContentReview Witness' Content Standards]</ref><ref>[http://ireport.cnn.com/guidelines.jspa CNN I-Report's Community Guidelines]</ref><ref>[http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines YouTube's Community Guidelines]</ref>
[[Image:Cnn i report.PNG|200px|thumb|left|CNN I-Report's submission guidelines]]
[[Image:The hub2.PNG|200px|thumb|left|The Hub's submission guidelines]]
We envision Pharos's list may be similar. It may contain prohibitions against which types of content will not be allowed, unless justifiable to the message -- like on the grounds of extreme violence, cruelty to animals, or explicit sexuality. But because of Pharos's concern for human rights abuses, it must expect that many legitimate videos may include violence, foul language, and sexuality in the context of abuse. The Board will draw up a general rule upon which legitimate versus illegitimate content can be distinguished. Their public guidelines about submissions may resemble CNN I-Report's -- general and user-friendly -- but privately they can hold detailed discussions about particular videos that may walk the line between appropriate and obscene.

In its guiding principles, the Board must also spell out how to approach videos that have been sent anonymously and cannot be verified. Pharos's general policy is that it will accept any content sent to it, and will only publish content related to human rights. The goal is to have a quick turn-around, so that all submissions, after being evaluated and scrubbed clean, will be posted and distributed immediately. Pharos can have a badge system (like CNN's I-Report) that declares whether the video has been verified as accurate and reliable by Pharos standards.<ref>[http://ireport.cnn.com/faq.jspa#vetted CNN I-Report's Vetting Policy]</ref> A video without a badge will be understood as not necessarily real or trustworthy.

If the content arrives from an unknown source, Pharos must be concerned that it has been edited to misrepresent reality or is an outright forgery. We recognize that there has been a history of forged abuses, including with videos of abuses that have been manufactured to give the appearance of an abuse when there has not been one. We are aware that competing groups, particularly in long-standing conflicts, use allegations of human rights abuse as tools to promote their political agenda, rather than strictly to protect human rights principles. The possibility of a video being used to spur on violence must also be a concern.<ref>For example, France 24's 09/17/10 report on an amateur video showing abuse in Kashmir -- which may or may not be a forgery--inciting violence in the region [http://observers.france24.com/content/20100917-kashmir-video-human-rights-violations-adds-fuel-deadly-protests-india-army "Kashmir video showing human rights violations adds fuel to deadly protests"]</ref> We do not want Pharos to be drawn into such disputes, or be used to facilitate the escalation of violence, if it is possible.

The Board, relying on its own knowledge and its network of contacts, will have to make the difficult calls whether to publish videos that are suspected of being edited or forged.<ref>This decision could possibly be lengthy and resource-consuming task, but we expect it only to be so in exceptional circumstances. [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6980113.ece "Tamil Tiger video killing is genuine, declares the UN", The Sunday Times, 01/08/10]</ref> It can determine whether a state's argument, claiming that an abuse video has been forged, is strong enough to merit taking a video down.<ref>See Human Rights Watch's response to Pakistan's objections that a video documenting abuse was a forgery. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11455858 BBC News, "Pakistan army says 'extra-judicial killing' video faked" 10/01/10], with more information on the video dispute at [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/world/asia/30pstan.html?pagewanted=all "Video Hints at Executions by Pakistanis", The New York Times 09/29/10]</ref> Other human rights organizations must make similar determinations in whether to publish accounts of abuse, that may have been exaggerated or falsified. Pharos can borrow their insights into how to maker responsible choices on questionable content.

== The Implementation Team ==
The Implementation Team -- made up of a Tech Team and a Content one -- will work according to the directives established by the Board. It will be responsible for ensuring the site operates smoothly, that the content is protected, and that it is distributed promptly and fully to the appropriate publishers. If Pharos hosts content on its own site, the team will ensure that the media is presented in a timely and usable manner.

The Tech team will be charged with matters of security and stability. They will maintain the website, and scrub each video of all identifiable content and metadata.

Pharos may be besieged with videos at certain times (like, if there is a high-profile crisis going on) and it should be built not to crash during an intense spurt of activity. The site may also be subject to DDOS attacks, or other attempted take-downs.<ref> See, e.g., the Berkman Center's December 2010 report on DDOS attacks directed against human rights groups [http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheon/2011/01/ddos Berkman Center's Interactive DDOS Report]</ref>
The tech team must devise a strategy -- whether it involves mirroring, hosting with a major company, or otherwise -- to insulate Pharos from such attacks. Pharos should be reliably available, particularly in the face of attacks from those actors who do not want a certain video to be seen, and during times of crisis when more users want to upload and to view human rights media.

Security of the content must also be a priority of the Tech Team. If Pharos retains unscrubbed versions of the content it receives -- the videos with distinguishing features still visible, or with metadata attached -- they must be protected from any possible intrusion. Pharos must be able to guarantee its promise to uploaders that no one will ever be able to trace the video back to them. If Pharos keeps any logs of the videos have been submitted, like how they arrived or when they did, these logs should receive similarly high levels of security. We expect that Pharos may want to preserve logs and unscrubbed media for the sake of future investigations or historical documentation. If, for instance, the author and the subject of the video decide to go on the record, and wish to be identified in the video, Pharos should be able to provide them a copy of their media that has not been obscured. The original, untouched media could be useful to them as evidence, and Pharos can act as the media's safekeeper when the user's own hardware may be taken or wiped clean.

[[Image:Pharos_Slide_-_Encryption_Key_Distribution.png|300px|thumb|right|Pharos's public key encryption]]

If Pharos decides to offer uploaders a public key encryption service, then the Tech Team will have to ensure the absolute security of its encryption process. The private key it uses to decrypt the submitted files will have to be guarded so that no technological or human infiltration is possible. We expect the Tech team to hire out a private security firm that can ensure the utmost security is possible.

The Content Team will focus more on soliciting media, determining whether it fits the mission, and publishing it as widely and fully as possible. They will use the Board's guiding principles as the basis for their decisions about whether a submission is appropriate for Pharos. They can approach the Board if a video is particularly challenging. We expect that the principles will be a sufficient guide for most submissions, and that the team will only have to approach the Board in rare occurrences of a particularly controversial or confusing submission.

[[Image:Pharos_Diagram_-_right_side_-_dsitribution.png|300px|thumb|right|Content distribution]]

The Content Team will be responsible for distributing the media to as many sources as possible. They may also provide contextual information alongside the actual file -- with any information that they can verify about where it was created, at what time, and under what circumstances. They will not reveal anything that could identify how they received the video or who is involved in it. They will decide which videos are 'Pharos certified', according to the standards set by the board, and which videos don't receive the badge.

Pharos, via both the Content Team and the Board, will cultivate a network of human rights organizations, journalists and academics worldwide, upon whom it can rely when trying to evaluate a video. If the Content Team needs to learn more about the circumstances in which the video was produced, they can call upon this network for general information about the context. If a video is suspect, they may also contact this network to try to determine more about its reliability.

The network will also be useful in soliciting videos. They can distribute their public key via these organizations, which may produce human rights media on their own, or which may be the local contact points for people who are not activists, but have ended up with documentation of abuse on their hardware. These local organizations can instruct people on how to submit their media securely, directing them to Pharos and with guidance on using public keys, Tor, or other methods that will ensure some security.

== A Wider Network ==
Pharos need not consist solely of a well-protected office in a Western country. Though this may be its headquarters, the organization could include a worldwide network of localized publishers. Taking the model of human rights organizations, there could be regional or continental Pharos Hubs, all connected loosely to a central body. The local versions could have more translation and language support tailored to the area, and it could have distribution networks that are focused less on US news media, and more on local media. The Board of Directors could include members from each of the Pharos Hubs.

A less centralized system would help insure that Pharos does not make decisions that are divorced from local realities. Local hubs will be more attuned to which videos may be forgeries or editing; they will also be able to contextualize videos and provide consumers with fuller explanations of why the abuse occurred and what response would be best.

There could be two main problems with a more dispersed Pharos. First, local offices may be more biased about the content submissions. Because the employees will be more directly invested in the region, they may not publish any video that they consider could harm their political party or movement. A centralized Pharos organization would be more separate from local realities (and though that makes them less knowledgeable about the context of a video) it makes them less biased in deciding which content to distribute.

Second, local Pharos operations will be more liable to security attacks or governmental requests. If they are working in a country that does not have strong protections on freedom of expression, their site may be blocked or their employees may be subject to prosecution for their work. Moreover, their offices, records, and stored content may be infiltrated or subpoenaed. It will be harder to guarantee uploaders security if the office itself is not immune to attack or investigations. If they use public-private key encryption systems, the key may be more easily compromised as well.

The ideal would be for Pharos to be balanced between a centralized, Western-based office and a worldwide network that can offer more local support and contextualization. Security concerns may be the overriding ones. Pharos must be able to guarantee its uploaders absolute anonymity, and protect its own employees from prosecution or attack. If the organization could maintain this high level of security while still partnering with organizations worldwide, and perhaps even delegating some decision-making and hosting to them, that would ensure that Pharos is better attuned to situations on the ground and protected from forged content.

==References==
<references/>

Problem Statement and Introduction

2011-02-06T02:10:26Z

Kbharris:

The average citizen’s ability to capture video in countries around the world – in the form of cheap digital recorders and cell phone cameras – combined with the spread of free online video hosting websites has created a powerful new tool for human rights. But, with some notable exceptions,<ref> See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Neda_Agha-Soltan</ref> this tool has not been harnessed to the extent that it could or should be. In our research, we identified some problems that led to this state of affairs and then attempted to work out practical solutions. This Section is particularly focused on describing the problems we identified.

==Historical Overview==

Video has long been recognized as a uniquely powerful tool with which to document human rights abuse and advocate for change. Videos and photographs from the liberated Nazi concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen and Dachau documented the horrific abuses of the Holocaust and precipitated the international demand that Nazi leaders be brought to justice.<ref> See http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/liberation_camps_01.shtml</ref> Soon after home televisions proliferated in the United States, video had a tremendous effect on the Civil Rights movement. Stark images of discrimination, segregation, and brutality, such as those surrounding the integration of Little Rock, Arkansas’s public schools in 1957, captured the American attention.<ref> See, e.g., Gene Roberts & Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation 182 (2006) (“the daily visual broadcasts of news as it happened [in Little Rock] had a profound impact on the nation’s understanding of the race drama in the South.”)</ref> Domestically, many Americans, including many of the journalists themselves, were appalled and thus motivated to promote and advocate for change.<ref> See generally id at Chapter 11.</ref> The continued reports out of Little Rock also proved to be a significant source of embarrassment for the United States internationally, which generated an entirely different set of pressures on the Eisenhower administration.<ref>Michael L. Krenn, “Unfinished Business”: Segregation and Diplomacy at the 1958 World’s Fair, 20 Diplomatic History 591 (1996), available at: http://vi.uh.edu/pages/buzzmat/DH%20articles/African%20Americans/krenn.pdf </ref>

However, at this time the video cameras belonged to large corporations that could afford the new and expensive technology needed to both capture and broadcast video. The networks could exercise a strong amount of editorial control with regards to the quantity and type of content recorded and broadcast.

The spread of camcorders and videocassettes made it easier for individual citizens to document human rights violations and abuse. In the United States, the dramatic home video footage of Rodney King’s 1991 beating at the hands of Los Angeles police officers stirred up public awareness and concern over police brutality and discrimination. Shortly thereafter, the human rights organization Witness was created with the goal of putting camcorders in the hands of human rights activists to help them document abuse.<ref> http://www.witness.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=26&Itemid=78</ref> At that point in time, however, the means of distribution and broadcast of video were still largely controlled by major networks. Human rights activists could capture video more easily, but they could not guarantee an audience.

In recent years the spread of ubiquitous cheap cell phone cameras combined with free online video hosting has made it possible for millions of people to capture video and broadcast it to the world. While there are examples of poignant videos that have spread in recent years and dramatically captured the public’s attention,<ref> See supra note 1.</ref> video for human rights does not appear to have taken off as one might expect in light of these democratizing technologies.

==The Problems==

The raw number of video-capable devices operating in oppressive regimes suggests capacity for a lot more video sharing than currently occurs.<ref>Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_mobile_phones_in_use. While many of the phones operating in oppressive regimes will not have video cameras, it is reasonable to think that a significant portion do have recording capabilities, meaning that millions of such cameras are currently operational.</ref> There are well-documented problems facing the people who share videos online right now that may also serve to prevent the medium from reaching its full potential. This section seeks to identify some of those problems and begins to sketch out the solutions developed more fully in subsequent sections of our project.

===Reprisals===

One of the biggest areas of concern in the human rights media space is reprisals by adversaries, which are typically governments or their officials, but may also include corporate actors or others. The reprisals may be targeted at any person involved in the video recording, production, or dissemination.

First, and perhaps most obviously, the person doing the filming or uploading/exfiltrating the video may be targeted for punishment.<ref>See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8487179.stm (describing the arrest of one Burmese journalist for cooperation with news media and noting that another journalist received a 20 year prison sentence “after a military court found she had provided video for the Democratic Voice of Burma.”)</ref> Authorities may have a number of ways of identifying the source of video that appears online. For example, they could be monitoring or logging Internet traffic within their borders, allowing them to easily track less sophisticated Internet users who attempt to post data. Even more sophisticated users will be vulnerable to governments that use correspondingly sophisticated snooping techniques. In addition, governments might be able to use metadata or circumstantial evidence from the videos after they are broadcast to identify authors. Even if such information is not immediately accessible to the average web user, governments may exert pressure on host websites to reveal information kept internally, such as server logs or private messages.<ref>For example, Yahoo! provided substantial information regarding at least one journalist to the Chinese government in 2005, citing its obligation “to operate within each country's laws.” See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4221538.stm.</ref> Large multinational corporations that serve as content or communication platforms might be particularly susceptible to this form of government pressure because of the interests of their employees and shareholders.<ref>See generally Goldsmith & Wu, Who Controls the Internet 49–86 (2006).</ref>

Second, the person or people filmed in human rights media might be targeted for punishment. After the 2009 protests in Iran, the government circulated photographs and stills from videos in an attempt to identify anti-government protesters.<ref>See http://www.gerdab.ir/fa/pages/?cid=422; http://hub.witness.org/en/node/11999</ref> Traditionally, documentary filmmakers in the human rights arena operated by asking for consent from their subjects,<ref> A discussion regarding informed consent and the need to protect subjects can be found at http://blog.witness.org/2010/06/protecting-yourself-your-subjects-and-your-human-rights-videos-on-youtube/</ref> yet shooting spontaneous video on the street or the use of video obtained second-hand may not afford filmmakers the ability to request or obtain consent from subjects. Accordingly, the need to protect the subjects depicted within videos is particularly acute for filmmakers who wish to broadcast recordings of events that may lead to reprisals against subjects of the video. Videographers might also desire to protect the dignity of a subject who has been subjected to certain types of treatment.<ref>For example, the treatment of Emad el-Kabir at the hands of the Egyptian police was particularly gruesome and documented on cell phone video. See http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1581608,00.html. While activists were able to convince the victim to come forward in this case, in future cases they might want to disseminate such footage without providing the name or identity of the victim, particularly if the victim is unknown.</ref>

===Access===

A second set of problems centers around problems of access both by uploaders and by viewers. It is well-known that many repressive regimes block or limit access to the Internet or particular websites.<ref>Or in the case of Egypt, currently, the entire Internet.</ref> Undoubtedly, repressive regimes would seek to limit access to content hosting sites for people who would like to upload videos documenting human rights abuses. Even if a website can use technical workarounds that enhance safety and access, such as VPNs, public key encryption, or other methods of evading Internet-blocking, they face the problem of communicating this information to people on the ground in repressive regimes.

Furthermore, some actors have shown a willingness to actively attack human rights websites via DDoS and other methods in order to prevent visitors from uploading or watching video, creating serious access problems for technically unsophisticated websites.<ref>See http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.law.harvard.edu/files/2010_DDoS_Attacks_Human_Rights_and_Media.pdf</ref> It then becomes highly important that any website billing itself as a human rights repository be able to maintain access and uptime for all visitors.

===Audience===

Finally, there is no single place to “go” in order to find new human rights media or video content. In December 2007, Witness created The Hub to provide a central repository for human rights video.<ref>http://hub.witness.org/</ref> However, it discontinued accepting new content in 2009, citing technical difficulties and changing priorities.<ref>See http://blog.witness.org/2010/08/update-on-the-hub-and-witness-new-online-strategy/</ref> At present, the spread of human rights video content appears to be primarily viral, and therefore, a bit haphazard. A number of disjointed avenues exist for distribution, but there is no centralized channel or place that serves as a home for content. One might also be concerned about the authenticity and/or lack of context that accompanies videos posted to disparate, relatively unknown hosts by anonymous authors.

In our view, a host that consistently provides authentic videos of interest to the human rights community, media, and concerned people throughout the world would be a strong step forward. By developing a consistent track record of impact, such a site could then develop a strong reputation encouraging new content to be sent.

==Solutions==

Pharos represents our solutions to many of these problems. Some of the solutions are technical, but many are organizational. It would be entirely possible for actors to tackle some or all of these problems individually, but our hope and belief is that one organization could take on the entire set of issues most effectively. Working with existing organizations and developing a track record of safety, security, judgment, and impact would start a virtuous cycle that could have an immense impact on human rights advocacy throughout the world.

==References==
<references/>

Problem Statement and Introduction

2011-02-06T02:08:39Z

Kbharris:

Problem Statement and Introduction

2011-02-06T02:06:51Z

Kbharris:

The average citizen’s ability to capture video in countries around the world – in the form of cheap digital recorders and cell phone cameras – combined with the spread of free online video hosting websites has created a powerful new tool for human rights. But, with some notable exceptions,<ref> See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Neda_Agha-Soltan</ref> this tool has not been harnessed to the extent that it could or should be. In our research, we identified some problems that led to this state of affairs and then attempted to work out practical solutions. This Section is particularly focused on describing the problems we identified.

==Historical Overview==

Video has long been recognized as a uniquely powerful tool with which to document human rights abuse and advocate for change. Videos and photographs from the liberated Nazi concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen and Dachau documented the horrific abuses of the Holocaust and precipitated the international demand that Nazi leaders be brought to justice.<ref> See http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/liberation_camps_01.shtml</ref> Soon after home televisions proliferated in the United States, video had a tremendous effect on the Civil Rights movement. Stark images of discrimination, segregation, and brutality, such as those surrounding the integration of Little Rock, Arkansas’s public schools in 1957, captured the American attention.<ref> See, e.g., Gene Roberts & Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation 182 (2006) (“the daily visual broadcasts of news as it happened [in Little Rock] had a profound impact on the nation’s understanding of the race drama in the South.”)</ref> Domestically, many Americans, including many of the journalists themselves, were appalled and thus motivated to promote and advocate for change.<ref> See generally id at Chapter 11.</ref> The continued reports out of Little Rock also proved to be a significant source of embarrassment for the United States internationally, which generated an entirely different set of pressures on the Eisenhower administration.<ref>Michael L. Krenn, “Unfinished Business”: Segregation and Diplomacy at the 1958 World’s Fair, 20 Diplomatic History 591 (1996), available at: http://vi.uh.edu/pages/buzzmat/DH%20articles/African%20Americans/krenn.pdf </ref>

However, at this time the video cameras belonged to large corporations that could afford the new and expensive technology needed to both capture and broadcast video. The networks could exercise a strong amount of editorial control with regards to the quantity and type of content recorded and broadcast.

The spread of camcorders and videocassettes made it easier for individual citizens to document human rights violations and abuse. In the United States, the dramatic home video footage of Rodney King’s 1991 beating at the hands of Los Angeles police officers stirred up public awareness and concern over police brutality and discrimination. Shortly thereafter, the human rights organization Witness was created with the goal of putting camcorders in the hands of human rights activists to help them document abuse.<ref> http://www.witness.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=26&Itemid=78</ref> At that point in time, however, the means of distribution and broadcast of video were still largely controlled by major networks. Human rights activists could capture video more easily, but they could not guarantee an audience.

