The US announced today that it will fund data collection on the conflict in Ukraine. In addition to laying the groundwork for war crimes prosecutions, the move would share critical, real-time data with humanitarian organizations.
The newly established Conflict Observatory will use open source investigative techniques and satellite imagery to monitor the conflict in Ukraine and gather evidence of possible war crimes. External organizations and international researchers would have access to the resulting database, a US State Department spokesman confirmed in an email.
Partners for the Conflict Observatory include Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, artificial intelligence firm PlanetScape Ai and Esri, a geographic information systems company, according to a press release from the State Department. The Observatory will have access to commercial satellite data and U.S. government imagery, allowing “civil society groups to move at a faster pace, toward a speed once reserved for U.S. intelligence agencies,” said Nathaniel Raymond, a lecturer at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs and co-leader of the Humanitarian Research Lab.
Raymond himself is no stranger to using technology to investigate conflict and crises. More than a decade ago, he was director of operations for the Satellite Sentinel Project, co-founded by actor George Clooney, which used satellite imagery to monitor the conflict in South Sudan and document human rights violations. It was the first initiative of its kind, but would be too expensive and labor intensive for other organizations to replicate.
“This kind of work is very labor-intensive,” said Alexa Koenig, executive director of the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley School of Law. “I think we’re at a time on the money and capacity side when many of these organizations need to think about the information environment in which they operate. Open source information can be invaluable in the preliminary research phase, when planning humanitarian aid or conducting a legal investigation.”
None of the data that the Observatory will use and disseminate is classified; the satellite images will come from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s commercial contracts with private companies. But having access to many types of data in one place, rather than spread across many different entities, and the ability to analyze it would make it powerful. While the Observatory would use publicly available data, unlike many other humanitarian projects, Raymond has no intention of making its data open source.
“The level of detail and how quickly, in some cases, image data can be collected means it could be valuable for those looking to target civilians and protected infrastructure such as hospitals and shelters,” he says.
Raymond is very aware of these kinds of risks. While at Satellite Sentinel, a report the group published may have led to the kidnapping of a group of Chinese road workers by the South Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Although the image was anonymized by removing the latitude and longitude, Raymond says locals could have recognized the terrain and identified where road crews were located.
