In the light of the recent political reforms in Burma, for the first time, our partners at the Network for Human Rights Documentation – Burma (ND-Burma) felt comfortable planning a comprehensive Martus training in Rangoon. In late November 2013, jointly with ND-Burma, our team co-led a training for seven human rights groups issues such as digital security tools and methods, approaches to documentation, and, of course, a deep training on using Martus. We are honored to have been able to support ND-Burma member organizations at this memorable training and are deeply grateful for their continued partnership.
Members of our Engineering/ Product/ Project Management / Design teams recently participated in a hack day, where they came up with some valuable proof of concepts for our Human Rights and Global Literacy initiatives and experimented with microcontrollers. Granted, hack days are no panacea for solving the world’s problems. Did we complete the proof of concepts we worked on? Of course not. But did we make great progress on various fronts and are we using what we learned to design our way forward? YES!
Leading foreign policy magazine Foreign Affairs posted a story about the Syrian civil war citing Benetech’s United Nations report of conflict-related killings in Syria. The story’s author, David Kaye, notes that while well-respected human rights groups have shown the regime of Bashar al-Assad “to be responsible for attacks directed against civilians, torture of prisoners, summary executions, and the use of chemical weapons, among other crimes,” it is Benetech’s “detailed report last January for the UN that identified nearly 60,000 individual killings, a number that now likely exceeds 100,000.”
I recently returned from a weeklong training in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where I worked with our partner, Housing Works, to set up a nation-wide human rights documentation project using Martus, Benetech’s secure, open source documentation tool. The new initiative follows on the heels of a spate of homophobic violence experienced by the Haitian LGBTI community earlier this year. By the end of our training week, we graduated 20 new Martus Human Rights monitors representing 10 organizations working across the country with the goal of ensuring that no human rights violation motivated by homophobia, misogyny or stigma based on HIV status goes undocumented.
Human rights groups face increasingly sophisticated attackers with the ability to exploit their growing digital surface. When a group documenting human rights abuses against the Tibetan community came to us last year with interest in Martus, they brought with them a deep mistrust of their own hard drives. Together we decided to use an implementation method that emphasized security at all stages and selected Tails to be the default environment for their use of Martus. The Martus-on-Tails model is an exciting new venture into human rights defenders’ protection. We look forward to exploring other models and developing this one into a more mature standard.
