(2 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
This is one of those reports many may find extremely interesting and much more should be reported about. But that’s why we have and need a PBS and an NPR, they Report as to their news shows.
SUMMARY
Spencer Michels reports on a California nonprofit using high-tech tools to document patterns of brutality and combat human rights abuses across the globe. Transcript
A cut from the transcript:
JIM FRUCHTERMAN: I thought, well, how could you protect a bunch of essentially peasants in a rural village? And the first thought is, you know, what kind of high tech could you have? So, I started thinking about, what do human rights groups do? Well, all they do is process information. But no one writes software for them.
So, could we make tools to make the human rights movement more powerful by helping them do more with the information they have about human rights abuses?
PATRICK BALL, chief scientist, Benetech: Well, the beauty of this software is that all you have to do to encrypt it is to push save.
SPENCER MICHELS: Benetech’s software program, called Martus, can be easily used in the field, even by non-technical personnel. They download the program on a laptop and fill in the blanks to provide a database. It’s all automatically encrypted and stored in the cloud on remote servers away from prying eyes.
The data is accessible only by a secret code. Then, says Patrick Ball, chief scientist in the human rights program, Benetech helps analyze the data.
PATRICK BALL: We don’t catch bad guys. That’s the job of prosecutors. But once prosecutors are building a case about a crime of policy, not about who pulled the trigger, but who made the plans, then our statistical analysis provides a fundamental basis for the claim about policy, about a plan, about design, coordination and organization of mass violence.
SPENCER MICHELS: That was the case in Guatemala, where Benetech is playing a crucial role in helping local authorities make sense of an enormous secret archive of police documents found in an abandoned warehouse.
Human rights workers scanned a sampling of the 80 million documents, many of which provided direct evidence of people disappeared and killed during the country’s bloody civil war in the ’80s. And they used Benetech’s software and statistical analysis to find patterns of brutality. {continued}
In this it states that he quit the for profit world and went non-profit with another program which led him to develop this program for use by residents in different countries as well as non profits.
One thought I had in watching was wondering how much donation funding, and by whom, from the international corporate world, especially corporations known to be from here, does he get. My guess would be not much, one of the reasons they ship jobs overseas is to avoid the regulations, even well beyond human rights, placed on them here, and we don’t get products etc. any cheaper. That which seems to be the tepublican, no longer any thing related to the once republican party, ideology which has finally been opened up for all to see in tearing down the regulations and more placed on companies doing business within these shores! Fighting to finish what was started some thirty years ago and headed rapidly towards during the previous administration with the tepublican congresses.