EyeWitness app lets smartphones report war crimes | Hacker News Reader

EyeWitness app lets smartphones report war crimes

bbc.co.uk

36 pointsSimplyUseless15 comments

Then, when the user is in a safe location...

Unfortunately, this leaves the reporter vulnerable to having their device confiscated/destroyed. Live uploading would be better, but it's unlikely that the internet infrastructure is in place to allow this in an area where "war crimes" are a serious concern.

There's also the "releasing images to proper authorities" bit - I can't think of a reason that this shouldn't be completely open and public instead, if nothing else it makes suppressing the info impossible.

This isn't going to solve the stated problem at the top: Staged scenes.

They are quite common in certain areas and even journalists fall for them all the time, this smartphone app will only be worse.

Good point! See this documentary for more details:

http://www.rubensalvadori.com/index.php/project/photojournal...

It doesn't solve the problem entirely, but this does make things incrementally better. Staging a fake video is harder if it's expected to include GPS coordinates pointing to a spot where forensic evidence might be found and a phone subscriber ID that's expected to point to someone willing to testify. YouTube videos usually don't have those things.

Is there a GitHub repository for this? There are non-obvious features that I think it would be very good for it to have.

One of the core problems is that reporters might have their phones confiscated or destroyed, or the reporters might even be killed. The best solution is live uploading, but network infrastructure usually isn't good enough to stream video (especially in crowds where several people might be trying to do it at once). What I think it should do, is use the connectivity it has to live-upload limited information strategically.

First it should upload the location, time, device ID, and a hash of the video recorded so far. This is only a few hundred bytes (could fit in an SMS), and creates a record that video was recorded, which could be used in combination with testimony to support a claim of destruction of evidence. Then it should add, based on the amount of bandwidth available, low-quality audio, higher-quality audio, and selected still frames from the video.

The pics are encrypted with a public key and buried in an online database where lawyers review the images and won't release them except to 'proper authorities'. Not sure if that's a good thing, the user seems to lose control over their own media they can't make copies.

What will they do to mitigate that fact that the war criminals will be doing network traffic analysis?

Pulling updates from the Play Store for the app or pinging its service while being at the wrong place at the wrong time might cause you to disappear.

Android Apps can be deployed and distributed a variety of ways. E-Mail is one of those ways. Bluetooth sharing is another.

So far its primary distribution network is the Play Store.

Most casual/uninformed users won't sideload an application if it's available through an app store.

Ideally, they'd add a feature where it makes its traffic take the form of https connections to a variety of IP addresses that also host other things, so that it's hard to identify. I don't think passive network traffic analysis can determine which apps are being downloaded to the Google's Play Store, from connections to the Play Store itself.

Even if they aren't doing anything to hide the network traffic, there are events that people want to capture where the main bad actors don't have those capabilities. Taking recent events in Ferguson Missouri, for example, while the NSA could almost certainly tell who was using the EyeWitness app, the corrupt local police almost certainly couldn't.

This is true. The "war crimes" angle makes it seem as if its for use against state-level actors waging war.

In that case, compromising electronic communications has been a key strategy in disrupting organization and identifying targets that pose a threat.

We've been very careful about not letting any details leak to the press about our campaigns in the Middle East.

If an app puts that control in jeopardy and I'm in an occupied country, I wouldn't want my Google account listing that I have it installed. Nor would I want to use it on a compromised network.

The little ToS they have you scroll through when you install it makes it apparent that it shouldn't be used on an untrusted network.

Good for them for making it unambiguous.

I'm curious to know what sort of optimizations they have made for the phones and infrastructure being used in these locations.

Will this work for police violence?

I suppose, though there's already 'an app for that' as it were: https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=ACLU+Affilia...

Implementation may be subpar but the underlying idea is golden.

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