美国国家公共电台 NPR Activists Build Human Rights Abuse Cases With Help From Cellphone Videos

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

The war in Syria is a conflict of the social media age. Cellphones are ubiquitous among the rebels, the government, even ordinary citizens. And that means almost no bad deed goes unrecorded. As NPR's science correspondent Joe Palca reports, there's an organization using all those videos to build criminal cases against the perpetrators.

A warning, some of the sounds and descriptions in this story are disturbing.

JOE PALCA, BYLINE 1: The volume of videos is staggering.

MOHAMMAD AL ABDALLAH: We're in the process of downloading almost 2,000 videos a day.

PALCA: Mohammad Al Abdallah is executive director of the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre in Washington, D.C. The center is a nonprofit supported by the U.S. State Department and a handful of European governments. Abdallah was born in Syria but moved to the United States in 2009. He's a human rights lawyer determined 2 to seek justice for innocent Syrians who have suffered and died as a result of the violence that's gripped their country.

I asked Abdallah how the videos would be used as evidence in a courtroom. And he calls up an example on his computer screen.

AL ABDALLAH: I'll show you this one. It's a bit graphic 3. It's a very bloody 4 video.

PALCA: The video was apparently 5 taken with a cellphone. It shows men in a room beating five civilians 6, who Abdallah says worked in a hospital.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken).

PALCA: One of the men, who seems to be in charge, yells taunts 7 at the victims and cheers when the attacks are especially vicious.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Cheering).

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken).

PALCA: "Make sure you're getting this," he yells to the man with the camera. The victims, barely moving, huddle 8 in obvious agony on the floor of the room. But it's not only the brutality 10 and the graphic images that make this video important to a lawyer. It's what else is on it. The perpetrators turn the cameras on themselves and they're apparently Syrian government agents.

AL ABDALLAH: Naming each other and inviting 11 each other to participate in the torture campaign.

PALCA: Abdallah's organization maintains a database of these videos to document the abuses. And their analysts 12 spend hours adding identifying tags to each video so they can more easily search the database. For example, if the video shows an attack, what kind of attack is it? Is there a weapon?

AL ABDALLAH: Is it explosive? Is it nontraditional? Is it (unintelligible) aircraft, car bomb, landmine 13?

PALCA: Who's in the video? Where was the video taken? Things like that. But the volume of videos Abdallah and his analysts are trying to process threatens to overwhelm them.

AL ABDALLAH: We envision ending up with a million-plus videos.

PALCA: Going through all of them and cataloguing in detail their contents is both crucial and impossible.

AL ABDALLAH: We're not going to be able to do this. We need help.

PALCA: And help may be coming. Jay Aronson is founder 14 and director of the Center for Human Rights Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

JAY ARONSON: What we're trying to do is create tools that allow the human rights community to gather as much information as possible and process and analyze 15 it in a way that never would have been possible by hand manually.

PALCA: For example...

ARONSON: We have technology that allows you to rapidly go through that entire collection of video.

PALCA: And find specific things like, say, a clip with a helicopter in it. That's useful because helicopters are often used to drop makeshift bombs on civilians.

(SOUNDBITE OF HELICOPTER)

PALCA: Or you can build software that can find video clips that have an ambulance in them.

(SOUNDBITE OF AMBULENCE SIREN)

PALCA: This should help automate 16 the process of tagging videos, taking some of the burden off human reviewers. But Aronson admits computers have trouble with context. Is the helicopter delivering supplies or dropping a bomb? Is the ambulance coming in response to a brutal 9 beating or someone having a heart attack?

ARONSON: There's no magic computer program that you can program and say, hey, computer, find me barrel bombings or find me instances of torture and then have it go through all of the sources and just find those things.

PALCA: Aronson says it will take people to do that. But human rights lawyer Mohammad Al Abdallah says the tools Aronson and his colleagues are developing should make it easier to find videos that are related to one another. And that's essential for amassing 17 the evidence that will be needed in a criminal trial. He calls up another video.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: (Foreign language spoken).

PALCA: This young man is describing the discovery of several badly disfigured bodies.

AL ABDALLAH: It's six dead bodies or five dead bodies burnt and thrown in the street, in Damascus suburbs - city called Atel (ph).

PALCA: And it turns out these are the same men I saw being brutally 18 beaten in that first video Abdallah showed me. He says you can tell that because it was taken the same day as the other video and the victims are wearing the same clothes.

AL ABDALLAH: He is wearing a pajama - blue with three stripes and white. And he's the exact same person that appeared here.

PALCA: Abdallah says these videos came in from different sources. But taken together, they provide a more complete picture of what happened. And he's confident he'll be able to connect more videos and build more strong legal cases with the help of computer science.

AL ABDALLAH: I think technology is going to be the judge in this conflict.

PALCA: There's one problem technology can't solve. Right now there's virtually no legal mechanism 19 to prosecute 20 anyone for what's going on in Syria. But this evidence isn't going away. And Abdallah hopes the time will come when the world will insist that there be some kind of accounting 21 for these crimes. Joe Palca, NPR News.