Slashdot Log In
Satellite Images Used to Document International Atrocities
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Jun 11, 2007 04:23 AM
from the angels-on-our-shoulders dept.
from the angels-on-our-shoulders dept.
wikkedwoman wrote with a link to a Washington Post story about the use of satellite imagery to detect atrocities around the world. The story details Amnesty International's efforts to identify areas in the world that may have been subject to man-made disasters. By comparing and contrasting imagery captured over time, researchers can produce hard evidence to present to a hard-to-please international community. "Tonight, [Amnesty Researcher Jeremy] Nelson begins his work by making a copy of the [older] shot in the right-hand screen and pasting it directly over the [newer] one on the left. Then he makes the top one nearly transparent. A river that cuts through the scene becomes a marker to help him line up the two. Now he can easily flip back and forth to look for changes. Sudanese huts tend to follow a similar pattern: a solid base ring with a steep, thatched roof. In the earlier image, they show up as small circles, with a slight shading to the dome, depending on the direction of the sun. Nelson draws a small, green circle slightly larger than the area of the average hut and makes several dozen copies of it ... When he finishes, he moves the 2007 shot to the top and begins the analysis again ... parts of this region were burned so thoroughly that there's nothing left but a large black scar. If you didn't know that huts were there before, you'd have no idea they were now gone. 'Whoever did this did a good job,' he says quietly. 'Thorough, at least.'"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
that's fascinating (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:that's fascinating (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:that's fascinating (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:that's fascinating (Score:5, Insightful)
Change your label for the people you are thinking of from "terrorists" to "people we do not know if are innocent or not".
Feel that thought.
Think about reducing the number of automobile accidents by 2%. Would you accept this behavior for that reduction? Would you accept the disabling of the constitution and the random torture of some innocent and some guilty people to get that 2% reduction?
That's the number of lives we are talking about. And I've rounded up.
Whether there are atrocities in Darfur is irrelevant. What scares me is if people like you are willing to give up having their country be a decent world citizen and a country of law in order to get that 2% reduction. Because "everybody" agree that Darfur is horrible. The question is getting YOU to accept that there are atrocities in the 'civilized' world, too, and that these must stop if we are to have legitimacy in working against other atrocities.
Eivind.
Parent
Re:that's fascinating (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
It's really just a forum for trolling and information exchange, much like
Re:Do you even watch the news? (Score:5, Funny)
The Saudi Arabian ambassador is a troll! US Ambassador is flamebait! The British Ambassador is redundant!
And then, someone puts the goatse.cx guy on the main screen.
Parent
Alternative to Satellites (Score:2, Funny)
Manual for now (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
well (Score:2, Interesting)
It is hard to get good information out of Darfur (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think there is really much debate that there are massacres taking place in Sudan at the moment. However is it very easy for the Government to control the flow of information out of the country. Doctors without Borders, who are often the organization on the front line of these crisis, who are willing to speak up about atrocities, got kicked out in 2005. A UN diplomat (http://www.janpronk.nl/index288.html#290 [janpronk.nl]) was also expelled for blogging about the Sudanese government.
NGOs have a hard time bringing in any sort of communication equipment (satellites for internet etc etc) and I'm pretty sure that you need to have a permit to take photos in Sudan, and the government controls where people can go. This is the same for many conflict zones, especially those with dubious treatment of human rights.
What this article shows is that there are now ways of documenting what is going on in Sudan, which is beyond the direct control of the Sudanese government. However it is very expensive (the images are costing about $1600 each) and there was an issue, when they couldn't book satellite time over Sudan. Whether this was because the government booked it out to prevent them from taking photos is unsure - but it does show the limitation.
Part of the reason that the international community is dragging their feet (or can drag their feet) is probably the lack of reliable concrete information - and this is what this project provides.
That and the fact that Sudan has oil, which the Chinese are heavily invested in.
Re:It is hard to get good information out of Darfu (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe oil is involved, maybe
Of course, realism is something you're not worried about, right
That last reason (Score:2)
Re:It is hard to get good information out of Darfu (Score:2, Insightful)
That and the fact that Sudan has oil, which the Chinese are heavily invested in.
Seriously though, I think China is the major threat to peace and stability in the world today. In addition to Sudan, China is also a major supporter of several other repressive countries in the world, including Burma, North Korea, and Zimbabwe. This includes both arms/military support and political clout in the United Nations. On the bright side, many activists are using the Olympics next year to bring up many of China's domestic and foreign policy issues. It's similar to what happened 19 years ago in Sout
Re:It is hard to get good information out of Darfu (Score:5, Informative)
OK, so I'm pretty sure that this is flamebait, but you did it on my comment, so I took it...