In recent years the spread of ubiquitous cheap cell phone cameras combined with free online video hosting has made it possible for millions of people to capture video and broadcast it to the world. While there are examples of poignant videos that have spread in recent years and dramatically captured the public’s attention,<ref> See supra note 1.</ref> video for human rights does not appear to have taken off as one might expect in light of these democratizing technologies.

==The Problems==

The raw number of video-capable devices operating in oppressive regimes suggests capacity for a lot more video sharing than currently occurs.<ref>Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_mobile_phones_in_use. While many of the phones operating in oppressive regimes will not have video cameras, it is reasonable to think that a significant portion do have recording capabilities, meaning that millions of such cameras are currently operational.</ref> There are well-documented problems facing the people who share videos online right now that may also serve to prevent the medium from reaching its full potential. This section seeks to identify some of those problems and begins to sketch out the solutions developed more fully in subsequent sections of our project.

===Reprisals===

One of the biggest areas of concern in the human rights media space is reprisals by adversaries, which are typically governments or their officials, but may also include corporate actors or others. The reprisals may be targeted at any person involved in the video recording, production, or dissemination.

First, and perhaps most obviously, the person doing the filming or uploading/exfiltrating the video may be targeted for punishment.<ref>See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8487179.stm (describing the arrest of one Burmese journalist for cooperation with news media and noting that another journalist received a 20 year prison sentence “after a military court found she had provided video for the Democratic Voice of Burma.”)</ref> Authorities may have a number of ways of identifying the source of video that appears online. For example, they could be monitoring or logging Internet traffic within their borders, allowing them to easily track less sophisticated Internet users who attempt to post data. Even more sophisticated users will be vulnerable to governments that use correspondingly sophisticated snooping techniques. In addition, governments might be able to use metadata or circumstantial evidence from the videos after they are broadcast to identify authors. Even if such information is not immediately accessible to the average web user, governments may exert pressure on host websites to reveal information kept internally, such as server logs or private messages.<ref>For example, Yahoo! provided substantial information regarding at least one journalist to the Chinese government in 2005, citing its obligation “to operate within each country's laws.” See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4221538.stm.</ref> Large multinational corporations that serve as content or communication platforms might be particularly susceptible to this form of government pressure because of the interests of their employees and shareholders.<ref>See generally Goldsmith & Wu, Who Controls the Internet 49–86 (2006).</ref>

Second, the person or people filmed in human rights media might be targeted for punishment. After the 2009 protests in Iran, the government circulated photographs and stills from videos in an attempt to identify anti-government protesters.<ref>See http://www.gerdab.ir/fa/pages/?cid=422; http://hub.witness.org/en/node/11999</ref> Traditionally, documentary filmmakers in the human rights arena operated by asking for consent from their subjects,<ref> A discussion regarding informed consent and the need to protect subjects can be found at http://blog.witness.org/2010/06/protecting-yourself-your-subjects-and-your-human-rights-videos-on-youtube/</ref> yet shooting spontaneous video on the street or the use of video obtained second-hand may not afford filmmakers the ability to request or obtain consent from subjects. Accordingly, the need to protect the subjects depicted within videos is particularly acute for filmmakers who wish to broadcast recordings of events that may lead to reprisals against subjects of the video. Videographers might also desire to protect the dignity of a subject who has been subjected to certain types of treatment.<ref>For example, the treatment of Emad el-Kabir at the hands of the Egyptian police was particularly gruesome and documented on cell phone video. See http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1581608,00.html. While activists were able to convince the victim to come forward in this case, in future cases they might want to disseminate such footage without providing the name or identity of the victim, particularly if the victim is unknown.</ref>

===Access===

A second set of problems centers around problems of access both by uploaders and by viewers. It is well-known that many repressive regimes block or limit access to the Internet or particular websites.<ref>Or in the case of Egypt, currently, the entire internet.</ref> Undoubtedly, repressive regimes would seek to limit access to content hosting sites for people who would like to upload videos documenting human rights abuses. Even if a website can use technical workarounds that enhance safety and access, such as VPNs, public key encryption, or other methods of evading Internet-blocking, they face the problem of communicating this information to people on the ground in repressive regimes.

Furthermore, some actors have shown a willingness to actively attack human rights websites via DDoS and other methods in order to prevent visitors from uploading or watching video, creating serious access problems for technically unsophisticated websites.<ref>See http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.law.harvard.edu/files/2010_DDoS_Attacks_Human_Rights_and_Media.pdf</ref> It then becomes highly important that any website billing itself as a human rights repository be able to maintain access and uptime for all visitors.

===Audience===

Finally, there is no single place to “go” in order to find new human rights media or video content. In December 2007, Witness created The Hub to provide a central repository for human rights video.<ref>http://hub.witness.org/</ref> However, it discontinued accepting new content in 2009, citing technical difficulties and changing priorities.<ref>See http://blog.witness.org/2010/08/update-on-the-hub-and-witness-new-online-strategy/</ref> At present, the spread of human rights video content appears to be primarily viral, and therefore, a bit haphazard. A number of disjointed avenues exist for distribution, but there is no centralized channel or place that serves as a home for content. One might also be concerned about the authenticity and/or lack of context that accompanies videos posted to disparate, relatively unknown hosts by anonymous authors.

In our view, a host that consistently provides authentic videos of interest to the human rights community, media, and concerned people throughout the world would be a strong step forward. By developing a consistent track record of impact, such a site could then develop a strong reputation encouraging new content to be sent.

==Solutions==

Pharos represents our solutions to many of these problems. Some of the solutions are technical, but many are organizational. It would be entirely possible for actors to tackle some or all of these problems individually, but our hope and belief is that one organization could take on the entire set of issues most effectively. Working with existing organizations and developing a track record of safety, security, judgment, and impact would start a virtuous cycle that could have an immense impact on human rights advocacy throughout the world.

==References==
<references/>

Problem Statement and Introduction

2011-02-06T02:05:39Z

Kbharris:

The average citizen’s ability to capture video in countries around the world – in the form of cheap digital recorders and cell phone cameras – combined with the spread of free online video hosting websites has created a powerful new tool for human rights. But, with some notable exceptions,<ref> See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Neda_Agha-Soltan</ref> this tool has not been harnessed to the extent that it could or should be. In our research, we identified some problems that led to this state of affairs and then attempted to work out practical solutions. This Section is particularly focused on describing the problems we identified.

==Historical Overview==

Video has long been recognized as a uniquely powerful tool with which to document human rights abuse and advocate for change. Videos and photographs from the liberated Nazi concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen and Dachau documented the horrific abuses of the Holocaust and precipitated the international demand that Nazi leaders be brought to justice.<ref> See http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/liberation_camps_01.shtml</ref> Soon after home televisions proliferated in the United States, video had a tremendous effect on the Civil Rights movement. Stark images of discrimination, segregation, and brutality, such as those surrounding the integration of Little Rock, Arkansas’s public schools in 1957, captured the American attention.<ref> See, e.g., Gene Roberts & Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation 182 (2006) (“the daily visual broadcasts of news as it happened [in Little Rock] had a profound impact on the nation’s understanding of the race drama in the South.”)</ref> Domestically, many Americans, including many of the journalists themselves, were appalled and thus motivated to promote and advocate for change.<ref> See generally id at Chapter 11.</ref> The continued reports out of Little Rock also proved to be a significant source of embarrassment for the United States internationally, which generated an entirely different set of pressures on the Eisenhower administration.<ref>Michael L. Krenn, “Unfinished Business”: Segregation and Diplomacy at the 1958 World’s Fair, 20 Diplomatic History 591 (1996), available at: http://vi.uh.edu/pages/buzzmat/DH%20articles/African%20Americans/krenn.pdf </ref>

However, at this time the video cameras belonged to large corporations that could afford the new and expensive technology needed to both capture and broadcast video. The networks could exercise a strong amount of editorial control with regards to the quantity and type of content recorded and broadcast.

The spread of camcorders and videocassettes made it easier for individual citizens to document human rights violations and abuse. In the United States, the dramatic home video footage of Rodney King’s 1991 beating at the hands of Los Angeles police officers stirred up public awareness and concern over police brutality and discrimination. Shortly thereafter, the human rights organization Witness was created with the goal of putting camcorders in the hands of human rights activists to help them document abuse.<ref> http://www.witness.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=26&Itemid=78</ref> At that point in time, however, the means of distribution and broadcast of video were still largely controlled by major networks. Human rights activists could capture video more easily, but they could not guarantee an audience.

In recent years the spread of ubiquitous cheap cell phone cameras combined with free online video hosting has made it possible for millions of people to capture video and broadcast it to the world. While there are examples of poignant videos that have spread in recent years and dramatically captured the public’s attention,<ref> See supra note 1.</ref> video for human rights does not appear to have taken off as one might expect in light of these democratizing technologies.

==The Problems==

The raw number of video-capable devices operating in oppressive regimes suggests capacity for a lot more video sharing than currently occurs.<ref>Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_mobile_phones_in_use. While many of the phones operating in oppressive regimes will not have video cameras, it is reasonable to think that a significant portion do have recording capabilities, meaning that millions of such cameras are currently operational.</ref> There are well-documented problems facing the people who share videos online right now that may also serve to prevent the medium from reaching its full potential. This section seeks to identify some of those problems and begin to sketch out the solutions developed more fully in subsequent sections of our project.

===Reprisals===

One of the biggest areas of concern in the human rights media space is reprisals by adversaries, which are typically governments or their officials, but may also include corporate actors or others. The reprisals may be targeted at any person involved in the video recording, production, or dissemination.

First, and perhaps most obviously, the person doing the filming or uploading/exfiltrating the video may be targeted for punishment.<ref>See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8487179.stm (describing the arrest of one Burmese journalist for cooperation with news media and noting that another journalist received a 20 year prison sentence “after a military court found she had provided video for the Democratic Voice of Burma.”)</ref> Authorities may have a number of ways of identifying the source of video that appears online. For example, they could be monitoring or logging Internet traffic within their borders, allowing them to easily track less sophisticated Internet users who attempt to post data. Even more sophisticated users will be vulnerable to governments that use correspondingly sophisticated snooping techniques. In addition, governments might be able to use metadata or circumstantial evidence from the videos after they are broadcast to identify authors. Even if such information is not immediately accessible to the average web user, governments may exert pressure on host websites to reveal information kept internally, such as server logs or private messages.<ref>For example, Yahoo! provided substantial information regarding at least one journalist to the Chinese government in 2005, citing its obligation “to operate within each country's laws.” See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4221538.stm.</ref> Large multinational corporations that serve as content or communication platforms might be particularly susceptible to this form of government pressure because of the interests of their employees and shareholders.<ref>See generally Goldsmith & Wu, Who Controls the Internet 49–86 (2006).</ref>

Second, the person or people filmed in human rights media might be targeted for punishment. After the 2009 protests in Iran, the government circulated photographs and stills from videos in an attempt to identify anti-government protesters.<ref>See http://www.gerdab.ir/fa/pages/?cid=422; http://hub.witness.org/en/node/11999</ref> Traditionally, documentary filmmakers in the human rights arena operated by asking for consent from their subjects,<ref> A discussion regarding informed consent and the need to protect subjects can be found at http://blog.witness.org/2010/06/protecting-yourself-your-subjects-and-your-human-rights-videos-on-youtube/</ref> yet shooting spontaneous video on the street or the use of video obtained second-hand may not afford filmmakers the ability to request or obtain consent from subjects. Accordingly, the need to protect the subjects depicted within videos is particularly acute for filmmakers who wish to broadcast recordings of events that may lead to reprisals against subjects of the video. Videographers might also desire to protect the dignity of a subject who has been subjected to certain types of treatment.<ref>For example, the treatment of Emad el-Kabir at the hands of the Egyptian police was particularly gruesome and documented on cell phone video. See http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1581608,00.html. While activists were able to convince the victim to come forward in this case, in future cases they might want to disseminate such footage without providing the name or identity of the victim, particularly if the victim is unknown.</ref>

===Access===

A second set of problems centers around problems of access both by uploaders and by viewers. It is well-known that many repressive regimes block or limit access to the Internet or particular websites.<ref>Or in the case of Egypt, currently, the entire internet.</ref> Undoubtedly, repressive regimes would seek to limit access to content hosting sites for people who would like to upload videos documenting human rights abuses. Even if a website can use technical workarounds that enhance safety and access, such as VPNs, public key encryption, or other methods of evading Internet-blocking, they face the problem of communicating this information to people on the ground in repressive regimes.

Furthermore, some actors have shown a willingness to actively attack human rights websites via DDoS and other methods in order to prevent visitors from uploading or watching video, creating serious access problems for technically unsophisticated websites.<ref>See http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.law.harvard.edu/files/2010_DDoS_Attacks_Human_Rights_and_Media.pdf</ref> It then becomes highly important that any website billing itself as a human rights repository be able to maintain access and uptime for all visitors.

===Audience===

Finally, there is no single place to “go” in order to find new human rights media or video content. In December 2007, Witness created The Hub to provide a central repository for human rights video.<ref>http://hub.witness.org/</ref> However, it discontinued accepting new content in 2009, citing technical difficulties and changing priorities.<ref>See http://blog.witness.org/2010/08/update-on-the-hub-and-witness-new-online-strategy/</ref> At present, the spread of human rights video content appears to be primarily viral, and therefore, a bit haphazard. A number of disjointed avenues exist for distribution, but there is no centralized channel or place that serves as a home for content. One might also be concerned about the authenticity and/or lack of context that accompanies videos posted to disparate, relatively unknown hosts by anonymous authors.

In our view, a host that consistently provides authentic videos of interest to the human rights community, media, and concerned people throughout the world would be a strong step forward. By developing a consistent track record of impact, such a site could then develop a strong reputation encouraging new content to be sent.

==Solutions==

Pharos represents our solutions to many of these problems. Some of the solutions are technical, but many are organizational. It would be entirely possible for actors to tackle some or all of these problems individually, but our hope and belief is that one organization could take on the entire set of issues most effectively. Working with existing organizations and developing a track record of safety, security, judgment, and impact would start a virtuous cycle that could have an immense impact on human rights advocacy throughout the world.

==References==
<references/>

Challenges and Critiques

2011-02-04T18:34:48Z

Kbharris: Redirecting to Challenges

#REDIRECT [[Challenges]]

Challenges

2011-02-04T18:32:11Z

Kbharris:

This section of the wiki acknowledges key challenges facing the Pharos project and recommends future work that can be done to address some of these challenges. It addresses foundational critiques of the project, practical concerns, and potential unintended consequences that may result from the project.

==Foundational Considerations: Defining the Problem==

The Pharos Project is premised on the idea that in spite of a rise in low-cost video technologies, a dearth of video footage about human rights abuses currently exists.<ref> ''Contra'' E-mail from Patrick Meier, Director of Crisis Mapping, Ushahidi and Doctoral Research Fellow, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Harvard University (Feb. 1, 2011, 18:21 PDT) (on file with author) (stating that there is currently no dearth of footage about human rights abuses circulating on the internet, specifically pointing to the videos on YouTube and Witness.org documenting government-endorsed brutality against civilian protesters in Egypt as Mubarak struggles to stay in power).</ref> Assuming for the moment that there exists a true dearth of videos about human rights abuses, it is unclear what has stymied the use of video technologies to document and report human rights abuses. It is possible that few human rights videos have been circulated for reasons independent of a need for a new technological system that sanitizes and serves as an end-to-end upload-and-hosting service for human rights videos.

For example, internet penetration in Africa remains low—one 2010 study estimates that only about 10.9 percent of the population in the continent has internet access.<ref>Internet World Stats, ''Usage and Population Statistics'', http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm; http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/ict/index.html; http://www.oafrica.com/statistics/internet-penetration-vs-human-development-index-2010/ </ref> The lack of internet access could explain why human rights activists make limited use of video technologies to upload human rights content onto the web. Social norms may also drive whether and how technologies are used to further human rights. In addition, some activists might choose not to film and circulate videos documenting human rights abuses because increasing international exposure of a particular type of government abuse may not stop government abuses.<ref>Interview with Jennifer Gibson, former human rights activist for Save the Children (Feb. 3, 2011) (on file with author). ''See, infra'', [[#Unintended Consequences|Unintended Consequences]].</ref> The “range of human rights abuses” is wide, and human rights advocacy taking the form of “pursuing reform through formal judicial routes or diplomatic channels” might be more effective in a variety of situations.<ref>Gibson, ''supra'', note 3.</ref> The solution offered by Pharos may be ill-suited to addressing first-order issues like network connection and practices surrounding technology use.

More precision is needed in defining the problems Pharos hopes to solve. In internal discussions, the Pharos team proposed several potential hypotheses, each of which should be critically examined:

Human rights videos are not widely disseminated on the internet because:

*There is '''no tool to sanitize human rights videos''' (i.e. remove identifying information), and human rights abuses are not being recorded on video or uploaded to the internet because of the fear of jeopardizing the physical security of individuals featured in human rights videos or of the uploader.
*Human rights '''activists do not have the technological knowledge''' to use existing “liberation technologies” like Tor that can provide some measure of anonymity and security to the human rights activist.
*'''Current technologies''' (like Tor) that can be used by human rights activists '''are underleveraged''' because human rights activists do not know about their existence.
*'''For-profit services''', such as YouTube, '''are particularly susceptible to government requests for takedown'''; as a result, human rights videos are not either being posted to these for-profit hosting sites or being taken down.

Some of the problems above can be addressed without the creation of a new organization and the design of a new technological system. For example, in order to address human rights activists’ lack of technical expertise, some researchers have run technology training sessions.<ref>''See generally'', http://irevolution.wordpress.com/ (detailing Patrick Meier’s insight on deploying crisis mapping technologies to further civil resistance against repressive regimes).</ref> Patrick Meier, a researcher studying the use of technologies in civil resistance against repressive regimes, has led technology training sessions to teach individuals how to use technologies like Ushahidi, a tool that uses crowdsourced information to map the emergence of natural disasters and government abuses against citizens.<ref> http://ushahidi.com/about-us; ''see also'' http://jan30sudan.crowdmap.com/ (mapping civil resistance by Sudanese citizens against the government and indicating times and places where protesters have been killed).</ref>

If existing technologies are not being leveraged to the extent possible by human rights activists because they do not know of these tools’ existence, training sessions or branding efforts may similarly be used to inform human rights activists of the tools at their disposal. Low-cost video editing software that strips metatags from the video and enables face blurring could provide a similarly narrow solution to address the problem of government efforts to identify and jail dissidents who upload or are featured in human rights videos.

Going forward, more information providing support for the hypotheses debated within the team is needed to determine if a new technological system is needed, and if so, what features of such a technological system would most aid the dissemination of human rights media.

==Practical Concerns==

The success of Pharos’s mission depends on acquiring adequate funding; developing a clear policy to meet its objectives of enabling, protecting, and promoting human rights; and making video upload simple enough to encourage activists to use video technologies more frequently to capture and circulate content on human rights abuses.

===Costs and Funding===

The costs of running a non-profit organization like Pharos would be significant. Resources would be needed to train a sophisticated technology team to keep the Pharos’s servers secure. Regular staff would be needed to blur faces and remove metatags and other identifiable information from the videos. Educating human rights organizations about Pharos and branding and disseminating information about Pharos would also be expensive because it would require visiting many different NGOs around the world.

Finding sources of funding might be problematic because of the highly political nature of Pharos’s mission. All of the potential sources of funding—governments, venture capitalists, and philanthropists—would likely have concerns that limit their willingness to donate.

Most governments would fear the destabilizing effects of videos posted by their citizens or the geopolitical consequences of funding such an effort. Most venture capitalists and other profit-seeking investors would not be interested in funding Pharos because Pharos will not generate profit.

