Combating “Fake News” With a Smartphone “Proof Mode”

Reposted from the Guardian Project blog

We have been working for many years with our partners at WITNESS, a leading human rights media training and advocacy organization, to figure out how best to turn smartphone cameras into tools of empowerment for activists. While it is often enough to use the visual pixels you capture to create awareness or pressure on an issue, sometimes you want those pixels to actually be treated as evidence. This means, you want people to trust what they see, to know it hasn’t been tampered with, and to believe that it came from the time, place and person you say it came from.

Enter, ProofMode, a light, minimal “reboot” of our more heavyweight, verified media app, CameraV. Our aim was to create a lightweight (< 3MB!), almost invisible utility (minimal battery impact!), that you can run all of the time on your phone (no annoying notifications or popups), that automatically adds extra digital proof data to all photos and videos you take. This data can then be easily shared, when you really need it, through a “Share Proof” share action, to anyone you choose over email or a messaging app, or uploaded to a cloud service or reporting platform.

  

 

On the technical front, what the app is doing is automatically generating an OpenPGP key for this installed instance of the app itself, and using that to automatically sign all photos and videos at time of capture. A sha256 hash is also generated, and combined with a snapshot of all available device sensor data, such as GPS location, wifi and mobile networks, altitude,  device language, hardware type, and more. This is also signed, and stored with the media. All of this happens with no noticeable impact on battery life or performance, every time the user takes a photo or video. We have been running it for months on fairly old, low end phones, and you just forget it is happening.

 

   

While we are very proud of the work we did with the CameraV and InformaCam projects, the end results was a complex application and proprietary data format that required a great deal of investment by any user or community that wished to adopt it. Furthermore, it was an app that you had to decide and remember to use, in a moment of crisis. With ProofMode, we both wanted to simplify the adoption of the tool, and make it nearly invisible to the end-user, while making it the adoption of the tool by organizations painless through simple formats like CSV and known formats like PGP signatures.

The source and direct APK downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/guardianproject/proofmode

The beta release is also available today for Android phones on Google Play. We hope to have an iPhone version in beta in the next few months.

We have also published a sample batch proof data set on Github here: https://github.com/guardianproject/proofmode/tree/master/samples/sample-proof-1

Our design goals included the following:

  • Run all of the time in the background without noticeable battery, storage or network impact
  • Provide a no-setup-required, automatic new user experience that works without requiring training
  • Use strong cryptography for strong identity and verification features, but not encryption
  • Produce “proof” sensor data formats that can be easily parse, imported by existing tools (CSV)
  • Do not modify the original media files; all proof metadata storied in separate file
  • Support chain of custody needs through automatic creation of sha256 hashes and PGP signatures
  • Do not require a persistent identity or account generation

We also were able to take advantage of the new Android “Quick Settings” developer API, to add a ProofMode toggle button right along side other system functions like Wifi, Location, Bluetooth and more. This fulfills a vision that WITNESS has had for a while in mainstreaming the concept of our prototype into mainstream adoption, giving every citizen journalist a quick mode to activate when their moment arrives.

 

You can read a bit more in the project README on the workflow we imagine being used for all of this. What we hope is that the ProofMode app is simple and low impact enough that potential users will install and forget that it is there. It will go along doing its business quietly without fuss, until the users realizes they have taken a photo or video that might have some value as digital evidence. Then, using the SHARE PROOF action, send their proof data set off to an organization, journalist, lawyer, or other advocate that would be able to verify the chain of custody and integrity of the files and proof using off the shelf OpenPGP and CSV visualization tools. While we have a bit more work to do on the last part, we already have many partners in the human rights world who are skilled and capable of doing just that.

If you’d like to learn more about the CameraV app and our collaboration with WITNESS and Coletivo Papo Reto video activist group in Brazil, please watch this video below from the Al Jazeera “Rebel Geeks” documentary.

Another Excellent Event: Open Video Conference, This Week in NYC

News from my work on The Guardian Project:

Nathan Freitas will be on a panel at the 2nd annual Open Video Conference in New York this Friday and Saturday. He will be on the panel entitled “Cameras Everywhere” led by our partners at Witness, on Saturday at 3pm.

Summary: Cameras Everywhere: Human Rights and Web Video – (2:45 PM – 3:30 PM)

Description: Once upon a time, video cameras were rare. Now they are ubiquitous—as are the opportunities to share, use, and re-use video. What are the limits and possibilities of an ethics of openness when it comes to human rights footage?

Videos (particularly mobile and online video) make it possible to document and publicize human rights struggles – from monks marching for freedom in Rangoon and Lhasa, and the election protestors in Tehran, to individual voices speaking out against injustice on YouTube and other online spaces. But despite the growing circulation of images of human rights violations, of victims and survivors, there is limited discussion of crucial safety, consent and ethical concerns – particularly for people who are filmed.

Issues around consent, representation and re-victimization and retaliation have emerged even more clearly in an open and networked online environment, as have concerns about intentionality and authenticity. Video is being reworked, remixed and recirculated by many more people. New possibilities for action by a global citizenry have arisen, but these carry with them substantial challenges, opportunities and dangers.