Sudan is already in the top 30 oil exporters in the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chart_of_exports_and _production_of_oil_by_nation [wikipedia.org]), so rubbish about what you're saying about it taking decades to get the oil out of there. Admitted I don't think that it's coming out of Darfur, but it's still the same government.
I actually believe that the biggest problem comes as much from people with close minded views such as your. When people think like that it becomes a "war of civilizations", instead of just an peacekeeping-operation to end genocide, of course the Sudanese government is going to object. Your views of Islam and Muslims are incredibly narrow-minded, and I can only guess, very uneducated. By thinking like that you prevent peaceful dialog from happening.
I have personally spent the last 18 months living mostly in Pakistan and Indonesia - the worlds two largest Muslim countries. Despite standing out as a tall westerner, I didn't have any trouble at all, no terrorists, no jihads. Actually I found most of the people much friendlier than the people back home.
So please take some time to think about the situation, and what will make it better, before spreading such narrow minded rubbish.
Parent
They generally know - they don't care (Score:5, Insightful)
Eyes on Darfur from AI and other examples (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a few stories in the same vein:
Documenting Humanitarian Crisis with Google Earth [slashgeo.org]
New Google Earth Layers: Darfur and more [slashgeo.org]
The Israel-Lebanon Conflict in Google Earth [slashgeo.org]
Beirut Destruction Through Remote Sensing [slashgeo.org]
Israel - Lebanon Conflict and Geospatial Data Access [slashgeo.org]
A comuunity could be developed here (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You can watch reservoirs filling, watch rainforest clearance in Brazil (though not so well in Borneo, since the country is almost perpetuall
Work Smarter! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Manipulation at its finest (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, I would guess whoever is burning down the villages is not burning down much of the surrounding trees and shrubs, which would indicate man-made causes
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, the same could be said about New Orleans. Suspiciously the devastation doesn't expand that much further than the city, so it must have been man-made, eh?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
No, 'cos a person with a brain in their head would go "shit, it's right near the ocean, and there's what looks like sediment covering stuff, and one kind of damage follows land contours, and the satellite pic was taken right after this other satellite pic of a fuckass huge hurricane"
And the smart person would figure it's probably flood & stor
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Manipulation at its finest (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
That's quite a gross oversimplification for any intelligent person looking at images. Sure, a village with a few burned huts is one thing. Could be a back yard fire that took hold.
But a village with every single house burned, in a desert area where there's little vegetation that hasn't already been taken up for food or housing? That's suspicious. When it's a few miles away from anoth
Re: (Score:2)
Argumentation at its worst (Score:5, Insightful)
The areas they are looking into are areas with reported atrocities.
Apart from that, if you look at the summary, you'll see a description of the architecture that in no way resembles the 17th centure British capital. The reason that the fire was wide spread was the proximity of the buildings and the ineptitude of the civil servants. Apart from that, there is no documentation to support or point to a massacre (except that of the Dutch and other immigrants)
The reason for New Orleans' destruction is also heavily documented as being anything but a massacre.
The point of the technology would be to act as supporting evidence instead of conclusive. If taken alone, yeah, it could be an accident or a natural occurrence. When taken in the context of a country with millions of refugees and numerous reports of pogroms, ethnic cleansing and massacres... Well, it's less likely that the explanation is accidental/natural (but of course, not impossible)
Parent
Re:Argumentation at its worst (Score:5, Interesting)
E.g., do you even know which side was inhabiting that area, if not for being spoon fed that it's an atrocity against the Sudanese?
I'll also point out that history (some of it very near) is full of manipulation and selective confirmation. And often you just need to choose whose side propaganda you want to listen to.
E.g., if you would have asked German prisoners in '39, they would have told you that they're just fighting against the Polish aggressors. (The Third Reich propaganda massively broadcast news of the polish "aggression" and Germany just protecting its borders.)
I'll also point out that tribal warfare _is_ brutal like that. You can find archaeological evidence from the pre-columbian era where whole villages were razed. And most native tribes from all over the world were engaged in endemic warfare long before the Europeans got there. IIRC attrition rates in some areas reached 60%. Of the total population, not of the army. As in, really, if you were born in one of those tribes, chances would be about 60% that you'd die in combat, and not in your bed of old age. (By comparison, even the WW2 barely averaged 1% of the total population of the countries involved.)