Even though many philanthropists might be initially attracted to the broad goals of Pharos, some of them may object to the organization’s definition of acceptable content.<ref>''See'' [[#Governance and Defining Acceptable Content|Governance and Defining Acceptable Content]].</ref> For example, an American philanthropist that generally supports ending human rights abuses may object to Pharos’s willingness to release video content exposing American troops’ firing on Iraqi or Afghani civilians because of the video’s potential to further deepen anti-American sentiment in the Middle East.

===Governance and Defining Acceptable Content===
[[Image:Daniel pearl.jpg|thumb|alt=ALT|A photo of Daniel Pearl, before he was killed, courtesy of The Tribune|left]]

Extremist groups might submit videos to Pharos that are intended to terrorize a population. Determining whether it is appropriate to disseminate a video showing the capture or the killing of a civilian would be difficult. When the video of journalist Daniel Pearl’s beheading circulated on the internet, many video hosting services decided to continue hosting the video even though some individuals, including Senator Joe Lieberman, asked for YouTube to remove graphic and violent videos that seemed to further the end of terrorists.<ref>''See'' J. Lieberman and S. Collins, ''Violent Islamist Extremism, the Internet, and the homegrown Terrorist Threat''. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (Mar. 8 2008), http://hsgac.senate.gov/public/_files/IslamistReport.pdf.</ref> Like Lieberman, some philanthropists might object to content that is distributed to further the end of a terrorist or extremist organization.<ref>''See, e.g.'', Peter Finn, ''Khalid Sheik Mohammed Killed U.S. Journalist Daniel Pearl, Report Finds'', WASH. POST, Jan. 20, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/20/AR2011012000057.html (David Pearl’s killer said that the video of the beheading was made to serve Al Qaeda propaganda objectives).</ref> YouTube’s Community Guidelines advises uploaders not to post content that contains “graphic or gratuitous violence”<ref>http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines</ref> and yet YouTube decided that First Amendment rights and the right of the public to know what had happened to Daniel Pearl trumped other concerns.

In a similar situation, what position would Pharos take? Should the board remove the video to refuse satisfying the whims of a terrorist organization? Or should a larger interest in human rights or in circulating the truth trump other considerations? What positions would the former political leaders on the Pharos board take and how would those views influence Pharos’s decision?

Defining the scope of acceptable content presents a particularly thorny problem for Pharos’s advisory board even though Pharos could skirt some issues by abiding by a policy that is as inclusive and as politically neutral as possible.

One set of policy guidelines the Pharos team intended to model was the CNN iReport Community Guidelines.<ref>http://ireport.cnn.com/guidelines.jspa</ref> CNN iReport asks individuals to not post:

*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.<ref>''Id.</ref>

If adopted, several of the guidelines listed above would be difficult to interpret. As mentioned before, would video content showing the capture of a civilian journalist and his beheading violate the guideline that bars content “contain[ing] violent images of killing or physical abuse . . . captured solely, or principally, for exploitive . . . or gratuitous purposes”?

[[Image:Bullet ant02.jpg|thumb|alt=Alt|Bullet ant|right]]

Furthermore, what is a human rights violation in one country might very well be a venerated tradition in another society. Determining the right level of deference to pay a particular society will be challenging. The Satere-Mawe, an indigenous people in Brazil, perform a male adulthood initiation ritual in which boys stick their hands in a glove filled with bullet ants whose bites inject venom into their victims, causing severe pain, temporary paralysis in the arms, and uncontrollable shaking that may last up to twenty-four hours.<ref>Steve Backshall, ''Bitten by the Amazon'', THE TIMES, Jun. 6, 2008, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/destinations/latin_america/article3131030.ece.</ref> In other societies, un-anaesthetized male circumcision is performed on teenage boys without sterilized medical instruments as part of a religious ritual, and botched circumcisions routinely lead to death.<ref>Thandisizwe Redford Mavundla, et. al., ''Rationalization of Male Circumcision as a Sacred Religious: Custom: Health Beliefs of Xhosa Men in South Africa'', 20 J. TRANSCULT. NURSING 395, 396 (2009).</ref> Do these rituals constitute human rights abuses?

A board that consists of former political leaders, philanthropists, and academics is also likely to encounter disagreements that might stall the creation of, or adherence to, a clear policy regarding acceptable content.

===Other Challenges===

It is unclear how Pharos would identify and ban fabricated human rights videos if most individuals submitting videos do so with little to no identifying information attached on the video to help the Pharos content team determine what is credible content and what is not. Without an effective procedure to identify and remove fabricated videos, Pharos might instigate needless political unrest or erode its own credibility, undermining activists’ and viewers’ trust in its ability to disseminate accurate information.

Another area of concern is ease of use by the end users. To be successful, Pharos would ideally make video upload easier than currently available tools do. One of the methods of video upload discussed by the team would require accessing a VPN or Pharos-specific Tor network.<ref>''See'' [[Central Idea]].</ref> These methods of uploading videos to Pharos might be prohibitively complicated for the average human rights activist.

Finally, it is disputable just how secure the direct channels between human rights activists and the centralized Pharos organization can be, from a technical standpoint.<ref>''See'' [[Technical Capabilities]].</ref>

==Unintended Consequences==

===Threats to Human Security===

If Pharos works as intended and broadcasts information about human rights abuses, governments will have a strong interest in discovering the identity of the video uploaders and the identity of individuals in the videos. Governments will be most interested in accessing the videos given to Pharos in their pre-sanitized version so that government agents can identify the faces of protesters or use other identifiable features of the video to determine who shot the video.

A disgruntled employee at Pharos who intentionally leaks pre-sanitized videos or a sophisticated government-sponsored hacking team that accesses the pre-sanitized videos could jeopardize human rights activists.

The creation of Pharos could leave human rights activists worse off than before if Pharos’s promise of anonymization and security is relied upon and not kept.

===Government Crackdowns on Internet Access===

[[Image:Egypt internet blackout.jpg|thumb|alt=Alt|Graph representing the falloff of internet traffic during the Egyptian government's crackdown on internet access|right]]

Other problems related to the internet architecture within countries will likely play a larger role in the adoption of any technology liberation tool than the mere existence of the tool. In reaction to political unrest, the government of Egypt took its entire country offline on January 27, 2011.<ref> ''See'' http://www.herdict.org/blog/2011/01/28/egypt-joins-a-select-few/ (displaying the falloff of internet traffic coming to and from Egypt when the government banned internet access Jan. 27, 2011 in response to political instability).</ref> Other countries like China block internet access in certain portions of the country where political unrest—and human rights abuses—exists.<ref>http://opennet.net/blog/2009/07/china-shuts-down-internet-xinjiang-region-after-riots</ref>

If Pharos were to initially succeed at helping activists exfiltrate videos documenting human rights abuses, repressive regimes might react by taking their countries offline any time there is political unrest likely to erupt in human rights abuses by their military and paramilitary forces. Such a result would not only undermine populations’ access to information about human rights, but a far-ranging scope of communication channels and information as a whole.

===Worsening of Human Rights Conditions===

Despite its manifest intention of improving human rights conditions around the world, Pharos might worsen human rights conditions in two ways.

First, the impulse to take human rights activism online might distract citizens—and governments—from participating in meaningful, real-world reforms.<ref>''See generally'' Evgeny Morozov, THE NET DELUSION 197-203 (2011) (arguing that young people’s participation in online political campaigns might produce an illusion of offline political reform).</ref> The internet is not always the best forum or outlet for pursuing relief from human rights abuses.

<blockquote> “The '''right path of action''' to help '''solve human rights problems''' is '''context-specific.''' If you really want a bad situation to change, you need to think about timing issues, framing issues, who to go to in order to publicize news about an abuse…. You have to examine what is the incident involved and who is the actor perpetrating the incidents. '''Tweeting or posting a video''' documenting a human rights abuse in most contexts '''will not induce the perpetrator to stop'''.” <ref> ''See'' Gibson, ''supra'', note 3.</ref> </blockquote>

Second, the international naming-and-shaming of a government for its human rights abuses may also have the serious and unintended consequences of worsening human rights conditions for citizens living under the rule of a shamed government.

For example, in 2002, the Nigerian government sentenced Amina Lawal to death by stoning after she gave birth out of wedlock.<ref>Deborah L. Rhode and Amanda Packel, ''Leadership in a Global Context: Corporate Social Responsibility and International Human Rights'', LEADERSHIP: LAW, POLICY, AND MANAGEMENT (forthcoming, Aspen Publishers, 2011).</ref> Her case quickly gained international attention, and the media and human rights activists in the West organized an international letter-writing campaign demanding the courts to reverse the sentence.<ref>''Id.''</ref> During this time, Lawal was not in danger and her case was still pending appeal.<ref>''Id.''</ref> As international uproar over the case increased, tensions between the local NGO representing Lawal and the Nigerian judicial system increased.<ref>''Id.''</ref> Significantly, many Western audiences had gotten the facts of Lawal’s case wrong and the local NGO representing Lawal feared that the inaccuracies in the media and in the activists' letters to the Nigerian government were hurting Lawal’s case.<ref>Letter from BAOBAB for Women's HUman Rights to paticipants of letter-writing campaign, http://www.wluml.org/node/1127</ref> The NGO urged the well meaning, but misdirected, petitioners to stop.<ref>''Id.''</ref> They had reason to believe that the international scrutiny and mangling of the facts would do Lawal more harm than good: earlier, an unmarried teenager convicted of extramarital sex was flogged “deliberately . . . to defy” what a local official described as “letters from infidels.” <ref>''See'' Rhode, ''supra'', note 21.</ref>

Sanitizing the videos could go a long way toward protecting the victims featured in the videos, but encouraging the filming and circulation of human rights videos could still politicize issues in a way that may worsen conditions for individuals living under a repressive regime. Pharos needs to carefully consider the possibility that it would in fact worsen the very conditions it is designed to improve.

==References==
<references/>

Pharos

2011-02-04T18:28:47Z

Kbharris:

[[Image:Pharos.png|400px]]

Our group’s work led to a proposal for a new organization, Pharos, that will serve to enable, protect, and promote human rights media from around the world. Our starting premise is that there is an immense capability to capture video in the form of relatively cheap cell phone cameras and other digital recorders. Importantly, it has also become much easier to post such video online for free. This combination of developments should have led to a dramatic expansion in video to promote human rights, but our view was that this development has not occurred.

Thus we set out to identify the obstacles that might be preventing or inhibiting the spread of human rights media, as well as existing services and solutions that could be used to surmount these obstacles. As a whole, it seemed that existing services were inadequate for a range of reasons including: susceptibility to government pressure, lack of security, lack of publicity, and many others. While our initial discussions and research led us to consider discrete solutions to discrete problems, the interwoven nature of many of the problems led us to consider the viability and desirability of a single organization that could meet the many challenges simultaneously.

Accordingly, we propose Pharos as a solution to these many problems in the aggregate. It should be noted, however, that within these pages readers will still find discussions of many discrete problems pertaining to human rights media, as well as suggestions for solutions that could be implemented immediately by a new application or existing service (e.g. software making it easy to blur the faces of protesters or more secure upload platforms). In our view, addressing any of these problems would be a highly worthwhile endeavor that has the promise of creating a better Internet.

==[[Problem Statement and Introduction]]==
==[[Existing Services]]==
==[[Pharos - Central Idea]]==
==[[Pharos - Organization and Governance]]==
==Pharos - Technical Capabilities==
==[[Challenges]]==

Challenges

2011-02-04T18:28:11Z

Kbharris:

This section of the wiki acknowledges core criticisms of the Pharos project and recommends future work that can be done to address some of these concerns. It addresses foundational critiques of the project, practical concerns, and potential unintended consequences that may result from the project.

==Foundational Considerations: Defining the Problem==

The Pharos Project is premised on the idea that in spite of a rise in low-cost video technologies, a dearth of video footage about human rights abuses currently exists.<ref> ''Contra'' E-mail from Patrick Meier, Director of Crisis Mapping, Ushahidi and Doctoral Research Fellow, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Harvard University (Feb. 1, 2011, 18:21 PDT) (on file with author) (stating that there is currently no dearth of footage about human rights abuses circulating on the internet, specifically pointing to the videos on YouTube and Witness.org documenting government-endorsed brutality against civilian protesters in Egypt as Mubarak struggles to stay in power).</ref> Assuming for the moment that there exists a true dearth of videos about human rights abuses, it is unclear what has stymied the use of video technologies to document and report human rights abuses. It is possible that few human rights videos have been circulated for reasons independent of a need for a new technological system that sanitizes and serves as an end-to-end upload-and-hosting service for human rights videos.

For example, internet penetration in Africa remains low—one 2010 study estimates that only about 10.9 percent of the population in the continent has internet access.<ref>Internet World Stats, ''Usage and Population Statistics'', http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm; http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/ict/index.html; http://www.oafrica.com/statistics/internet-penetration-vs-human-development-index-2010/ </ref> The lack of internet access could explain why human rights activists make limited use of video technologies to upload human rights content onto the web. Social norms may also drive whether and how technologies are used to further human rights. In addition, some activists might choose not to film and circulate videos documenting human rights abuses because increasing international exposure of a particular type of government abuse may not stop government abuses.<ref>Interview with Jennifer Gibson, former human rights activist for Save the Children (Feb. 3, 2011) (on file with author). ''See, infra'', [[#Unintended Consequences|Unintended Consequences]].</ref> The “range of human rights abuses” is wide, and human rights advocacy taking the form of “pursuing reform through formal judicial routes or diplomatic channels” might be more effective in a variety of situations.<ref>Gibson, ''supra'', note 3.</ref> The solution offered by Pharos may be ill-suited to addressing first-order issues like network connection and practices surrounding technology use.

More precision is needed in defining the problems Pharos hopes to solve. In internal discussions, the Pharos team proposed several potential hypotheses, each of which should be critically examined:

Human rights videos are not widely disseminated on the internet because:

*There is '''no tool to sanitize human rights videos''' (i.e. remove identifying information), and human rights abuses are not being recorded on video or uploaded to the internet because of the fear of jeopardizing the physical security of individuals featured in human rights videos or of the uploader.
*Human rights '''activists do not have the technological knowledge''' to use existing “liberation technologies” like Tor that can provide some measure of anonymity and security to the human rights activist.
*'''Current technologies''' (like Tor) that can be used by human rights activists '''are underleveraged''' because human rights activists do not know about their existence.
*'''For-profit services''', such as YouTube, '''are particularly susceptible to government requests for takedown'''; as a result, human rights videos are not either being posted to these for-profit hosting sites or being taken down.

Some of the problems above can be addressed without the creation of a new organization and the design of a new technological system. For example, in order to address human rights activists’ lack of technical expertise, some researchers have run technology training sessions.<ref>''See generally'', http://irevolution.wordpress.com/ (detailing Patrick Meier’s insight on deploying crisis mapping technologies to further civil resistance against repressive regimes).</ref> Patrick Meier, a researcher studying the use of technologies in civil resistance against repressive regimes, has led technology training sessions to teach individuals how to use technologies like Ushahidi, a tool that uses crowdsourced information to map the emergence of natural disasters and government abuses against citizens.<ref> http://ushahidi.com/about-us; ''see also'' http://jan30sudan.crowdmap.com/ (mapping civil resistance by Sudanese citizens against the government and indicating times and places where protesters have been killed).</ref>

If existing technologies are not being leveraged to the extent possible by human rights activists because they do not know of these tools’ existence, training sessions or branding efforts may similarly be used to inform human rights activists of the tools at their disposal. Low-cost video editing software that strips metatags from the video and enables face blurring could provide a similarly narrow solution to address the problem of government efforts to identify and jail dissidents who upload or are featured in human rights videos.

Going forward, more information providing support for the hypotheses debated within the team is needed to determine if a new technological system is needed, and if so, what features of such a technological system would most aid the dissemination of human rights media.

==Practical Concerns==

The success of Pharos’s mission depends on acquiring adequate funding; developing a clear policy to meet its objectives of enabling, protecting, and promoting human rights; and making video upload simple enough to encourage activists to use video technologies more frequently to capture and circulate content on human rights abuses.

===Costs and Funding===

The costs of running a non-profit organization like Pharos would be significant. Resources would be needed to train a sophisticated technology team to keep the Pharos’s servers secure. Regular staff would be needed to blur faces and remove metatags and other identifiable information from the videos. Educating human rights organizations about Pharos and branding and disseminating information about Pharos would also be expensive because it would require visiting many different NGOs around the world.

Finding sources of funding might be problematic because of the highly political nature of Pharos’s mission. All of the potential sources of funding—governments, venture capitalists, and philanthropists—would likely have concerns that limit their willingness to donate.

Most governments would fear the destabilizing effects of videos posted by their citizens or the geopolitical consequences of funding such an effort. Most venture capitalists and other profit-seeking investors would not be interested in funding Pharos because Pharos will not generate profit.

Even though many philanthropists might be initially attracted to the broad goals of Pharos, some of them may object to the organization’s definition of acceptable content.<ref>''See'' [[#Governance and Defining Acceptable Content|Governance and Defining Acceptable Content]].</ref> For example, an American philanthropist that generally supports ending human rights abuses may object to Pharos’s willingness to release video content exposing American troops’ firing on Iraqi or Afghani civilians because of the video’s potential to further deepen anti-American sentiment in the Middle East.

===Governance and Defining Acceptable Content===
[[Image:Daniel pearl.jpg|thumb|alt=ALT|A photo of Daniel Pearl, before he was killed, courtesy of The Tribune|left]]

Extremist groups might submit videos to Pharos that are intended to terrorize a population. Determining whether it is appropriate to disseminate a video showing the capture or the killing of a civilian would be difficult. When the video of journalist Daniel Pearl’s beheading circulated on the internet, many video hosting services decided to continue hosting the video even though some individuals, including Senator Joe Lieberman, asked for YouTube to remove graphic and violent videos that seemed to further the end of terrorists.<ref>''See'' J. Lieberman and S. Collins, ''Violent Islamist Extremism, the Internet, and the homegrown Terrorist Threat''. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (Mar. 8 2008), http://hsgac.senate.gov/public/_files/IslamistReport.pdf.</ref> Like Lieberman, some philanthropists might object to content that is distributed to further the end of a terrorist or extremist organization.<ref>''See, e.g.'', Peter Finn, ''Khalid Sheik Mohammed Killed U.S. Journalist Daniel Pearl, Report Finds'', WASH. POST, Jan. 20, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/20/AR2011012000057.html (David Pearl’s killer said that the video of the beheading was made to serve Al Qaeda propaganda objectives).</ref> YouTube’s Community Guidelines advises uploaders not to post content that contains “graphic or gratuitous violence”<ref>http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines</ref> and yet YouTube decided that First Amendment rights and the right of the public to know what had happened to Daniel Pearl trumped other concerns.

In a similar situation, what position would Pharos take? Should the board remove the video to refuse satisfying the whims of a terrorist organization? Or should a larger interest in human rights or in circulating the truth trump other considerations? What positions would the former political leaders on the Pharos board take and how would those views influence Pharos’s decision?

Defining the scope of acceptable content presents a particularly thorny problem for Pharos’s advisory board even though Pharos could skirt some issues by abiding by a policy that is as inclusive and as politically neutral as possible.

One set of policy guidelines the Pharos team intended to model was the CNN iReport Community Guidelines.<ref>http://ireport.cnn.com/guidelines.jspa</ref> CNN iReport asks individuals to not post:

*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.<ref>''Id.</ref>

If adopted, several of the guidelines listed above would be difficult to interpret. As mentioned before, would video content showing the capture of a civilian journalist and his beheading violate the guideline that bars content “contain[ing] violent images of killing or physical abuse . . . captured solely, or principally, for exploitive . . . or gratuitous purposes”?

