As media recording devices have become smaller and cheaper, people have started to record
rights abuses as they happen.
Supporting witnesses to record rights abuses and providing spaces where they can be broadcast
is a useful tactic that can be used to highlight rights abuses and have them addressed.
For me, the power of video lies in its ability to convey the visual evidence and the real
firsthand experience of what it's like to experience, for example, human rights abuse.
And the exciting thing now is people have cell phones which they can use to capture
the first person reality that they experience and so it's no longer just a select few who
get to tell the stories, everyone has the potential to be a witness.
This record broadcast and expose.
This was the tactic used by the turquist sniper, an anonymous video activist in Morocco who
filmed police officers taking bribes from motorists.
So what he done, he filmed those police in different places in different days of the
week doing the same, it's filming about 10 or 15 police agents doing the same abuses
in the street of those villages.
He put that on YouTube, he published the first, the second and the third videos.
The videos we are seeing about hundreds of thousands of users, they pushed the government
to arrest those agents and they pushed the government actually to use the same technique
and hide cameras in the street and control police agents by using the same technique
that was used by the target sniper.
In a different context, in Burma, citizen documentation of state abuses does not appear
to have changed the behavior of its military regime.
However, bloggers have recorded and broadcast what they have witnessed, putting a global
spotlight on Burma and this has raised awareness about the human rights abuses that are taking
place.
Now, in Burma, everything is restricted, especially, you know, internet, email and online stuff.
But a lot of people in Burma are using blogs.
So they are posting out their stories, images, whatever they can get and then people around
the world can see what is actually happening in Burma.
Images and cheap digital recording devices were seen as integral to the so-called saffron
revolution that took place in Burma.
As the Burmese protests about economic hardship and military brutality grew in size and frequency,
reports of military violence also increased.
Images of protesting nuns and monks wearing saffron-colored robes were broadcast on the
internet and were then picked up by mainstream media across the globe, leading the military
regime to temporarily cut all internet and most cell phone services during the peak
of activities.
Despite this, as Ong explains, the deployment of simple cheap cameras was critical for recording
what happened, while blogs were an invaluable tool for getting news and images distributed
to the outside world.
And what happened was they see this, you know, something happening in front of their
eyes and they just took a camera and they just shot it and they just, all the photos
or all the audios or all the videos that they've got, just post them out on blog and they
did automatically become, you know, a very good success.
But under repressive regimes, successful online infractivism does not always easily
translate into offline impacts.
In Burma, many bloggers are now paying a high price for their online activism during the
saffron revolution.
Many have been jailed with sentences sometimes stretching beyond 50 years.
This shows why the consequences of online activities need to be thought through carefully
in advance by those involved in uncovering and broadcasting rights abuses.
Victims and survivors of human rights abuses were already vulnerable, so it's really important
when we film them to make sure that we don't doubly victimize them.
For us, that means making sure that people understand the worst case scenario for who
will see the footage.
In a digital era, you can't assume that once a piece of footage is out there, it won't
be copied, placed on YouTube and seen by the perpetrator or the person who is responsible
for whatever happened.
So we think you should explain the worst case scenario and help people make their own judgment
about whether they want to speak out, whether they want to be seen, and then take measures
to protect them, so disguising their identity, disguising their voice, taking those steps.
I think one of the biggest challenges now for info activism is how we encourage thousands
of people who are now participating in movements for human rights using video to think about
how they understand the importance of consent, how they understand these issues so they don't
doubly revictimize people who've experienced human rights abuses.
While recording devices, blogs, videos, and online broadcasting channels are just some
of the ways that info activists can record and expose rights abuses and support actions
that will address them.
But as these examples have highlighted, it is essential to carefully consider people's
need for anonymity, to protect those who may be vulnerable to further abuses.