Presenters:
Sam Gregory — WITNESS
Gabriella Coleman — NYU
Nathan Freitas — The Guardian Project
Steve Grove – News and Politics, YouTube

Following the panel, there will be an open workshop, to continue the discussion and brainstorm new approaches and tools to address the issues raised. This feedback will be gathered and fed into the OVC Hackday, held at NYU ITP on Sunday. Team Guardian will join in with whoever shows up at the hackday, take the ideas from the previous day, and build prototyped mobile video solutions in response to them.

You can get more information and register for the hackday here: http://www.openvideoconference.org/hacklabs/

OVC hack labs: Sunday, October 3

Join us at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program for an all-day open space gathering for innovators of all stripes. Meet and collaborate with conference attendees, HTML5 developers, transmedia storytelling experts, and more. Among the planned activities:

Make interactive HTML5 video using WebMadeMovies technology like popcorn.js
Map out a transmedia strategy for your content
Build a custom HTML5 player for your site
Create robust video sites using the free+open source Kaltura CE 2.0 self-hosted software stack
or just grab a room and hack on your project!

OVC hack labs are free and open to the public.

The “Took”: Tibetan-enabled Nook eReader

Thanks to amazing work by Tibetan font experts Tom Meyer and Chris Fynn, as well as the Barnes and Noble Nook eInk reader device hackers at NookDevs.com, I have modified my $199 Nook  ($149 if you get the wifi only model!)  to support proper rendering of Tibetan characters. This is dynamic rendering of Unicode text, and not just static pre-rendered images.

You might have seen an earlier post I wrote about this here, and I’ve essentially done the same thing this time, but with an important addition of code from Tom that properly stacks the characters (a critical feature often not available in an OS font library), and a new Tibetan font (actually Bhutanese) from Chris which is small, lightweight and efficient enough to be used on Android. All together this provides support for reading Tibetan text on web pages, and within full application user interfaces, eBooks and more.

With up to 32gb of storage possible via the tiny micro SD Card, this one device could probably store and serve up the majority of Tibetan Buddhist texts, not to mention literary, poetic and historic works, that exist, all in a lightweight, energy-efficient device. Since the device is also networked, you can use it to pull down the latest Tibetan language online news and blogs.

And yes, this is all possible because the Nook is based on the free, open-source Android operating system. Yay for freedom in all forms!

This is support for both web pages, as well as full applications on the device.

Discussing New Tactics for Human Rights

This week, I’m participating in a one week online dialog regarding the development of new tools and tactics for the purpose of documenting human rights violations. The New Tactics in Human Rights Project, led by a diverse group of partner international organizations, advisors and practitioners, promotes tactical innovation and strategic thinking within the international human rights community. While there is an amazing list of researchers and practitioners who have been invited to seed the thread, all are welcome to join in the discussion, as well.

Here’s a brief summary of what we’ll be covering:

Join us for this important on-line dialogue featuring Documenting Violations: Choosing the Right Approach from January 27 to February 2, 2010. This dialogue will feature practitioners that have developed database systems to document human rights violations, organizations on the ground documenting violations, and those that are training practitioners on how to choose the right approach and system for their documentation. We will look at options for ways to collect, store and share your human rights data safely and effectively. If you are trying to figure out the best documenting system for your work – or if you have found something that works well, please join us for this conversation to share your questions, ideas, resources and stories!

Featured Resource Practitioners
Featured resource practitioners for this dialogue include (click here for more biographical info):

  • Vijaya Tripathi and Megan Price work with the Martus database developed by Benetech
  • Agnethe Olesen, Daniel D’Esposito and Bert Verstappen work on the OpenEvSys database developed by HURIDOCS
  • Jorge Villagran and Sofia Espinosa of the Guatemalan National Police Archive Team
  • Patrick J. Pierce, head of the International Center for Translational Justice – Burma Program
  • Oleg Burlaca, utilizes HURIDOCS methodology and working on websites for World Organisation Against Torture and SOVA Center for Information and Analysis
  • Patrick Stawski, Human Rights Archivist at Duke University and Seth Shaw, Duke’s Libraries’ Electronic Records Archivist
  • Jana Asher, M.S., is the Executive Director of StatAid
  • Agnieszka Raczynska of Red Nacional de Organismos Civiles de Derechos Humanos, Mexico
  • Daniel Rothenberg is the Managing Director of International Projects at the International Human Rights Law Institute (IHRLI) at DePaul University College of Law

Read on:
http://www.newtactics.org/en/blog/new-tactics/documenting-violations-choosing-right-approach

ITP2800: Designing Mobile Apps for Crisis Situations

Here is the slide deck and audio recording of a recent lecture I gave to my NYU ITP2800 students. The topic was “Building an Effective User Experience for Mobile Smartphone Applications Used Under Duress”, with the ideas and content coming from an earlier blog post / crowd-sourced effort on this topic. I still consider this talk a work in progress, but figured I’d share it in the spirit of open iteration!