[[Image:Bullet ant02.jpg|thumb|alt=Alt|Bullet ant|right]]

Furthermore, what is a human rights violation in one country might very well be a venerated tradition in another society. Determining the right level of deference to pay a particular society will be challenging. The Satere-Mawe, an indigenous people in Brazil, perform a male adulthood initiation ritual in which boys stick their hands in a glove filled with bullet ants whose bites inject venom into their victims, causing severe pain, temporary paralysis in the arms, and uncontrollable shaking that may last up to twenty-four hours.<ref>Steve Backshall, ''Bitten by the Amazon'', THE TIMES, Jun. 6, 2008, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/destinations/latin_america/article3131030.ece.</ref> In other societies, un-anaesthetized male circumcision is performed on teenage boys without sterilized medical instruments as part of a religious ritual, and botched circumcisions routinely lead to death.<ref>Thandisizwe Redford Mavundla, et. al., ''Rationalization of Male Circumcision as a Sacred Religious: Custom: Health Beliefs of Xhosa Men in South Africa'', 20 J. TRANSCULT. NURSING 395, 396 (2009).</ref> Do these rituals constitute human rights abuses?

A board that consists of former political leaders, philanthropists, and academics is also likely to encounter disagreements that might stall the creation of, or adherence to, a clear policy regarding acceptable content.

===Other Challenges===

It is unclear how Pharos would identify and ban fabricated human rights videos if most individuals submitting videos do so with little to no identifying information attached on the video to help the Pharos content team determine what is credible content and what is not. Without an effective procedure to identify and remove fabricated videos, Pharos might instigate needless political unrest or erode its own credibility, undermining activists’ and viewers’ trust in its ability to disseminate accurate information.

Another area of concern is ease of use by the end users. To be successful, Pharos would ideally make video upload easier than currently available tools do. One of the methods of video upload discussed by the team would require accessing a VPN or Pharos-specific Tor network.<ref>''See'' [[Central Idea]].</ref> These methods of uploading videos to Pharos might be prohibitively complicated for the average human rights activist.

Finally, it is disputable just how secure the direct channels between human rights activists and the centralized Pharos organization can be, from a technical standpoint.<ref>''See'' [[Technical Capabilities]].</ref>

==Unintended Consequences==

===Threats to Human Security===

If Pharos works as intended and broadcasts information about human rights abuses, governments will have a strong interest in discovering the identity of the video uploaders and the identity of individuals in the videos. Governments will be most interested in accessing the videos given to Pharos in their pre-sanitized version so that government agents can identify the faces of protesters or use other identifiable features of the video to determine who shot the video.

A disgruntled employee at Pharos who intentionally leaks pre-sanitized videos or a sophisticated government-sponsored hacking team that accesses the pre-sanitized videos could jeopardize human rights activists.

The creation of Pharos could leave human rights activists worse off than before if Pharos’s promise of anonymization and security is relied upon and not kept.

===Government Crackdowns on Internet Access===

[[Image:Egypt internet blackout.jpg|thumb|alt=Alt|Graph representing the falloff of internet traffic during the Egyptian government's crackdown on internet access|right]]

Other problems related to the internet architecture within countries will likely play a larger role in the adoption of any technology liberation tool than the mere existence of the tool. In reaction to political unrest, the government of Egypt took its entire country offline on January 27, 2011.<ref> ''See'' http://www.herdict.org/blog/2011/01/28/egypt-joins-a-select-few/ (displaying the falloff of internet traffic coming to and from Egypt when the government banned internet access Jan. 27, 2011 in response to political instability).</ref> Other countries like China block internet access in certain portions of the country where political unrest—and human rights abuses—exists.<ref>http://opennet.net/blog/2009/07/china-shuts-down-internet-xinjiang-region-after-riots</ref>

If Pharos were to initially succeed at helping activists exfiltrate videos documenting human rights abuses, repressive regimes might react by taking their countries offline any time there is political unrest likely to erupt in human rights abuses by their military and paramilitary forces. Such a result would not only undermine populations’ access to information about human rights, but a far-ranging scope of communication channels and information as a whole.

===Worsening of Human Rights Conditions===

Despite its manifest intention of improving human rights conditions around the world, Pharos might worsen human rights conditions in two ways.

First, the impulse to take human rights activism online might distract citizens—and governments—from participating in meaningful, real-world reforms.<ref>''See generally'' Evgeny Morozov, THE NET DELUSION 197-203 (2011) (arguing that young people’s participation in online political campaigns might produce an illusion of offline political reform).</ref> The internet is not always the best forum or outlet for pursuing relief from human rights abuses.

<blockquote> “The '''right path of action''' to help '''solve human rights problems''' is '''context-specific.''' If you really want a bad situation to change, you need to think about timing issues, framing issues, who to go to in order to publicize news about an abuse…. You have to examine what is the incident involved and who is the actor perpetrating the incidents. '''Tweeting or posting a video''' documenting a human rights abuse in most contexts '''will not induce the perpetrator to stop'''.” <ref> ''See'' Gibson, ''supra'', note 3.</ref> </blockquote>

Second, the international naming-and-shaming of a government for its human rights abuses may also have the serious and unintended consequences of worsening human rights conditions for citizens living under the rule of a shamed government.

For example, in 2002, the Nigerian government sentenced Amina Lawal to death by stoning after she gave birth out of wedlock.<ref>Deborah L. Rhode and Amanda Packel, ''Leadership in a Global Context: Corporate Social Responsibility and International Human Rights'', LEADERSHIP: LAW, POLICY, AND MANAGEMENT (forthcoming, Aspen Publishers, 2011).</ref> Her case quickly gained international attention, and the media and human rights activists in the West organized an international letter-writing campaign demanding the courts to reverse the sentence.<ref>''Id.''</ref> During this time, Lawal was not in danger and her case was still pending appeal.<ref>''Id.''</ref> As international uproar over the case increased, tensions between the local NGO representing Lawal and the Nigerian judicial system increased.<ref>''Id.''</ref> Significantly, many Western audiences had gotten the facts of Lawal’s case wrong and the local NGO representing Lawal feared that the inaccuracies in the media and in the activists' letters to the Nigerian government were hurting Lawal’s case.<ref>Letter from BAOBAB for Women's HUman Rights to paticipants of letter-writing campaign, http://www.wluml.org/node/1127</ref> The NGO urged the well meaning, but misdirected, petitioners to stop.<ref>''Id.''</ref> They had reason to believe that the international scrutiny and mangling of the facts would do Lawal more harm than good: earlier, an unmarried teenager convicted of extramarital sex was flogged “deliberately . . . to defy” what a local official described as “letters from infidels.” <ref>''See'' Rhode, ''supra'', note 21.</ref>

Sanitizing the videos could go a long way toward protecting the victims featured in the videos, but encouraging the filming and circulation of human rights videos could still politicize issues in a way that may worsen conditions for individuals living under a repressive regime. Pharos needs to carefully consider the possibility that it would in fact worsen the very conditions it is designed to improve.

==References==
<references/>

Existing Services

2011-02-04T17:48:50Z

Kbharris:

Human rights videos are currently disseminated through a variety of traditional and new media outlets. While these services have allowed many important human rights videos to reach an unprecedented audience, they are currently inadequate in two ways. First, none of the existing solutions have the proper alignment of incentives to effectively and fully support human rights media. Second, no existing service provides both secure anonymous uploading mechanisms and tools to ensure the anonymity of the videos’ subjects.

==Alignment of Incentives==

To explain why none of the current solutions have adequately solved the problems facing human rights media, it is helpful to plot these solutions along two important axes. First, the horizontal axis measures how susceptible organizations are to government and financial pressures. Organizations that are more susceptible to pressure can be found on the right-hand side of the chart, while organizations that are resistant to these pressures reside on the left-hand side. Second, the vertical axis looks at the extent to which an organization filters the content it publishes. At the top, non-hierarchical organizations generally take a hands-off approach to the content available on their websites, accepting most forms of user-generated content. Hierarchical organizations, on the other hand, exercise great control in the selection and promotion of the content that they publish. The basic chart is presented below.

[[Image:CurrentOrgs1.png]]

===Mapping the Competition===

====Second Quadrant====
The Second Quadrant, in the upper right of the chart, includes for-profit, multinational organizations that host user-generated content. YouTube and Facebook are two popular organizations that fall directly into this quadrant.<ref>Other organizations might include Flickr, Vimeo, Veoh, and Metacafe.</ref> Anyone with access can upload content to YouTube and publish it to the world, as long as it does not violate YouTube’s Community Guidelines (e.g. the video contains pornography or graphic violence).<ref>See [http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines?gl=GB&hl=en-GB YouTube Community Guidelines].</ref> Although YouTube is well-suited to host and disseminate large amounts of human rights media, it is still subject to outside pressures. Governments can force YouTube to limit the availability of certain content by threatening to block the site in their country. In 2008, for example, YouTube removed a controversial video critical of Islam in order to end Pakistan’s ban of the site.<ref>See Greg Sandoval, [http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines?gl=GB&hl=en-GB Pakiston Welcomes Back YouTube], CNet (Feb. 26, 2008).</ref> Such actions illustrate precisely why Second Quadrant organizations are insufficient to serve as publishers of human rights media: although they host most forms of user-generated content, their profit-seeking status leaves them susceptible to pressure to censor that content.

====Third Quadrant====
Actors in the Third Quadrant also do not provide an ideal platform for promoting human rights media. This space is dominated by traditional news organizations such as The New York Times, CNN, Reuters, and the Associated Press, as well as newer user-generated services like CNN iReport. Although these organizations are subject to many of the same financial pressures as Second Quadrant organizations, they are generally less willing to cater to oppressive governments. The real problem with using these organizations to promote human rights media, however, is the hierarchical structure they use to select content. Many organizations lack a system by which users can send in their content for publication, forcing them use services like YouTube. Even if an organization does accept user-generated content, editors ultimately decide which information is worthy of the limited time or space they have to present the news. When these large news organizations cover human rights abuses, they often focus on countries where Western powers have some involvement.<ref> For example, one study of The New York Times found that "[a]ttention to abuses occurs primarily in countries that were strategically instrumental during the cold war and in countries where there is clear U.S. involvement." See Caliendo et al., [http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/harvard_international_journal_of_press_politics/v004/4.4caliendo.html All the News That's Fit to Print? New York Times Coverage of Human-Rights Violations].</ref> Thus, Third Quadrant organizations are also insufficient to serve as publishers of human rights media, since important human rights media may not be chosen for publication.

====Fourth Quadrant====
The Fourth Quadrant contains most of the current existing human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Witness.org. These groups are non-profit organizations with a dedicated focus on promoting human rights. Although governments can forcibly block these organizations' websites, it will be more difficult to pressure them into compromising their ideological positions than it would be for profit-seeking organizations. Like CNN and The New York Times, however, Quadrant Four organizations all currently employ hierarchical methods for publishing human rights content, making value judgments about which content the world should see. Some organizations even chose to shoot their own footage of human rights events. Amnesty International, for instance, frequently publishes its own content gathered by affiliates rather than user-generated videos.<ref>See [http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/video-and-audio Amnesty International Video and Audio]. Most of the videos on this site are accompanied by Amnesty International commentary and background on the country being highlighted.</ref> Additionally, organizations like Witness.org have shifted their focus away from curating and hosting human rights videos. The mission of Witness.org is now to encourage people on the ground to produce human rights videos by giving them access to equipment and training.<ref>See [http://www.witness.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=266&Itemid=196 What is WITNESS?].</ref> Therefore, Fourth Quadrant organizations are also insufficient to serve as publishers of human rights media.

[[Image:CurrentOrgs3.png]]

===A Gap in the First Quadrant===

While existing organizations do encourage people to create human rights media and often bring these videos to the attention of the world, we believe many important human rights are never seen. There is currently no viable organization dedicated to human rights media that is both resistant to pressure and non-hierarchical. In other words, no dedicated human rights solution exists in Quadrant One.

To fill this First Quadrant gap, we propose Pharos. Pharos’ non-profit status leaves it immune to many of the tactics that governments have effectively used against profit-seeking companies. Additionally, the non-hierarchical nature of Pharos’ content publishing allows it to effectively disseminate human rights media and make it widely available.

[[Image:CurrentOrgs2.png]]

====A Quick Word about BitTorrent and The Hub====

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol that exists in the First Quadrant, but it is not a viable solution to the problems we have identified. First, it would be impossible to guarantee that all of the videos on a BitTorrent server were related to human rights, and these servers would likely be overrun by spam and other content. Second, in order to download content using BitTorrent, another user must be hosting that information. In countries with serious human rights abuses, Internet access may not be consistent or users may not wish to host the content for fear of being identified by the government. It will also be difficult to convince users to download videos in the first place, and then upload them for others. If users stop uploading a video it can disappear from the torrent forever, whereas a video on Pharos would remain available forever. Third, there are simply not enough people on BitTorrent to make it an effective solution. While everyone has access to an Internet browser, BitTorrent requires additional software that most users will not be willing to install. Fourth, BitTorrent lacks an effective interface that would allow users to quickly browse and share important human rights videos. Thus, the effective and timely dissemination of human rights media will require something more than BitTorrent.

Another potential First Quadrant organization is the Hub, which was an offshoot of Witness.org that hosted user-submitted human rights media from 2007 to 2009. However, it has since shut down. <ref>See [http://hub.witness.org/ Important Update About the Hub].</ref> While over 3000 videos remain on the site, no new videos can be uploaded.<ref>See Priscila Neri, [ http://hub.witness.org/en/HUB2Years 2 Years of the Hub – A Look Back].</ref> This organization served an important function, and we believe Pharos should pick up where the Hub left off. Unlike the Hub, however, Pharos will anonymize all user-generated content and facilitate its publication on other popular news sites.

==Anonymization==

In addition to being uniquely incentivized to support human rights media, Pharos solves another critical problem that no other existing organization solves: anonymity. Pharos offers anonymity in two ways. First, people can upload their human rights videos anonymously, so that oppressive governments cannot trace the video to a specific individual. Second, Pharos offers services to strip metadata and blur identifiable faces in the videos themselves. Neither of these services are currently offered by any of the organizations presented above. Anonymity has simply not been as important in the past, because it was difficult or impossible to trace the origin of a video or identify the people in it. As governments grow increasingly tech-savvy, however, we believe anonymization services will become crucial for human rights organizations that wish to receive important content without putting their sources in danger.

==References==
<references/>

Existing Services

2011-02-04T17:47:05Z

Kbharris:

Human rights videos are currently disseminated through a variety of traditional and new media outlets. While these services have allowed many important human rights videos to reach an unprecedented audience, they are currently inadequate in two ways. First, none of the existing solutions have the proper alignment of incentives to effectively and fully support human rights media. Second, no existing service provides both secure anonymous uploading mechanisms and tools to ensure the anonymity of the videos’ subjects.

==Alignment of Incentives==

To explain why none of the current solutions have adequately solved the problems facing human rights media, it is helpful to plot these solutions along two important axes. First, the horizontal axis measures how susceptible organizations are to government and financial pressures. Organizations that are more susceptible to pressure can be found on the right-hand side of the chart, while organizations that are resistant to these pressures reside on the left-hand side. Second, the vertical axis looks at the extent to which an organization filters the content it publishes. At the top, non-hierarchical organizations generally take a hands-off approach to the content available on their websites, accepting most forms of user-generated content. Hierarchical organizations, on the other hand, exercise great control in the selection and promotion of the content that they publish. The basic chart is presented below.

[[Image:CurrentOrgs1.png]]

===Mapping the Competition===

====Second Quadrant====
The Second Quadrant, in the upper right of the chart, includes for-profit, multinational organizations that host user-generated content. YouTube and Facebook are two popular organizations that fall directly into this quadrant.<ref>Other organizations might include Flickr, Vimeo, Veoh, and Metacafe.</ref> Anyone with access can upload content to YouTube and publish it to the world, as long as it does not violate YouTube’s Community Guidelines (e.g. the video contains pornography or graphic violence).<ref>See [http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines?gl=GB&hl=en-GB YouTube Community Guidelines].</ref> Although YouTube is well-suited to host and disseminate large amounts of human rights media, it is still subject to outside pressures. Governments can force YouTube to limit the availability of certain content by threatening to block the site in their country. In 2008, for example, YouTube removed a controversial video critical of Islam in order to end Pakistan’s ban of the site.<ref>See Greg Sandoval, [http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines?gl=GB&hl=en-GB Pakiston Welcomes Back YouTube], CNet (Feb. 26, 2008).</ref> Such actions illustrate precisely why Second Quadrant organizations are insufficient to serve as publishers of human rights media: although they host most forms of user-generated content, their profit-seeking status leaves them susceptible to pressure to censor that content.

====Third Quadrant====
Actors in the Third Quadrant also do not provide an ideal platform for promoting human rights media. This space is dominated by traditional news organizations such as The New York Times, CNN, Reuters, and the Associated Press, as well as newer user-generated services like CNN iReport. Although these organizations are subject to many of the same financial pressures as Second Quadrant organizations, they are generally less willing to cater to oppressive governments. The real problem with using these organizations to promote human rights media, however, is the hierarchical structure they use to select content. Many organizations lack a system by which users can send in their content for publication, forcing them use services like YouTube. Even if an organization does accept user-generated content, editors ultimately decide which information is worthy of the limited time or space they have to present the news. When these large news organizations cover human rights abuses, they often focus on countries where Western powers have some involvement.<ref> For example, one study of The New York Times found that "[a]ttention to abuses occurs primarily in countries that were strategically instrumental during the cold war and in countries where there is clear U.S. involvement." See Caliendo et al., [http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/harvard_international_journal_of_press_politics/v004/4.4caliendo.html All the News That's Fit to Print? New York Times Coverage of Human-Rights Violations].</ref> Thus, Third Quadrant organizations are also insufficient to serve as publishers of human rights media, since important human rights media may not be chosen for publication.

====Fourth Quadrant====
The Fourth Quadrant contains most of the current existing human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Witness.org. These groups are non-profit organizations with a dedicated focus on promoting human rights. Although governments can forcibly block these organizations' websites, it will be more difficult to pressure them into compromising their ideological positions than it would be for profit-seeking organizations. Like CNN and The New York Times, however, quadrant four organizations all currently employ hierarchical methods for publishing human rights content, making value judgments about which content the world should see. Some organizations even chose to shoot their own footage of human rights events. Amnesty International, for instance, frequently publishes its own content gathered by affiliates rather than user-generated videos.<ref>See [http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/video-and-audio Amnesty International Video and Audio]. Most of the videos on this site are accompanied by Amnesty International commentary and background on the country being highlighted.</ref> Additionally, organizations like Witness.org have shifted their focus away from curating and hosting human rights videos. The mission of Witness.org is now to encourage people on the ground to produce human rights videos by giving them access to equipment and training.<ref>See [http://www.witness.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=266&Itemid=196 What is WITNESS?].</ref> Therefore, Fourth Quadrant organizations are also insufficient to serve as publishers of human rights media.

[[Image:CurrentOrgs3.png]]

===A Gap in the First Quadrant===

While existing organizations do encourage people to create human rights media and often bring these videos to the attention of the world, we believe many important human rights are never seen. There is currently no viable organization dedicated to human rights media that is both resistant to pressure and non-hierarchical. In other words, no dedicated human rights solution exists in Quadrant One.

To fill this First Quadrant gap, we propose Pharos. Pharos’ non-profit status leaves it immune to many of the tactics that governments have effectively used against profit-seeking companies. Additionally, the non-hierarchical nature of Pharos’ content publishing allows it to effectively disseminate human rights media and make it widely available.

[[Image:CurrentOrgs2.png]]

====A Quick Word about BitTorrent and The Hub====

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol that exists in the First Quadrant, but it is not a viable solution to the problems we have identified. First, it would be impossible to guarantee that all of the videos on a BitTorrent server were related to human rights, and these servers would likely be overrun by spam and other content. Second, in order to download content using BitTorrent, another user must be hosting that information. In countries with serious human rights abuses, Internet access may not be consistent or users may not wish to host the content for fear of being identified by the government. It will also be difficult to convince users to download videos in the first place, and then upload them for others. If users stop uploading a video it can disappear from the torrent forever, whereas a video on Pharos would remain available forever. Third, there are simply not enough people on BitTorrent to make it an effective solution. While everyone has access to an Internet browser, BitTorrent requires additional software that most users will not be willing to install. Fourth, BitTorrent lacks an effective interface that would allow users to quickly browse and share important human rights videos. Thus, the effective and timely dissemination of human rights media will require something more than BitTorrent.

Another potential First Quadrant organization is the Hub, which was an offshoot of Witness.org that hosted user-submitted human rights media from 2007 to 2009. However, it has since shut down. <ref>See [http://hub.witness.org/ Important Update About the Hub].</ref> While over 3000 videos remain on the site, no new videos can be uploaded.<ref>See Priscila Neri, [ http://hub.witness.org/en/HUB2Years 2 Years of the Hub – A Look Back].</ref> This organization served an important function, and we believe Pharos should pick up where the Hub left off. Unlike the Hub, however, Pharos will anonymize all user-generated content and facilitate its publication on other popular news sites.

==Anonymization==

In addition to being uniquely incentivized to support human rights media, Pharos solves another critical problem that no other existing organization solves: anonymity. Pharos offers anonymity in two ways. First, people can upload their human rights videos anonymously, so that oppressive governments cannot trace the video to a specific individual. Second, Pharos offers services to strip metadata and blur identifiable faces in the videos themselves. Neither of these services are currently offered by any of the organizations presented above. Anonymity has simply not been as important in the past, because it was difficult or impossible to trace the origin of a video or identify the people in it. As governments grow increasingly tech-savvy, however, we believe anonymization services will become crucial for human rights organizations that wish to receive important content without putting their sources in danger.

==References==
<references/>

Pharos - Organization and Governance

2011-02-04T08:12:43Z

Kbharris: For consistency: Pharos's not Pharos'

Pharos will be built around its core mission: to enable, protect, and promote human rights media. The challenge will be to interpret the mission into clear principles, upon which the organization will be able to function deftly and responsibly.

It will have two bodies, the board of directors and the day-to-day team, to establish and implement these principles. The first will be responsible for formulating a clear statement of Pharos's principles and, in difficult or changing circumstances, interpreting how they should be applied. The implementation team will oversee the functioning of the site, protect the security of the data, and manage relations with other content publishers and users.

[[Image:Internal structure.png|300px|thumb|right|Pharos's Organizational Chart]]
Alongside Pharos's formal organization, we envision a worldwide network that Pharos can promote active and appropriate submissions, as well as providing information to submitters about how to do so securely. The network can also supply Pharos with the necessary contextual information to provide alongside the video. While Pharos does not want to reveal any information about the people in the video, it does want to provide information that will help explain where the event occurred, in what circumstances, and related to what underlying factors. This context will be crucial in ensuring that the video will not be ignored by news outlets or dismissed as a forgery by state actors.

== The Board of Directors ==
The Board of Directors will include a variety of professionals and experts with proven experience in human rights, freedom of expression, human security, and international relations. Like other mission driven organizations, we want to draw members from several different fields to ensure that the principles are written in a rich and thoughtful way.<ref> Amnesty International's structure may be one possible model for Pharos [http://www.amnesty.org/en/who-we-are/our-people/international-executive-committee Amnesty's International Executive Committee Structure]</ref> We envision some of the members may be human rights attorneys, former diplomats, professors, journalists, activists, and IT professionals.

Their initial task will be to draw up a clear mission statement and list of principles, upon which Pharos will accept, process, and distribute content. We envision that the mission statement will be 'To Promote Freedom of Expression and Protect Human Rights'. It should provide a clear, but general, vision of why Pharos exists. Ideally, these principles will be sufficient guidelines for how the operations will be carried out day to day. After its initial meetings, the board will only have to meet quarterly to review the operations of Pharos. But in case there are some submissions that are particularly difficult to evaluate, the Board should be on call for

The list of guiding principles will necessarily be more specific. These will determine which videos Pharos will process, publish, and distribute, and which it will not. Other organizations, like CNN's I-Reporter and Witness' The Hub, have formulated content policies that provide useful baselines for Pharos.<ref>[http://hub.witness.org/en/ContentReview Witness' Content Standards]</ref><ref>[http://ireport.cnn.com/guidelines.jspa CNN I-Report's Community Guidelines]</ref><ref>[http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines YouTube's Community Guidelines]</ref>
[[Image:Cnn i report.PNG|200px|thumb|left|CNN I-Report's submission guidelines]]
[[Image:The hub2.PNG|200px|thumb|left|The Hub's submission guidelines]]
We envision Pharos's list may be similar. It may contain prohibitions against which types of content will not be allowed, unless justifiable to the message -- like on the grounds of extreme violence, cruelty to animals, or explicit sexuality. But because of Pharos's concern for human rights abuses, it must expect that many legitimate videos may include violence, foul language, and sexuality in the context of abuse. The Board will draw up a general rule upon which legitimate versus illegitimate content can be distinguished. Their public guidelines about submissions may resemble CNN I-Report's -- general and user-friendly -- but privately they can hold detailed discussions about particular videos that may walk the line between appropriate and obscene.

In its guiding principles, the Board must also spell out how to approach videos that have been sent anonymously and cannot be verified. Pharos's general policy is that it will accept any content sent to it, and will only publish content related to human rights. The goal is to have a quick turn-around, so that all submissions, after being evaluated and scrubbed clean, will be posted and distributed immediately. Pharos can have a badge system (like CNN's I-Report) that declares whether the video has been verified as accurate and reliable by Pharos standards.<ref>[http://ireport.cnn.com/faq.jspa#vetted CNN I-Report's Vetting Policy]</ref> A video without a badge will be understood as not necessarily real or trustworthy.

If the content arrives from an unknown source, Pharos must be concerned that it has been edited to misrepresent reality or is an outright forgery. We recognize that there has been a history of forged abuses, including with videos of abuses that have been manufactured to give the appearance of an abuse when there has not been one. We are aware that competing groups, particularly in long-standing conflicts, use allegations of human rights abuse as tools to promote their political agenda, rather than strictly to protect human rights principles. The possibility of a video being used to spur on violence must also be a concern.<ref>For example, France 24's 09/17/10 report on an amateur video showing abuse in Kashmir -- which may or may not be a forgery--inciting violence in the region [http://observers.france24.com/content/20100917-kashmir-video-human-rights-violations-adds-fuel-deadly-protests-india-army "Kashmir video showing human rights violations adds fuel to deadly protests"]</ref> We do not want Pharos to be drawn into such disputes, or be used to facilitate the escalation of violence, if it is possible.

The Board, relying on its own knowledge and its network of contacts, will have to make the difficult calls whether to publish videos that are suspected of being edited or forged.<ref>This decision could possibly be lengthy and resource-consuming task, but we expect it only to be so in exceptional circumstances. [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6980113.ece "Tamil Tiger video killing is genuine, declares the UN", The Sunday Times, 01/08/10]</ref> It can determine whether a state's argument, claiming that an abuse video has been forged, is strong enough to merit taking a video down.<ref>See Human Rights Watch's response to Pakistan's objections that a video documenting abuse was a forgery. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11455858 BBC News, "Pakistan army says 'extra-judicial killing' video faked" 10/01/10], with more information on the video dispute at [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/world/asia/30pstan.html?pagewanted=all "Video Hints at Executions by Pakistanis", The New York Times 09/29/10]</ref> Other human rights organizations must make similar determinations in whether to publish accounts of abuse, that may have been exaggerated or falsified. Pharos can borrow their insights into how to maker responsible choices on questionable content.

== The Implementation Team ==
The Implementation Team -- made up of a Tech Team and a Content one -- will work according to the directives established by the Board. It will be responsible for ensuring the site operates smoothly, that the content is protected, and that it is distributed promptly and fully to the appropriate publishers. If Pharos hosts content on its own site, the team will ensure that the media is presented in a timely and usable manner.

The Tech team will be charged with matters of security and stability. They will maintain the website, and scrub each video of all identifiable content and metadata.

Pharos may be besieged with videos at certain times (like, if there is a high-profile crisis going on) and it should be built not to crash during an intense spurt of activity. The site may also be subject to DDOS attacks, or other attempted take-downs.<ref> See, e.g., the Berkman Center's December 2010 report on DDOS attacks directed against human rights groups [http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheon/2011/01/ddos Berkman Center's Interactive DDOS Report]</ref>
The tech team must devise a strategy -- whether it involves mirroring, hosting with a major company, or otherwise -- to insulate Pharos from such attacks. Pharos should be reliably available, particularly in the face of attacks from those actors who do not want a certain video to be seen, and during times of crisis when more users want to upload and to view human rights media.

Security of the content must also be a priority of the Tech Team. If Pharos retains unscrubbed versions of the content it receives -- the videos with distinguishing features still visible, or with metadata attached -- they must be protected from any possible intrusion. Pharos must be able to guarantee its promise to uploaders that no one will ever be able to trace the video back to them. If Pharos keeps any logs of the videos have been submitted, like how they arrived or when they did, these logs should receive similarly high levels of security. We expect that Pharos may want to preserve logs and unscrubbed media for the sake of future investigations or historical documentation. If, for instance, the author and the subject of the video decide to go on the record, and wish to be identified in the video, Pharos should be able to provide them a copy of their media that has not been obscured. The original, untouched media could be useful to them as evidence, and Pharos can act as the media's safekeeper when the user's own hardware may be taken or wiped clean.

[[Image:Pharos_Slide_-_Encryption_Key_Distribution.png|300px|thumb|right|Pharos's public key encryption]]

If Pharos decides to offer uploaders a public key encryption service, then the Tech Team will have to ensure the absolute security of its encryption process. The private key it uses to decrypt the submitted files will have to be guarded so that no technological or human infiltration is possible. We expect the Tech team to hire out a private security firm that can ensure the utmost security is possible.

The Content Team will focus more on soliciting media, determining whether it fits the mission, and publishing it as widely and fully as possible. They will use the Board's guiding principles as the basis for their decisions about whether a submission is appropriate for Pharos. They can approach the Board if a video is particularly challenging. We expect that the principles will be a sufficient guide for most submissions, and that the team will only have to approach the Board in rare occurrences of a particularly controversial or confusing submission.

[[Image:Pharos_Diagram_-_right_side_-_dsitribution.png|300px|thumb|right|Content distribution]]

The Content Team will be responsible for distributing the media to as many sources as possible. They may also provide contextual information alongside the actual file -- with any information that they can verify about where it was created, at what time, and under what circumstances. They will not reveal anything that could identify how they received the video or who is involved in it. They will decide which videos are 'Pharos certified', according to the standards set by the board, and which videos don't receive the badge.

Pharos, via both the Content Team and the Board, will cultivate a network of human rights organizations, journalists and academics worldwide, upon whom it can rely when trying to evaluate a video. If the Content Team needs to learn more about the circumstances in which the video was produced, they can call upon this network for general information about the context. If a video is suspect, they may also contact this network to try to determine more about its reliability.

The network will also be useful in soliciting videos. They can distribute their public key via these organizations, which may produce human rights media on their own, or which may be the local contact points for people who are not activists, but have ended up with documentation of abuse on their hardware. These local organizations can instruct people on how to submit their media securely, directing them to Pharos and with guidance on using public keys, Tor, or other methods that will ensure some security.

== A Wider Network ==
Pharos need not consist solely of a well-protected office in a Western country. Though this may be its headquarters, the organization could include a worldwide network of localized publishers. Taking the model of human rights organizations, there could be regional or continental Pharos Hubs, all connected loosely to a central body. The local versions could have more translation and language support tailored to the area, and it could have distribution networks that are focused less on US news media, and more on local media. The Board of Directors could include members from each of the Pharos Hubs.

A less centralized system would help insure that Pharos does not make decisions that are divorced from local realities. Local hubs will be more attuned to which videos may be forgeries or editing; they will also be able to contextualize videos and provide consumers with fuller explanations of why the abuse occurred and what response would be best.

There could be two main problems with a more dispersed Pharos. First, local offices may be more biased about the content submissions. Because the employees will be more directly invested in the region, they may not publish any video that they consider could harm their political party or movement. A centralized Pharos organization would be more separate from local realities (and though that makes them less knowledgeable about the context of a video) it makes them less biased in deciding which content to distribute.

Second, local Pharos operations will be more liable to security attacks or governmental requests. If they are working in a country that does not have strong protections on freedom of expression, their site may be blocked or their employees may be subject to prosecution for their work. Moreover, their offices, records, and stored content may be infiltrated or subpoenaed. It will be harder to guarantee uploaders security if the office itself is not immune to attack or investigations. If they use public-private key encryption systems, the key may be more easily compromised as well.

The ideal would be for Pharos to be balanced between a centralized, Western-based office and a worldwide network that can offer more local support and contextualization. Security concerns may be the overriding ones. Pharos must be able to guarantee its uploaders absolute anonymity, and protect its own employees from prosecution or attack. If the organization could maintain this high level of security while still partnering with organizations worldwide, and perhaps even delegating some decision-making and hosting to them, that would ensure that Pharos is better attuned to situations on the ground and protected from forged content.

==References==
<references/>

Pharos - Organization and Governance

2011-02-04T08:10:38Z

Kbharris:

Pharos will be built around its core mission: to enable, protect, and promote human rights media. The challenge will be to interpret the mission into clear principles, upon which the organization will be able to function deftly and responsibly.

It will have two bodies, the board of directors and the day-to-day team, to establish and implement these principles. The first will be responsible for formulating a clear statement of Pharos' principles and, in difficult or changing circumstances, interpreting how they should be applied. The implementation team will oversee the functioning of the site, protect the security of the data, and manage relations with other content publishers and users.

[[Image:Internal structure.png|300px|thumb|right|Pharos's Organizational Chart]]
Alongside Pharos' formal organization, we envision a worldwide network that Pharos can promote active and appropriate submissions, as well as providing information to submitters about how to do so securely. The network can also supply Pharos with the necessary contextual information to provide alongside the video. While Pharos does not want to reveal any information about the people in the video, it does want to provide information that will help explain where the event occurred, in what circumstances, and related to what underlying factors. This context will be crucial in ensuring that the video will not be ignored by news outlets or dismissed as a forgery by state actors.

== The Board of Directors ==
The Board of Directors will include a variety of professionals and experts with proven experience in human rights, freedom of expression, human security, and international relations. Like other mission driven organizations, we want to draw members from several different fields to ensure that the principles are written in a rich and thoughtful way.<ref> Amnesty International's structure may be one possible model for Pharos [http://www.amnesty.org/en/who-we-are/our-people/international-executive-committee Amnesty's International Executive Committee Structure]</ref> We envision some of the members may be human rights attorneys, former diplomats, professors, journalists, activists, and IT professionals.

Their initial task will be to draw up a clear mission statement and list of principles, upon which Pharos will accept, process, and distribute content. We envision that the mission statement will be 'To Promote Freedom of Expression and Protect Human Rights'. It should provide a clear, but general, vision of why Pharos exists. Ideally, these principles will be sufficient guidelines for how the operations will be carried out day to day. After its initial meetings, the board will only have to meet quarterly to review the operations of Pharos. But in case there are some submissions that are particularly difficult to evaluate, the Board should be on call for

The list of guiding principles will necessarily be more specific. These will determine which videos Pharos will process, publish, and distribute, and which it will not. Other organizations, like CNN's I-Reporter and Witness' The Hub, have formulated content policies that provide useful baselines for Pharos.<ref>[http://hub.witness.org/en/ContentReview Witness' Content Standards]</ref><ref>[http://ireport.cnn.com/guidelines.jspa CNN I-Report's Community Guidelines]</ref><ref>[http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines YouTube's Community Guidelines]</ref>
[[Image:Cnn i report.PNG|200px|thumb|left|CNN I-Report's submission guidelines]]
[[Image:The hub2.PNG|200px|thumb|left|The Hub's submission guidelines]]
We envision Pharos' list may be similar. It may contain prohibitions against which types of content will not be allowed, unless justifiable to the message -- like on the grounds of extreme violence, cruelty to animals, or explicit sexuality. But because of Pharos' concern for human rights abuses, it must expect that many legitimate videos may include violence, foul language, and sexuality in the context of abuse. The Board will draw up a general rule upon which legitimate versus illegitimate content can be distinguished. Their public guidelines about submissions may resemble CNN I-Report's -- general and user-friendly -- but privately they can hold detailed discussions about particular videos that may walk the line between appropriate and obscene.

In its guiding principles, the Board must also spell out how to approach videos that have been sent anonymously and cannot be verified. Pharos' general policy is that it will accept any content sent to it, and will only publish content related to human rights. The goal is to have a quick turn-around, so that all submissions, after being evaluated and scrubbed clean, will be posted and distributed immediately. Pharos can have a badge system (like CNN's I-Report) that declares whether the video has been verified as accurate and reliable by Pharos standards.<ref>[http://ireport.cnn.com/faq.jspa#vetted CNN I-Report's Vetting Policy]</ref> A video without a badge will be understood as not necessarily real or trustworthy.

If the content arrives from an unknown source, Pharos must be concerned that it has been edited to misrepresent reality or is an outright forgery. We recognize that there has been a history of forged abuses, including with videos of abuses that have been manufactured to give the appearance of an abuse when there has not been one. We are aware that competing groups, particularly in long-standing conflicts, use allegations of human rights abuse as tools to promote their political agenda, rather than strictly to protect human rights principles. The possibility of a video being used to spur on violence must also be a concern.<ref>For example, France 24's 09/17/10 report on an amateur video showing abuse in Kashmir -- which may or may not be a forgery--inciting violence in the region [http://observers.france24.com/content/20100917-kashmir-video-human-rights-violations-adds-fuel-deadly-protests-india-army "Kashmir video showing human rights violations adds fuel to deadly protests"]</ref> We do not want Pharos to be drawn into such disputes, or be used to facilitate the escalation of violence, if it is possible.

The Board, relying on its own knowledge and its network of contacts, will have to make the difficult calls whether to publish videos that are suspected of being edited or forged.<ref>This decision could possibly be lengthy and resource-consuming task, but we expect it only to be so in exceptional circumstances. [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6980113.ece "Tamil Tiger video killing is genuine, declares the UN", The Sunday Times, 01/08/10]</ref> It can determine whether a state's argument, claiming that an abuse video has been forged, is strong enough to merit taking a video down.<ref>See Human Rights Watch's response to Pakistan's objections that a video documenting abuse was a forgery. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11455858 BBC News, "Pakistan army says 'extra-judicial killing' video faked" 10/01/10], with more information on the video dispute at [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/world/asia/30pstan.html?pagewanted=all "Video Hints at Executions by Pakistanis", The New York Times 09/29/10]</ref> Other human rights organizations must make similar determinations in whether to publish accounts of abuse, that may have been exaggerated or falsified. Pharos can borrow their insights into how to maker responsible choices on questionable content.

== The Implementation Team ==
The Implementation Team -- made up of a Tech Team and a Content one -- will work according to the directives established by the Board. It will be responsible for ensuring the site operates smoothly, that the content is protected, and that it is distributed promptly and fully to the appropriate publishers. If Pharos hosts content on its own site, the team will ensure that the media is presented in a timely and usable manner.

The Tech team will be charged with matters of security and stability. They will maintain the website, and scrub each video of all identifiable content and metadata.

Pharos may be besieged with videos at certain times (like, if there is a high-profile crisis going on) and it should be built not to crash during an intense spurt of activity. The site may also be subject to DDOS attacks, or other attempted take-downs.<ref> See, e.g., the Berkman Center's December 2010 report on DDOS attacks directed against human rights groups [http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheon/2011/01/ddos Berkman Center's Interactive DDOS Report]</ref>
The tech team must devise a strategy -- whether it involves mirroring, hosting with a major company, or otherwise -- to insulate Pharos from such attacks. Pharos should be reliably available, particularly in the face of attacks from those actors who do not want a certain video to be seen, and during times of crisis when more users want to upload and to view human rights media.

Security of the content must also be a priority of the Tech Team. If Pharos retains unscrubbed versions of the content it receives -- the videos with distinguishing features still visible, or with metadata attached -- they must be protected from any possible intrusion. Pharos must be able to guarantee its promise to uploaders that no one will ever be able to trace the video back to them. If Pharos keeps any logs of the videos have been submitted, like how they arrived or when they did, these logs should receive similarly high levels of security. We expect that Pharos may want to preserve logs and unscrubbed media for the sake of future investigations or historical documentation. If, for instance, the author and the subject of the video decide to go on the record, and wish to be identified in the video, Pharos should be able to provide them a copy of their media that has not been obscured. The original, untouched media could be useful to them as evidence, and Pharos can act as the media's safekeeper when the user's own hardware may be taken or wiped clean.

[[Image:Pharos_Slide_-_Encryption_Key_Distribution.png|300px|thumb|right|Pharos' public key encryption]]

If Pharos decides to offer uploaders a public key encryption service, then the Tech Team will have to ensure the absolute security of its encryption process. The private key it uses to decrypt the submitted files will have to be guarded so that no technological or human infiltration is possible. We expect the Tech team to hire out a private security firm that can ensure the utmost security is possible.

The Content Team will focus more on soliciting media, determining whether it fits the mission, and publishing it as widely and fully as possible. They will use the Board's guiding principles as the basis for their decisions about whether a submission is appropriate for Pharos. They can approach the Board if a video is particularly challenging. We expect that the principles will be a sufficient guide for most submissions, and that the team will only have to approach the Board in rare occurrences of a particularly controversial or confusing submission.

[[Image:Pharos_Diagram_-_right_side_-_dsitribution.png|300px|thumb|right|Content distribution]]

The Content Team will be responsible for distributing the media to as many sources as possible. They may also provide contextual information alongside the actual file -- with any information that they can verify about where it was created, at what time, and under what circumstances. They will not reveal anything that could identify how they received the video or who is involved in it. They will decide which videos are 'Pharos certified', according to the standards set by the board, and which videos don't receive the badge.

Pharos, via both the Content Team and the Board, will cultivate a network of human rights organizations, journalists and academics worldwide, upon whom it can rely when trying to evaluate a video. If the Content Team needs to learn more about the circumstances in which the video was produced, they can call upon this network for general information about the context. If a video is suspect, they may also contact this network to try to determine more about its reliability.

The network will also be useful in soliciting videos. They can distribute their public key via these organizations, which may produce human rights media on their own, or which may be the local contact points for people who are not activists, but have ended up with documentation of abuse on their hardware. These local organizations can instruct people on how to submit their media securely, directing them to Pharos and with guidance on using public keys, Tor, or other methods that will ensure some security.

== A Wider Network ==
Pharos need not consist solely of a well-protected office in a Western country. Though this may be its headquarters, the organization could include a worldwide network of localized publishers. Taking the model of human rights organizations, there could be regional or continental Pharos Hubs, all connected loosely to a central body. The local versions could have more translation and language support tailored to the area, and it could have distribution networks that are focused less on US news media, and more on local media. The Board of Directors could include members from each of the Pharos Hubs.

A less centralized system would help insure that Pharos does not make decisions that are divorced from local realities. Local hubs will be more attuned to which videos may be forgeries or editing; they will also be able to contextualize videos and provide consumers with fuller explanations of why the abuse occurred and what response would be best.

There could be two main problems with a more dispersed Pharos. First, local offices may be more biased about the content submissions. Because the employees will be more directly invested in the region, they may not publish any video that they consider could harm their political party or movement. A centralized Pharos organization would be more separate from local realities (and though that makes them less knowledgeable about the context of a video) it makes them less biased in deciding which content to distribute.

Second, local Pharos operations will be more liable to security attacks or governmental requests. If they are working in a country that does not have strong protections on freedom of expression, their site may be blocked or their employees may be subject to prosecution for their work. Moreover, their offices, records, and stored content may be infiltrated or subpoenaed. It will be harder to guarantee uploaders security if the office itself is not immune to attack or investigations. If they use public-private key encryption systems, the key may be more easily compromised as well.

The ideal would be for Pharos to be balanced between a centralized, Western-based office and a worldwide network that can offer more local support and contextualization. Security concerns may be the overriding ones. Pharos must be able to guarantee its uploaders absolute anonymity, and protect its own employees from prosecution or attack. If the organization could maintain this high level of security while still partnering with organizations worldwide, and perhaps even delegating some decision-making and hosting to them, that would ensure that Pharos is better attuned to situations on the ground and protected from forged content.

==References==
<references/>

Pharos - Organization and Governance

2011-02-04T08:04:44Z

Kbharris:

Pharos will be built around its core mission: to enable, protect, and promote human rights media. The challenge will be to interpret the mission into clear principles, upon which the organization will be able to function deftly and responsibly.

It will have two bodies, the board of directors and the day-to-day team, to establish & to implement these principles. The first will be responsible for formulating a clear statement of Pharos' principles and, in difficult or changing circumstances, interpreting how they should be applied. The implementation team will oversee the functioning of the site, protect the security of the data, and manage relations with other content publishers and users.

[[Image:Internal structure.png|300px|thumb|right|Pharos's Organizational Chart]]
Alongside Pharos' formal organization, we envision a worldwide network that Pharos can promote active and appropriate submissions, as well as providing information to submitters about how to do so securely. The network can also supply Pharos with the necessary contextual information to provide alongside the video. While Pharos does not want to reveal any information about the people in the video, it does want to provide information that will help explain where the event occurred, in what circumstances, and related to what underlying factors. This context will be crucial in ensuring that the video will not be ignored by news outlets or dismissed as a forgery by state actors.

== The Board of Directors ==
The Board of Directors will include a variety of professionals and experts with proven experience in human rights, freedom of expression, human security, and international relations. Like other mission driven organizations, we want to draw members from several different fields to ensure that the principles are written in a rich and thoughtful way.<ref> Amnesty International's structure may be one possible model for Pharos [http://www.amnesty.org/en/who-we-are/our-people/international-executive-committee Amnesty's International Executive Committee Structure]</ref> We envision some of the members may be human rights attorneys, former diplomats, professors, journalists, activists, and IT professionals.

Their initial task will be to draw up a clear mission statement and list of principles, upon which Pharos will accept, process, and distribute content. We envision that the mission statement will be 'To Promote Freedom of Expression and Protect Human Rights'. It should provide a clear, but general, vision of why Pharos exists. Ideally, these principles will be sufficient guidelines for how the operations will be carried out day to day. After its initial meetings, the board will only have to meet quarterly to review the operations of Pharos. But in case there are some submissions that are particularly difficult to evaluate, the Board should be on call for

The list of guiding principles will necessarily be more specific. These will determine which videos Pharos will process, publish, and distribute, and which it will not. Other organizations, like CNN's I-Reporter and Witness' The Hub, have formulated content policies that provide useful baselines for Pharos.<ref>[http://hub.witness.org/en/ContentReview Witness' Content Standards]</ref><ref>[http://ireport.cnn.com/guidelines.jspa CNN I-Report's Community Guidelines]</ref><ref>[http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines YouTube's Community Guidelines]</ref>
[[Image:Cnn i report.PNG|200px|thumb|left|CNN I-Report's submission guidelines]]
[[Image:The hub2.PNG|200px|thumb|left|The Hub's submission guidelines]]
We envision Pharos' list may be similar. It may contain prohibitions against which types of content will not be allowed, unless justifiable to the message -- like on the grounds of extreme violence, cruelty to animals, or explicit sexuality. But because of Pharos' concern for human rights abuses, it must expect that many legitimate videos may include violence, foul language, and sexuality in the context of abuse. The Board will draw up a general rule upon which legitimate versus illegitimate content can be distinguished. Their public guidelines about submissions may resemble CNN I-Report's -- general and user-friendly -- but privately they can hold detailed discussions about particular videos that may walk the line between appropriate and obscene.

In its guiding principles, the Board must also spell out how to approach videos that have been sent anonymously and cannot be verified. Pharos' general policy is that it will accept any content sent to it, and will only publish content related to human rights. The goal is to have a quick turn-around, so that all submissions, after being evaluated and scrubbed clean, will be posted and distributed immediately. Pharos can have a badge system (like CNN's I-Report) that declares whether the video has been verified as accurate and reliable by Pharos standards.<ref>[http://ireport.cnn.com/faq.jspa#vetted CNN I-Report's Vetting Policy]</ref> A video without a badge will be understood as not necessarily real or trustworthy.

If the content arrives from an unknown source, Pharos must be concerned that it has been edited to misrepresent reality or is an outright forgery. We recognize that there has been a history of forged abuses, including with videos of abuses that have been manufactured to give the appearance of an abuse when there has not been one. We are aware that competing groups, particularly in long-standing conflicts, use allegations of human rights abuse as tools to promote their political agenda, rather than strictly to protect human rights principles. The possibility of a video being used to spur on violence must also be a concern.<ref>For example, France 24's 09/17/10 report on an amateur video showing abuse in Kashmir -- which may or may not be a forgery--inciting violence in the region [http://observers.france24.com/content/20100917-kashmir-video-human-rights-violations-adds-fuel-deadly-protests-india-army "Kashmir video showing human rights violations adds fuel to deadly protests"]</ref> We do not want Pharos to be drawn into such disputes, or be used to facilitate the escalation of violence, if it is possible.

The Board, relying on its own knowledge and its network of contacts, will have to make the difficult calls whether to publish videos that are suspected of being edited or forged.<ref>This decision could possibly be lengthy and resource-consuming task, but we expect it only to be so in exceptional circumstances. [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6980113.ece "Tamil Tiger video killing is genuine, declares the UN", The Sunday Times, 01/08/10]</ref> It can determine whether a state's argument, claiming that an abuse video has been forged, is strong enough to merit taking a video down.<ref>See Human Rights Watch's response to Pakistan's objections that a video documenting abuse was a forgery. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11455858 BBC News, "Pakistan army says 'extra-judicial killing' video faked" 10/01/10], with more information on the video dispute at [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/world/asia/30pstan.html?pagewanted=all "Video Hints at Executions by Pakistanis", The New York Times 09/29/10]</ref> Other human rights organizations must make similar determinations in whether to publish accounts of abuse, that may have been exaggerated or falsified. Pharos can borrow their insights into how to maker responsible choices on questionable content.

== The Implementation Team ==
The Implementation Team -- made up of a Tech Team and a Content one -- will work according to the directives established by the Board. It will be responsible for ensuring the site operates smoothly, that the content is protected, and that it is distributed promptly and fully to the appropriate publishers. If Pharos hosts content on its own site, the team will ensure that the media is presented in a timely and usable manner.

The Tech team will be charged with matters of security and stability. They will maintain the website, and scrub each video of all identifiable content and metadata.

Pharos may be besieged with videos at certain times (like, if there is a high-profile crisis going on) and it should be built not to crash during an intense spurt of activity. The site may also be subject to DDOS attacks, or other attempted take-downs.<ref> See, e.g., the Berkman Center's December 2010 report on DDOS attacks directed against human rights groups [http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheon/2011/01/ddos Berkman Center's Interactive DDOS Report]</ref>
The tech team must devise a strategy -- whether it involves mirroring, hosting with a major company, or otherwise -- to insulate Pharos from such attacks. Pharos should be reliably available, particularly in the face of attacks from those actors who do not want a certain video to be seen, and during times of crisis when more users want to upload and to view human rights media.

Security of the content must also be a priority of the Tech Team. If Pharos retains unscrubbed versions of the content it receives -- the videos with distinguishing features still visible, or with metadata attached -- they must be protected from any possible intrusion. Pharos must be able to guarantee its promise to uploaders that no one will ever be able to trace the video back to them. If Pharos keeps any logs of the videos have been submitted, like how they arrived or when they did, these logs should receive similarly high levels of security. We expect that Pharos may want to preserve logs and unscrubbed media for the sake of future investigations or historical documentation. If, for instance, the author and the subject of the video decide to go on the record, and wish to be identified in the video, Pharos should be able to provide them a copy of their media that has not been obscured. The original, untouched media could be useful to them as evidence, and Pharos can act as the media's safekeeper when the user's own hardware may be taken or wiped clean.

[[Image:Pharos_Slide_-_Encryption_Key_Distribution.png|300px|thumb|right|Pharos' public key encryption]]

If Pharos decides to offer uploaders a public key encryption service, then the Tech Team will have to ensure the absolute security of its encryption process. The private key it uses to decrypt the submitted files will have to be guarded so that no technological or human infiltration is possible. We expect the Tech team to hire out a private security firm that can ensure the utmost security is possible.

The Content Team will focus more on soliciting media, determining whether it fits the mission, and publishing it as widely and fully as possible. They will use the Board's guiding principles as the basis for their decisions about whether a submission is appropriate for Pharos. They can approach the Board if a video is particularly challenging. We expect that the principles will be a sufficient guide for most submissions, and that the team will only have to approach the Board in rare occurrences of a particularly controversial or confusing submission.

[[Image:Pharos_Diagram_-_right_side_-_dsitribution.png|300px|thumb|right|Content distribution]]

The Content Team will be responsible for distributing the media to as many sources as possible. They may also provide contextual information alongside the actual file -- with any information that they can verify about where it was created, at what time, and under what circumstances. They will not reveal anything that could identify how they received the video or who is involved in it. They will decide which videos are 'Pharos certified', according to the standards set by the board, and which videos don't receive the badge.

Pharos, via both the Content Team and the Board, will cultivate a network of human rights organizations, journalists and academics worldwide, upon whom it can rely when trying to evaluate a video. If the Content Team needs to learn more about the circumstances in which the video was produced, they can call upon this network for general information about the context. If a video is suspect, they may also contact this network to try to determine more about its reliability.

The network will also be useful in soliciting videos. They can distribute their public key via these organizations, which may produce human rights media on their own, or which may be the local contact points for people who are not activists, but have ended up with documentation of abuse on their hardware. These local organizations can instruct people on how to submit their media securely, directing them to Pharos and with guidance on using public keys, Tor, or other methods that will ensure some security.

== A Wider Network ==
Pharos need not consist solely of a well-protected office in a Western country. Though this may be its headquarters, the organization could include a worldwide network of localized publishers. Taking the model of human rights organizations, there could be regional or continental Pharos Hubs, all connected loosely to a central body. The local versions could have more translation and language support tailored to the area, and it could have distribution networks that are focused less on US news media, and more on local media. The Board of Directors could include members from each of the Pharos Hubs.

A less centralized system would help insure that Pharos does not make decisions that are divorced from local realities. Local hubs will be more attuned to which videos may be forgeries or editing; they will also be able to contextualize videos and provide consumers with fuller explanations of why the abuse occurred and what response would be best.

There could be two main problems with a more dispersed Pharos. First, local offices may be more biased about the content submissions. Because the employees will be more directly invested in the region, they may not publish any video that they consider could harm their political party or movement. A centralized Pharos organization would be more separate from local realities (and though that makes them less knowledgeable about the context of a video) it makes them less biased in deciding which content to distribute.

Second, local Pharos operations will be more liable to security attacks or governmental requests. If they are working in a country that does not have strong protections on freedom of expression, their site may be blocked or their employees may be subject to prosecution for their work. Moreover, their offices, records, and stored content may be infiltrated or subpoenaed. It will be harder to guarantee uploaders security if the office itself is not immune to attack or investigations. If they use public-private key encryption systems, the key may be more easily compromised as well.

The ideal would be for Pharos to be balanced between a centralized, Western-based office and a worldwide network that can offer more local support and contextualization. Security concerns may be the overriding ones. Pharos must be able to guarantee its uploaders absolute anonymity, and protect its own employees from prosecution or attack. If the organization could maintain this high level of security while still partnering with organizations worldwide, and perhaps even delegating some decision-making and hosting to them, that would ensure that Pharos is better attuned to situations on the ground and protected from forged content.

==References==
<references/>

Pharos

2011-02-04T06:22:37Z

Kbharris:

Problem Statement/Introduction

2011-02-04T06:22:05Z

Kbharris: Problem Statement/Introduction moved to Problem Statement and Introduction

#REDIRECT [[Problem Statement and Introduction]]

Problem Statement and Introduction

2011-02-04T06:22:05Z

Kbharris: Problem Statement/Introduction moved to Problem Statement and Introduction

The average citizen’s ability to capture video in countries around the world – in the form of cheap digital recorders and cell phone cameras – combined with the spread of free online video hosting websites has created a powerful new tool for human rights. But, with some notable exceptions,<ref> See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Neda_Agha-Soltan</ref> it seems that this tool has not been harnessed to the extent that it could or should be. Our project set out to identify the problems that led to this state of affairs as well as identify some of the solutions. This section is particularly focused on setting out the problems we identified.

==Historical Overview==

Video has long been recognized as a uniquely powerful tool with which to document human rights abuse and advocate for change. Videos and photographs from the liberated Nazi concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen and Dachau documented the horrific abuses of the Holocaust and precipitated the international demand that Nazi leaders be brought to justice.<ref> See http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/liberation_camps_01.shtml</ref> Soon after home televisions proliferated in the United States, video had a tremendous effect on the Civil Rights movement. Stark images of discrimination, segregation, and brutality, such as those surrounding the integration of Little Rock, Arkansas’s public schools in 1957, captured the American attention.<ref> See, e.g., Gene Roberts & Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation 182 (2006) (“the daily visual broadcasts of news as it happened [in Little Rock] had a profound impact on the nation’s understanding of the race drama in the South.”)</ref> Domestically, many Americans, including many of the journalists themselves, were appalled and motivated to promote and advocate for change.<ref> See generally id at Chapter 11.</ref> The continued reports out of Little Rock also proved to be a significant source of embarrassment for the United States internationally, which generated an entirely different set of pressures on the Eisenhower administration.<ref>Michael L. Krenn, “Unfinished Business”: Segregation and Diplomacy at the 1958 World’s Fair, 20 Diplomatic History 591 (1996), available at: http://vi.uh.edu/pages/buzzmat/DH%20articles/African%20Americans/krenn.pdf </ref>

However, at this time the video cameras belonged to large corporations that could afford the new and expensive technology needed to both capture and broadcast video. The networks could exercise a strong amount of editorial control with regards to the quantity and type of content recorded and broadcast.

The spread of camcorders and videocassettes made it easier for individual citizens to document human rights violations and abuse. In the United States, the dramatic home video footage of Rodney King’s 1991 beating at the hands of Los Angeles police officers stirred up public awareness and concern over police brutality and discrimination. Shortly thereafter, the human rights organization Witness was created with the goal of putting camcorders in the hands of human rights activists to help them document abuse.<ref> http://www.witness.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=26&Itemid=78</ref> At that point in time, however, the means of distribution and broadcast of video were still largely controlled by major networks. Human rights activists could capture video more easily, but they could not guarantee an audience.

In recent years the spread of ubiquitous cheap cell phone cameras combined with free online video hosting has made it possible for millions of people to capture video and broadcast it to the world. While there are examples of poignant videos that have spread in recent years and dramatically captured the public’s attention,<ref> See supra note 1.</ref> video for human rights does not appear to have taken off as one might expect in light of these democratizing technologies.

==The Problems==

The raw number of video-capable devices operating in oppressive regimes suggests capacity for a lot more video sharing than currently occurs.<ref>Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_mobile_phones_in_use. While many of the phones operating in oppressive regimes will not have video cameras, it is reasonable to think that a significant portion do have recording capabilities, meaning that millions of such cameras are currently operational.</ref> There are well-documented problems facing the people who share videos online right now that may also serve to prevent the medium from reaching its full potential. This section seeks to identify some of those problems and begin to sketch out the solutions developed more fully in subsequent sections of our project.

===Reprisals===

One of the biggest areas of concern in the human rights media space is reprisals by adversaries, which are typically governments or their officials, but may also include corporate actors or others. The reprisals may be targeted at any person involved in the video recording, production, or dissemination.

First, and perhaps most obviously, the person doing the filming or uploading/exfiltrating the video may be targeted for punishment.<ref>See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8487179.stm (describing the arrest of one Burmese journalist for cooperation with news media and noting that another journalist received a 20 year prison sentence “after a military court found she had provided video for the Democratic Voice of Burma.”)</ref> Authorities may have a number of ways of identifying the source of video that appears online. For example, they could be monitoring or logging Internet traffic within their borders, allowing them to easily track less sophisticated Internet users who attempt to post data. Even more sophisticated users will be vulnerable to governments that use correspondingly sophisticated snooping techniques. In addition, governments might be able to use metadata or circumstantial evidence from the videos after they are broadcast to identify authors. Even if such information is not immediately accessible to the average web user, governments may exert pressure on host websites to reveal information kept internally, such as server logs or private messages.<ref>For example, Yahoo! provided substantial information regarding at least one journalist to the Chinese government in 2005, citing its obligation “to operate within each country's laws.” See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4221538.stm.</ref> Large multinational corporations that serve as content or communication platforms might be particularly susceptible to this form of government pressure because of the interests of their employees and shareholders.<ref>See generally Goldsmith & Wu, Who Controls the Internet 49–86 (2006).</ref>

Second, the person or people filmed in human rights media might be targeted for punishment. After the 2009 protests in Iran, the government circulated photographs and stills from videos in an attempt to identify anti-government protesters.<ref>See http://www.gerdab.ir/fa/pages/?cid=422; http://hub.witness.org/en/node/11999</ref> Traditionally, documentary filmmakers in the human rights arena operated by asking for consent from their subjects,<ref> A discussion regarding informed consent and the need to protect subjects can be found at http://blog.witness.org/2010/06/protecting-yourself-your-subjects-and-your-human-rights-videos-on-youtube/</ref> yet shooting spontaneous video on the street or the use video obtained second-hand may not afford filmmakers the ability to request or obtain consent from subjects. Accordingly, the need to protect the subjects depicted within videos is particularly acute for filmmakers who wish to broadcast recordings of events that may lead to reprisals against subjects of the video. Videographers might also desire to protect the dignity of a subject who has been subjected to certain types of treatment.<ref>For example, the treatment of Emad el-Kabir at the hands of the Egyptian police was particularly gruesome and documented on cell phone video. See http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1581608,00.html. While activists were able to convince the victim to come forward in this case, in other cases they might want to disseminate such footage without providing the name or identity of the victim if the victim’s identity cannot be ascertained.</ref>

===Access===

A second set of problems centers around problems of access both by uploaders and by viewers. It is well-known that many repressive regimes block or limit access to the Internet or particular websites.<ref>Or in the case of Egypt, now, the entire internet.</ref> Undoubtedly, repressive regimes would seek to limit access to content hosting sites for people who would like to upload videos documenting human rights abuses. Even if a website can use technical workarounds that enhance safety and access, such as VPN, public-key encryption, or other methods of evading Internet-blocking, they face the problem of communicating this information to people on the ground in repressive regimes.

Furthermore, some actors have shown a willingness to actively attack human rights websites via DDoS and other methods in order to prevent visitors from uploading or watching video, creating serious access problems for technically unsophisticated websites.<ref>See http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.law.harvard.edu/files/2010_DDoS_Attacks_Human_Rights_and_Media.pdf</ref> It then becomes highly important that any website billing itself as a human rights repository be able to maintain access and uptime for all visitors.

===Audience===

Finally, there is no single place to “go” in order to find new human rights media or video content. In December 2007, Witness created The Hub to provide a central repository for human rights video.<ref>http://hub.witness.org/</ref> However, they discontinued accepting new content in 2009, citing technical difficulties and changing priorities.<ref>See http://blog.witness.org/2010/08/update-on-the-hub-and-witness-new-online-strategy/</ref> At present, the spread of human rights video content appears to be primarily viral, and therefore, a bit haphazard. A number of disjointed avenues exist for distribution, but there is no centralized channel or place that serves as a home for content. One might also be concerned about the authenticity and/or lack of context that accompanies videos posted to disparate, relatively unknown hosts by anonymous authors.

In our view, a host that consistently provides authentic videos of interest to the human rights community, media, and concerned people throughout the world would be a strong step forward. By developing a consistent track record of impact, such a site could then develop a strong reputation encouraging new content to be sent.

==Solutions==

Pharos represents our solutions to many of these problems. Some of the solutions are technical, but many are organizational. It would be entirely possible for actors to tackle some or all of these problems individually, but our hope and belief is that one organization could take on the entire set of issues most effectively. Working with existing organizations and developing a track record of safety, security, judgment, and impact would start a virtuous cycle that could have an immense impact on human rights advocacy throughout the world.

==References==
<references/>

Pharos - Central Idea

2011-02-04T05:25:33Z

Kbharris:

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, . . .==

[[Image:PharosEndToEnd.png|thumb|left|400px|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.<ref>It should be noted, however, that Pharos is not restricted to receiving media over the Internet. For example, Pharos could publish a mailing address. For our purposes, however, we assume that the Internet is the easiest and most likely conduit through which Pharos will receive human rights media.</ref> 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,<ref>See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA</ref> sneakernets,<ref> See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet</ref> Tor implementations,<ref>See http://www.torproject.org</ref> 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.”<ref>Before publishing any piece of media, Pharos protects the identity of its sources by anonymizing any files it receives. This process is described in greater detail in the next Section.</ref> 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.<ref>The question of which videos should be subject to such blurring is left for further discussion. For example, a person who submits a video could explicitly request that the video be completely “anonymized.” In other cases, this might not be necessary. In yet other cases, Pharos may require such anonymization.</ref>

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”,<ref>See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand</ref> 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,<ref>See http://www.witness.org</ref> but no longer supports receiving and publishing it.<ref>See http://hub.witness.org (noting that ‘the uploading and commenting functionality have been turned off’ on Witness.org’s former video hosting site)</ref> 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:<ref> http://ireport.cnn.com/guidelines.jspa</ref>

*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.

==References==
<references/>

Pharos - Central Idea

2011-02-04T05:08:42Z

Kbharris:

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, . . .==

[[Image:PharosEndToEnd.png|thumb|left|400px|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.<ref>It should be noted, however, that Pharos is not restricted to receiving media over the Internet. For example, Pharos could publish a mailing address. For our purposes, however, we assume that the Internet is the easiest and most likely conduit through which Pharos will receive human rights media.</ref> 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,<ref>See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA</ref> sneakernets,<ref> See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet</ref> Tor implementations,<ref>See http://www.torproject.org</ref> 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.”<ref>Before publishing any piece of media, Pharos protects the identity of its sources by anonymizing any files it receives. This process is described in greater detail in the next Section.</ref> 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. 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.<ref>The question of which videos should be subject to such blurring is left for further discussion. For example, a person who submits a video could explicitly request that the video be completely “anonymized.” In other cases, this might not be necessary.</ref>

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”,<ref>See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand</ref> 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 other organizations.

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,<ref>See http://www.witness.org</ref> but no longer supports receiving and publishing it.<ref>See http://hub.witness.org (noting that ‘the uploading and commenting functionality have been turned off’ on Witness.org’s former video hosting site)</ref> 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' anonymization services help to solve the suppression of human rights media, they is 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:<ref> http://ireport.cnn.com/guidelines.jspa</ref>

*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.

==References==
<references/>

Pharos - Central Idea

2011-02-01T10:00:05Z

Kbharris:

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, . . .==

[[Image:PharosEndToEnd.png|thumb|left|400px|Pharos end-to-end diagram]]Pharos enables human rights media by facilitating technical solutions for receiving and publishing such media. The Figure “Pharos end-to-end diagram” 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.<ref>It should be noted, however, that Pharos is not restricted to receiving media over the Internet. For example, Pharos could publish a mailing address. For our purposes, however, we assume that the Internet is the easiest and most likely conduit through which Pharos will receive human rights media.</ref> 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,<ref>See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA</ref> sneakernets,<ref> See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet</ref> Tor implementations,<ref>See http://www.torproject.org</ref> 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.”<ref>Before publishing any piece of media, Pharos protects the identity of its sources by anonymizing any files it receives. This process is described in greater detail in the next Section.</ref> 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. 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. 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.<ref>The question of which videos should be subject to such blurring is left for further discussion. For example, a person who submits a video could explicitly request that the video be completely “anonymized.” In other cases, this might not be necessary.</ref>

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”,<ref>See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand</ref> 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.

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,<ref>See http://www.witness.org</ref> but no longer supports receiving and publishing it.<ref>See http://hub.witness.org (noting that ‘the uploading and commenting functionality have been turned off’ on Witness.org’s former video hosting site)</ref> 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 the anonymization that Pharos provides helps to solve the suppression of human rights media, it is 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:<ref> http://ireport.cnn.com/guidelines.jspa</ref>

*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.

==References==
<references/>

Pharos - Central Idea

2011-02-01T09:40:48Z

Kbharris:

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, . . .==

[[Image:PharosEndToEnd.png|thumb|left|400px|Pharos end-to-end diagram]]Pharos enables human rights media by facilitating technical solutions for receiving and publishing such media. The Figure “Pharos end-to-end diagram” 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.<ref>It should be noted, however, that Pharos is not restricted to receiving media over the Internet. For example, Pharos could publish a mailing address. For our purposes, however, we assume that the Internet is the easiest and most likely conduit through which Pharos will receive human rights media.</ref> 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,<ref>See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA</ref> sneakernets,<ref> See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet</ref> Tor implementations,<ref>See http://www.torproject.org</ref> 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.”<ref>Before publishing any piece of media, Pharos protects the identity of its sources by anonymizing any files it receives. This process is described in greater detail in the next Section.</ref> 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. 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. 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.<ref>The question of which videos should be subject to such blurring is left for further discussion. For example, a person who submits a video could explicitly request that the video be completely “anonymized.” In other cases, this might not be necessary.</ref>

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”,<ref>See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand</ref> 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.

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,<ref>See http://www.witness.org</ref> but no longer supports receiving and publishing it.<ref>See http://hub.witness.org (noting that ‘the uploading and commenting functionality have been turned off’ on Witness.org’s former video hosting site)</ref> 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.==

==References==
<references/>

Pharos - Central Idea

2011-02-01T09:02:56Z

Kbharris:

Pharos - Central Idea

2011-02-01T07:51:47Z

Kbharris:

Existing Services

2011-02-01T07:25:39Z

Kbharris: New page: Placeholder so we can link here

Placeholder so we can link here

Pharos

2011-02-01T07:25:20Z

Kbharris: Created a placeholder so I can link to it

[[Image:Pharos.png|400px]]

Our group’s work led to a proposal for a new organization, Pharos, that will serve to enable, protect, and promote human rights media from around the world. Our starting premise is that there is an immense capability to capture video in the form of relatively cheap cell phone cameras and other digital recorders. Importantly, it has also become much easier to post such video online for free. This combination of developments should have led to a dramatic expansion in video to promote human rights, but our view was that this development has not occurred.

Thus we set out to identify the obstacles that might be preventing or inhibiting the spread of human rights media, as well as existing services and solutions that could be used to surmount these obstacles. As a whole, it seemed that existing services were inadequate for a range of reasons including: susceptibility to government pressure, lack of security, lack of publicity, and many others. While our initial discussions and research led us to consider discrete solutions to discrete problems, the interwoven nature of many of the problems led us to consider the viability and desirability of a single organization that could meet the many challenges simultaneously.

Accordingly, we propose Pharos as a solution to these many problems in the aggregate. It should be noted, however, that within these pages readers will still find discussions of many discrete problems pertaining to human rights media, as well as suggestions for solutions that could be implemented immediately by a new application or existing service (e.g. software making it easy to blur the faces of protesters or more secure upload platforms). In our view, addressing any of these problems would be a highly worthwhile endeavor that has the promise of creating a better Internet.

==[[Problem Statement/Introduction]]==
==[[Existing Services]]==
==[[Pharos - Central Idea]]==
==[[Pharos - Organization and Governance]]==
==Pharos - Technical Capabilities==
==[[Challenges and Critiques]]==

Problem Statement and Introduction

2011-02-01T06:00:46Z

Kbharris: Skipped Level 1 of section formatting since it is the page name level (see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting)

The average citizen’s ability to capture video in countries around the world – in the form of cheap digital recorders and cell phone cameras – combined with the spread of free online video hosting websites has created a powerful new tool for human rights. But, with some notable exceptions,<ref> See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Neda_Agha-Soltan</ref> it seems that this tool has not been harnessed to the extent that it could or should be. Our project set out to identify the problems that led to this state of affairs as well as identify some of the solutions. This section is particularly focused on setting out the problems we identified.

==Historical Overview==

Video has long been recognized as a uniquely powerful tool with which to document human rights abuse and advocate for change. Videos and photographs from the liberated Nazi concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen and Dachau documented the horrific abuses of the Holocaust and precipitated the international demand that Nazi leaders be brought to justice.<ref> See http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/liberation_camps_01.shtml</ref> Soon after home televisions proliferated in the United States, video had a tremendous effect on the Civil Rights movement. Stark images of discrimination, segregation, and brutality, such as those surrounding the integration of Little Rock, Arkansas’s public schools in 1957, captured the American attention.<ref> See, e.g., Gene Roberts & Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation 182 (2006) (“the daily visual broadcasts of news as it happened [in Little Rock] had a profound impact on the nation’s understanding of the race drama in the South.”)</ref> Domestically, many Americans, including many of the journalists themselves, were appalled and motivated to promote and advocate for change.<ref> See generally id at Chapter 11.</ref> The continued reports out of Little Rock also proved to be a significant source of embarrassment for the United States internationally, which generated an entirely different set of pressures on the Eisenhower administration.<ref>Michael L. Krenn, “Unfinished Business”: Segregation and Diplomacy at the 1958 World’s Fair, 20 Diplomatic History 591 (1996), available at: http://vi.uh.edu/pages/buzzmat/DH%20articles/African%20Americans/krenn.pdf </ref>

However, at this time the video cameras belonged to large corporations that could afford the new and expensive technology needed to both capture and broadcast video. The networks could exercise a strong amount of editorial control with regards to the quantity and type of content recorded and broadcast.

The spread of camcorders and videocassettes made it easier for individual citizens to document human rights violations and abuse. In the United States, the dramatic home video footage of Rodney King’s 1991 beating at the hands of Los Angeles police officers stirred up public awareness and concern over police brutality and discrimination. Shortly thereafter, the human rights organization Witness was created with the goal of putting camcorders in the hands of human rights activists to help them document abuse.<ref> http://www.witness.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=26&Itemid=78</ref> At that point in time, however, the means of distribution and broadcast of video were still largely controlled by major networks. Human rights activists could capture video more easily, but they could not guarantee an audience.

In recent years the spread of ubiquitous cheap cell phone cameras combined with free online video hosting has made it possible for millions of people to capture video and broadcast it to the world. While there are examples of poignant videos that have spread in recent years and dramatically captured the public’s attention,<ref> See supra note 1.</ref> video for human rights does not appear to have taken off as one might expect in light of these democratizing technologies.

==The Problems==

The raw number of video-capable devices operating in oppressive regimes suggests capacity for a lot more video sharing than currently occurs.<ref>Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_mobile_phones_in_use. While many of the phones operating in oppressive regimes will not have video cameras, it is reasonable to think that a significant portion do have recording capabilities, meaning that millions of such cameras are currently operational.</ref> There are well-documented problems facing the people who share videos online right now that may also serve to prevent the medium from reaching its full potential. This section seeks to identify some of those problems and begin to sketch out the solutions developed more fully in subsequent sections of our project.

===Reprisals===

One of the biggest areas of concern in the human rights media space is reprisals by adversaries, which are typically governments or their officials, but may also include corporate actors or others. The reprisals may be targeted at any person involved in the video recording, production, or dissemination.

First, and perhaps most obviously, the person doing the filming or uploading/exfiltrating the video may be targeted for punishment.<ref>See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8487179.stm (describing the arrest of one Burmese journalist for cooperation with news media and noting that another journalist received a 20 year prison sentence “after a military court found she had provided video for the Democratic Voice of Burma.”)</ref> Authorities may have a number of ways of identifying the source of video that appears online. For example, they could be monitoring or logging Internet traffic within their borders, allowing them to easily track less sophisticated Internet users who attempt to post data. Even more sophisticated users will be vulnerable to governments that use correspondingly sophisticated snooping techniques. In addition, governments might be able to use metadata or circumstantial evidence from the videos after they are broadcast to identify authors. Even if such information is not immediately accessible to the average web user, governments may exert pressure on host websites to reveal information kept internally, such as server logs or private messages.<ref>For example, Yahoo! provided substantial information regarding at least one journalist to the Chinese government in 2005, citing its obligation “to operate within each country's laws.” See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4221538.stm.</ref> Large multinational corporations that serve as content or communication platforms might be particularly susceptible to this form of government pressure because of the interests of their employees and shareholders.<ref>See generally Goldsmith & Wu, Who Controls the Internet 49–86 (2006).</ref>

Second, the person or people filmed in human rights media might be targeted for punishment. After the 2009 protests in Iran, the government circulated photographs and stills from videos in an attempt to identify anti-government protesters.<ref>See http://www.gerdab.ir/fa/pages/?cid=422; http://hub.witness.org/en/node/11999</ref> Traditionally, documentary filmmakers in the human rights arena operated by asking for consent from their subjects,<ref> A discussion regarding informed consent and the need to protect subjects can be found at http://blog.witness.org/2010/06/protecting-yourself-your-subjects-and-your-human-rights-videos-on-youtube/</ref> yet shooting spontaneous video on the street or the use video obtained second-hand may not afford filmmakers the ability to request or obtain consent from subjects. Accordingly, the need to protect the subjects depicted within videos is particularly acute for filmmakers who wish to broadcast recordings of events that may lead to reprisals against subjects of the video. Videographers might also desire to protect the dignity of a subject who has been subjected to certain types of treatment.<ref>For example, the treatment of Emad el-Kabir at the hands of the Egyptian police was particularly gruesome and documented on cell phone video. See http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1581608,00.html. While activists were able to convince the victim to come forward in this case, in other cases they might want to disseminate such footage without providing the name or identity of the victim if the victim’s identity cannot be ascertained.</ref>

===Access===

A second set of problems centers around problems of access both by uploaders and by viewers. It is well-known that many repressive regimes block or limit access to the Internet or particular websites.<ref>Or in the case of Egypt, now, the entire internet.</ref> Undoubtedly, repressive regimes would seek to limit access to content hosting sites for people who would like to upload videos documenting human rights abuses. Even if a website can use technical workarounds that enhance safety and access, such as VPN, public-key encryption, or other methods of evading Internet-blocking, they face the problem of communicating this information to people on the ground in repressive regimes.

Furthermore, some actors have shown a willingness to actively attack human rights websites via DDoS and other methods in order to prevent visitors from uploading or watching video, creating serious access problems for technically unsophisticated websites.<ref>See http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.law.harvard.edu/files/2010_DDoS_Attacks_Human_Rights_and_Media.pdf</ref> It then becomes highly important that any website billing itself as a human rights repository be able to maintain access and uptime for all visitors.

===Audience===

Finally, there is no single place to “go” in order to find new human rights media or video content. In December 2007, Witness created The Hub to provide a central repository for human rights video.<ref>http://hub.witness.org/</ref> However, they discontinued accepting new content in 2009, citing technical difficulties and changing priorities.<ref>See http://blog.witness.org/2010/08/update-on-the-hub-and-witness-new-online-strategy/</ref> At present, the spread of human rights video content appears to be primarily viral, and therefore, a bit haphazard. A number of disjointed avenues exist for distribution, but there is no centralized channel or place that serves as a home for content. One might also be concerned about the authenticity and/or lack of context that accompanies videos posted to disparate, relatively unknown hosts by anonymous authors.

In our view, a host that consistently provides authentic videos of interest to the human rights community, media, and concerned people throughout the world would be a strong step forward. By developing a consistent track record of impact, such a site could then develop a strong reputation encouraging new content to be sent.

==Solutions==

Pharos represents our solutions to many of these problems. Some of the solutions are technical, but many are organizational. It would be entirely possible for actors to tackle some or all of these problems individually, but our hope and belief is that one organization could take on the entire set of issues most effectively. Working with existing organizations and developing a track record of safety, security, judgment, and impact would start a virtuous cycle that could have an immense impact on human rights advocacy throughout the world.

==References==
<references/>

Pharos

2011-02-01T05:56:25Z

Kbharris:

[[Image:Pharos.png|400px]]

Our group’s work led to a proposal for a new organization, Pharos, that will serve to enable, protect, and promote human rights media from around the world. Our starting premise is that there is an immense capability to capture video in the form of relatively cheap cell phone cameras and other digital recorders. Importantly, it has also become much easier to post such video online for free. This combination of developments should have led to a dramatic expansion in video to promote human rights, but our view was that this development has not occurred.

Thus we set out to identify the obstacles that might be preventing or inhibiting the spread of human rights media, as well as existing services and solutions that could be used to surmount these obstacles. As a whole, it seemed that existing services were inadequate for a range of reasons including: susceptibility to government pressure, lack of security, lack of publicity, and many others. While our initial discussions and research led us to consider discrete solutions to discrete problems, the interwoven nature of many of the problems led us to consider the viability and desirability of a single organization that could meet the many challenges simultaneously.

Accordingly, we propose Pharos as a solution to these many problems in the aggregate. It should be noted, however, that within these pages readers will still find discussions of many discrete problems pertaining to human rights media, as well as suggestions for solutions that could be implemented immediately by a new application or existing service (e.g. software making it easy to blur the faces of protesters or more secure upload platforms). In our view, addressing any of these problems would be a highly worthwhile endeavor that has the promise of creating a better Internet.

==[[Problem Statement/Introduction]]==
==Existing Services==
==[[Pharos - Central Idea]]==
==[[Pharos - Organization and Governance]]==
==Pharos - Technical Capabilities==
==[[Challenges and Critiques]]==

Central Idea

2011-02-01T05:55:44Z

Kbharris: Central Idea moved to Pharos - Central Idea: Consistency with other pages

#REDIRECT [[Pharos - Central Idea]]

Pharos - Central Idea

2011-02-01T05:55:44Z

Kbharris: Central Idea moved to Pharos - Central Idea: Consistency with other pages

Pharos - Central Idea

2011-02-01T05:53:59Z

Kbharris:

File:PharosEndToEnd.png

2011-02-01T05:24:45Z

Kbharris: Pharos end-to-end diagram

Pharos end-to-end diagram

Pharos - Central Idea

2011-02-01T05:24:21Z

Kbharris:

Pharos

2011-02-01T05:15:07Z

Kbharris:

[[Image:Pharos.png|400px]]

Our group’s work led to a proposal for a new organization, Pharos, that will serve to enable, protect, and promote human rights media from around the world. Our starting premise is that there is an immense capability to capture video in the form of relatively cheap cell phone cameras and other digital recorders. Importantly, it has also become much easier to post such video online for free. This combination of developments should have led to a dramatic expansion in video to promote human rights, but our view was that this development has not occurred.

Thus we set out to identify the obstacles that might be preventing or inhibiting the spread of human rights media, as well as existing services and solutions that could be used to surmount these obstacles. As a whole, it seemed that existing services were inadequate for a range of reasons including: susceptibility to government pressure, lack of security, lack of publicity, and many others. While our initial discussions and research led us to consider discrete solutions to discrete problems, the interwoven nature of many of the problems led us to consider the viability and desirability of a single organization that could meet the many challenges simultaneously.

Accordingly, we propose Pharos as a solution to these many problems in the aggregate. It should be noted, however, that within these pages readers will still find discussions of many discrete problems pertaining to human rights media, as well as suggestions for solutions that could be implemented immediately by a new application or existing service (e.g. software making it easy to blur the faces of protesters or more secure upload platforms). In our view, addressing any of these problems would be a highly worthwhile endeavor that has the promise of creating a better internet.

Table of Contents:

==[[Problem Statement/Introduction]]==
==Existing Services==
==[[Central Idea|Pharos - central idea]]==
==[[Pharos - organization and governance]]==
==Pharos - technical capabilities==
==[[Challenges and Critiques]]==

Pharos

2011-02-01T05:04:04Z

Kbharris:

[[Image:Pharos.png|500px]]

Our group’s work led to a proposal for a new organization, Pharos, that will serve to enable, protect, and promote human rights media from around the world. Our starting premise is that there is an immense capability to capture video in the form of relatively cheap cell phone cameras and other digital recorders. Importantly, it has also become much easier to post such video online for free. This combination of developments should have led to a dramatic expansion in video to promote human rights, but our view was that this development has not occurred.

Thus we set out to identify the obstacles that might be preventing or inhibiting the spread of human rights media, as well as existing services and solutions that could be used to surmount these obstacles. As a whole, it seemed that existing services were inadequate for a range of reasons including: susceptibility to government pressure, lack of security, lack of publicity, and many others. While our initial discussions and research led us to consider discrete solutions to discrete problems, the interwoven nature of many of the problems led us to consider the viability and desirability of a single organization that could meet the many challenges simultaneously.

Accordingly, we propose Pharos as a solution to these many problems in the aggregate. It should be noted, however, that within these pages readers will still find discussions of many discrete problems pertaining to human rights media, as well as suggestions for solutions that could be implemented immediately by a new application or existing service (e.g. software making it easy to blur the faces of protesters or more secure upload platforms). In our view, addressing any of these problems would be a highly worthwhile endeavor that has the promise of creating a better internet.

Table of Contents:

==[[Problem Statement/Introduction]]==
==Existing Services==
==[[Central Idea|Pharos - central idea]]==
==[[Pharos - organization and governance]]==
==Pharos - technical capabilities==
==[[Challenges and Critiques]]==

Pharos

2011-02-01T05:00:06Z

Kbharris:

[[Image:Pharos.png|600px]]

Our group’s work led to a proposal for a new organization, Pharos, that will serve to enable, protect, and promote human rights media from around the world. Our starting premise is that there is an immense capability to capture video in the form of relatively cheap cell phone cameras and other digital recorders. Importantly, it has also become much easier to post such video online for free. This combination of developments should have led to a dramatic expansion in video to promote human rights, but our view was that this development has not occurred.

Thus we set out to identify the obstacles that might be preventing or inhibiting the spread of human rights media, as well as existing services and solutions that could be used to surmount these obstacles. As a whole, it seemed that existing services were inadequate for a range of reasons including: susceptibility to government pressure, lack of security, lack of publicity, and many others. While our initial discussions and research led us to consider discrete solutions to discrete problems, the interwoven nature of many of the problems led us to consider the viability and desirability of a single organization that could meet the many challenges simultaneously.

Accordingly, we propose Pharos as a solution to these many problems in the aggregate. It should be noted, however, that within these pages readers will still find discussions of many discrete problems pertaining to human rights media, as well as suggestions for solutions that could be implemented immediately by a new application or existing service (e.g. software making it easy to blur the faces of protesters or more secure upload platforms). In our view, addressing any of these problems would be a highly worthwhile endeavor that has the promise of creating a better internet.

Table of Contents:

==[[Problem Statement/Introduction]]==
==Existing Services==
==[[Central Idea|Pharos - central idea]]==
==[[Pharos - organization and governance]]==
==Pharos - technical capabilities==
==[[Challenges and Critiques]]==

File:Pharos.png

2011-02-01T04:57:30Z

Kbharris: Pharos Main Image

Pharos Main Image

Pharos - Central Idea

2011-02-01T04:38:59Z

Kbharris:

=What is Pharos?=

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 facilitates technical solutions for receiving and publishing human rights media while protecting anonymity. And second, as an independent organization Pharos serves as a leader in promoting awareness of and discussions about the state of human rights media.

Pharos - Central Idea

2011-02-01T04:34:10Z

Kbharris:

'''What is Pharos?'''

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 facilitates technical solutions for receiving and publishing human rights media while protecting anonymity. And second, as an independent organization Pharos serves as a leader in promoting awareness of and discussions about the state of human rights media.

Pharos

2011-01-30T20:41:35Z

Kbharris:

Our group’s work led to a proposal for a new organization, Pharos, that will serve to enable, protect, and promote human rights media from around the world. Our starting premise is that there is an immense capability to capture video in the form of relatively cheap cell phone cameras and other digital recorders. Importantly, it has also become much easier to post such video online for free. This combination of developments should have led to a dramatic expansion in video to promote human rights, but our view was that this development has not occurred.

Thus we set out to identify the obstacles that might be preventing or inhibiting the spread of human rights media, as well as existing services and solutions that could be used to surmount these obstacles. As a whole, it seemed that existing services were inadequate for a range of reasons including: susceptibility to government pressure, lack of security, lack of publicity, and many others. While our initial discussions and research led us to consider discrete solutions to discrete problems, the interwoven nature of many of the problems led us to consider the viability and desirability of a single organization that could meet the many challenges simultaneously.

Accordingly, we propose Pharos as a solution to these many problems in the aggregate. It should be noted, however, that within these pages readers will still find discussions of many discrete problems pertaining to human rights media, as well as suggestions for solutions that could be implemented immediately by a new application or existing service (e.g. software making it easy to blur the faces of protesters or more secure upload platforms). In our view, addressing any of these problems would be a highly worthwhile endeavor that has the promise of creating a better internet.

Table of Contents:

# [[Problem Statement/Introduction]]
# Existing Services
# [[Central Idea|Pharos - central idea]]
# Pharos - organization and governance
# Pharos - technical capabilities
# Challenges

Pharos

2011-01-30T20:38:57Z

Kbharris:

Pharos

2011-01-24T19:34:01Z

Kbharris:

This is a placeholder for the Pharos project page.

Here is a skeleton table of contents:

# Problem Statement/Introduction
# Existing Services
# [[Central Idea|Pharos - central idea]]
# Pharos - organization and governance
# Pharos - technical capabilities
# Challenges

Pharos - Central Idea

2011-01-24T19:30:34Z

Kbharris: New page: Placeholder for the central idea text

Placeholder for the central idea text

Pharos

2011-01-24T19:30:22Z

Kbharris:

This is a placeholder for the Pharos project page.

Below is a skeleton table of contents:

# Problem Statement/Introduction
# Existing Services
# [[Central Idea|Pharos - central idea]]
# Pharos - organization and governance
# Pharos - technical capabilities
# Challenges

Pharos

2011-01-24T19:27:46Z

Kbharris:

This is a placeholder for the Pharos project page.

Below is a skeleton table of contents:

# Problem Statement/Introduction
# Existing Services
# Pharos - central idea
# Pharos - organization and governance
# Pharos - technical capabilities
# Challenges

Pharos

2011-01-24T19:26:17Z

Kbharris:

This is a placeholder for the Pharos project page.

Below is a skeleton table of contents:

# Problem Statement/Introduction
# Existing Services
# Pharos- central idea
# Pharos- organization and governance
# Pharos- technical capabilities
# Challenges

Pharos

2011-01-24T19:19:59Z

Kbharris: New page: This is a placeholder for the Pharos project page.

This is a placeholder for the Pharos project page.

Main Page

2011-01-24T19:19:30Z

Kbharris:

Welcome to Difficult Problems in Cyberlaw, a January course taught by Professor Jonathan Zittrain, co-hosted by Stanford Law School and Harvard Law School.

If you are a student, please see [[Course Logistics]]. All regular class meetings will be at '''Stanford Law School Classroom 272'''.

This [http://www.law.stanford.edu/contact/#maps map site] has a map of the [http://www.aaccessmaps.com/show/map/us/ca/bayarea Bay Area], [http://ucomm.stanford.edu/map/ Stanford campus], and [http://transportation.stanford.edu/images/visitor-bus.pdf visitor parking] at Stanford.

==WEEK ONE: Theory and Problems==

<center> '''Monday, January 3th: 5pm to 7pm''' </center>

:Professor Zittrain will give a lecture on the technological workings of the Internet.
:There will be time made for brief student introductions.

''Required Readings For Class'':
*Read [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wlyLMWKKY2WD51h6oU-xcR_vAVRaQPprAaKnu6NopzI/edit?hl=en&authkey=CN6RnL4C/ Brief Angry Statements of Confusion: How the Internet is Covered]
*Read Chapter 2 of [http://yupnet.org/zittrain/archives/10/ The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It]

''Recommended Readings'':
*Salzter, et al [http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoend.pdf/ End-to-End Arguments in System Design]

<center> '''After Class Reception! 7pm to 8:30pm''' </center>
:Please join us for a celebratory first-day-of-class reception, directly after class.

----

<center> '''Tuesday, January 4th: 11:30am to 1:30pm''' </center>

:Privacy and Technological Points of Control

'''Guests'''
*Fred von Lohman [http://w2.eff.org/about/staff/fred_von_lohmann.html/ EFF]
*Dean Hachamovitch [http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/Hachamovitch/ Microsoft]

''Required Readings for Class'':
*Read Zittrain's [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=388860 Internet Points of Control]
*Read [http://news.cnet.com/Supreme-Court-rules-against-file-swapping/2100-1030_3-5764135.html “Supreme Court rules against file swapping”] (June 2005)
*Read [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/internet_explorer_do_not_track/ “Microsoft unveils 'do not track' option for IE9”] (December 7 2010)

----

<center> '''Wednesday, January 5th: 5pm to 7pm'''</center>

:Cybersecurity and Diplomatic Transparency

'''Guests'''
*Ben Scott [http://www.state.gov State Department]

''Required Readings for Class''
*Read Clark and Landau's [http://docs.google.com/document/d/1xT-j_mLv6wXppsa8p5YP0r6mDWQakq5qS-2kBt8STcs/edit?hl=en&authkey=CNek64YG/ Untangling Attribution] (sections in italics are recommended, not required)
*Read Zuckerman's [http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.law.harvard.edu/files/2010_DDoS_Attacks_Human_Rights_and_Media.pdf Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Against Independent Media and Human Rights Sites] (pp 48 through 58 required; pp 8-25 recommended for technical background)
*Read Zittrain and Sauter's [http://futureoftheinternet.org/wikileaks-cable-faq Wikileaks FAQ]
*Read Clinton's [http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/21/internet_freedom?page=full Internet Freedom] (January 21, 2010)
*Read The New York Times's [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/world/middleeast/23response.html Defense Department's Response to Iraq War Logs] (October 22, 2010)
*Read The Wall Street Journal [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704694004576019944121568506.html?mod=rss_whats_news_us Air Force Blocks Media Sites] (December 14, 2010)
*Read Roy Revie's [http://pulsemedia.org/2010/12/08/wikileaks-and-21st-century-statecraft/ Wikileaks and 21st Century Statecraft]

----

<center> '''Thursday, January 6th: 11:30am to 1:30pm'''</center>

:Privacy and Reputation

'''Guests'''
*Peter Kazanjy [http://www.honestly.com/ Honestly.com]

''Required Readings for Class''
*Read Chapter 9 of Zittrain's [http://futureoftheinternet.org/static/ZittrainTheFutureoftheInternet.pdf The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It] (pp 200-221, 225-231 required)
*Read Chapter 8 of Solove's [http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/dsolove/Future-of-Reputation/text/futureofreputation-ch8.pdf The Future of Reputation]
*Read Craig Newmark's [http://www.cnewmark.com/2010/04/trust-and-reputation-systems-redistributing-power-and-influence.html/ Trust and reputation systems: redistributing power and influence]
*Read Evlyn Rusli [http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/19/unvarnished-honestly-kazanjy-funding Unvarnished Becomes Honestly.com, Raises $1.2 Million And Opens The Floodgates] (October 19, 2010)

''Recommended for Class''
*Attendance at Zittrain's [http://liberationtechnology.stanford.edu/events/minds_for_sale_1_6_2011/ Minds for Sale] lecture is highly recommended. (4:30pm to 6:00pm, Wallenberg Theater)

----

<center> '''Friday, January 7th: 9:30am to 11:30am'''</center>

:Crowdsourcing and The Four Quadrants

'''Guests'''
*SpamGirl, admin of [http://turkers.proboards.com/index.cgi Turker Nation] forums
*Lukas Biewald, [http://crowdflower.com Crowdflower]

''Required Readings for Class''
*Explore [http://turkers.proboards.com/index.cgi Turker Nation] forums.
*Explore Panos Ipeirotis's [http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com research blog]
*Read [http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/difficultproblems/Class_3 Cloudwork Best Practices]
*Read Zittrain's [http://fordhamlawreview.org/assets/pdfs/Vol_78/Zittrain_Vol_78_May.pdf The Four Quadrants]

''Recommended for Class''
*Though class will run into this event, if you can make it after class, it should be really interesting: [http://www.techamerica.org/nstic/ National Strategies for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace] (11 AM - 12 PM)
----
==WEEK TWO: Analysis through the Four Quadrants==

<center> '''Monday, January 10th: 6pm to 8pm''' </center>

:Government Regulation/Corporate Monopolies (Quadrant One)
:Review of groups' work thus far
:Discussion and lecture of Professor Zittrain's "The Four Quadrants."

''Required Readings For Class'':
*Read sections of Wu and Goldsmith's Who Controls the Internet

''Recommended Readings'':
*Review Zittrain's [http://fordhamlawreview.org/assets/pdfs/Vol_78/Zittrain_Vol_78_May.pdf The Four Quadrants]

----

<center> '''Tuesday, January 11th: 11:30am to 1:30pm'''</center>

:(Corporate) Self-Regulation (Quadrant Two)

'''Guests'''
*Andrew McLaughlin http://twitter.com/mcandrew
*Charlie Cheever of [http://www.quora.com/Charlie-Cheever Quora]
*Steven Lurie and Jay Monahan of [http://www.zynga.com Zynga]

''Required Reading for Class''
*Read Grimmelmann and Ohm's [http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1032&context=james_grimmelmann Dr. Generative]

''Field Trip!''
*to [http://www.mozilla.org Mozilla]!

----

<center> '''Wednesday, January 12th: 5pm to 7pm''' </center>

:Cyberanarchy! (Quadrant Three)

'''Guests'''
*[http://joindiaspora.com Diaspora]
*Steven Levy, author of [http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-Levy/dp/0141000511 Hackers] and journalist at Wired

'''Required Reading for Class'''
*Watch Coleman's [http://turbulence.org/blog/2010/04/13/free-speech-anonymous-vs-scientology Old and New Net Wars Over Free Speech and Secrecy or How to Understand the Lulz Battle Against the Church of Scientology] (about an hour of video altogether)

'''Field Trip!'''
*Reception at [http://www.augustcap.com/ August Capital] with [http://www.augustcap.com/team/david_hornik/ David Hornik]

----

<center> '''Thursday, January 13th: 11:30am to 1:30pm''' </center>

:Communitarian (Quadrant Four)

'''Required Reading for Class'''
*Read Chapter 5 fro Joseph Reagle's [http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=1zjQTDbNrS6G-n5FnQY0ngNIp3Iw3d1-A4h5BMlSLXOxG8mlyC5OqZq0494Ao&hl=en&authkey=CMHpiPoC Good Faith Collaboration]
*Read pp 127-148 of Professor Zittrain's [http://futureoftheinternet.org/static/ZittrainTheFutureoftheInternet.pdf The Future of the Internet]

'''Field Trip!'''
*to [http://www.wikimedia.org Wikimedia]
*and [http://twitter.com Twitter]!

----

[[Pharos]]

'''Winter class: Please disregard the below links for now.'''

[[Class Schedule]]

[[Class Notes]]

[[Topic Sign-up!]]

[[CrowdConf Brainstorm page]]

[[New Difficult Topics]]