As soon as humans invented missile weapons, suddenly in caves everywhere you have crude drawings of groups of archers shooting at each other, often led by some priest with some holy totem. And it didn't take much longer to invent flaming arrows.
Even in civilized nation warfare, the US secession war saw such things as the burning of Columbia [wikipedia.org]. Or the fire bombing of Dresden or Tokyo, in WW2.
Now think that 10-100 times worse, and you have an accurate image of tribal warfare, at least for some tribes. Humans needed some tens of thousands of years to get shocked by the horrors of soldiers dying of all sorts of diseases in the Crimean war, or by the brutal realities of WW1 and WW2, and start getting ideas that maybe we should all act a bit nicer. Whole areas of the globe just didn't get there.
And yes, it would be nice if we somehow dragged them into the 21'st century. But it also helps if you realize that neither side there got in the 21'st century, and it's usually not just one side massacring the others.
Basically, just from the pictures you don't know who did what to whom. And in retaliation to what. It's easy to pin the blame on just one side as the ones cleansing the others, but reality is rarely that neatly divided in the good and the evil. And such pictures can be used to create just such a one-sided view.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
E.g., if you would have asked German prisoners in '39, they would have told you that they're just fighting against the Polish aggressors. (The Third Reich propaganda massively broadcast news of the polish "aggression" and Germany just protecting its borders.)
It's even closer than that people are being jailed right now fo
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, that's the whole point (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, thanks for bringing that up. 'Cause, see, that's the whole flippin' point I was trying to make.
No, I don't know enough about that conflict to have an informed opinion. And I'm not going to suddenly jump to a spoon-fed conclusion based on some emotional images and wording. When I have enough other data there, I might make a judgment. But I refuse to
If you don't know... (Score:2)
You may also tell me what party AI or other human rights watch organizations are in these conflicts? Maybe you can at least expect some form of objectivity from them?
All in all these photos are not conclusive
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There are entirely too many drawn in taking sides and waving banners just because the nice man on TV told them which side to join, and how loud to shout. I'm thinking the world as a whole would be a much better place if more people stopped and thought, "wait a minute, that can mean anything whatsoever." We probably would have less atrocities to worry about in the first place, if those comi
Re:If you don't know... (Score:4, Interesting)
You say you're not familiar with the Sudanese conflict, but you're right that there is more to the story. In particular, the conflict in Darfur is just the latest episode in a long, sad story of civil war and political stupidity, to put it nicely. The net result there is that the Sudanese government is acting largely with impunity in Darfur, as the African Union has a mere 7,000 troops in the region and the EU and UN are sitting on their thumbs.
One thing Nelson and the Amnesty/AAAS program in general are trying to do by releasing these photographs is let the Sudanese militias and government know that they are being watched. They're coupling the technological aspect with info from the ground.
Independent researchers, Amnesty workers, and refugees provide stories to go with the pictures, which helps corroborate the theory that it was violence that caused the fires. But they're also providing tips to the Amnesty/AAAS people that certain villages in Sudan might be next in advance. From my reading of TFA, I think they have two goals with these pictures: the first is that they want to let the Sudanese government know that they have their eye on those sites that appear to be at risk, and the second is that they want to be able to immediately commission new photos of those regions when word comes down that it has been attacked. Then their before/after photos are fresher, more reliable.
Second, these guys are not shy about saying they want to drum up support for the "Save Darfur" movement. They figure, probably correctly, that attaching photographs of villages burnt to a crisp to stories from refugees and survivors will strike a chord in the general population. So some of your comments are on-target, but they're already admitted.
Third, these photos provide information about regions the Sudanese government and militias have blocked off. TFA talks about one region no one has gotten into in years, not even Oxfam or the Red Cross. If the militias won't let them in, there's a good chance things are really bad there. These photos could provide meaningful intelligence about the situation on the ground.
Finally, let me reiterate what someone else said, though not so nicely: go find out more about Darfur. It's really a terrible story, but you're right that the media's depiction is one-sided. It really ignores the larger historical context and the political machinations that have made the situation what it is today. Harper's [harpers.org] had a good write-up on it a year ago or so, and I'm sure there are myriad other resources. Cheers.
Parent
Actually, that's sorta the whole point (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, if you also have the right context, you can make an informed judgment. But do you? That's the question I'm asking.
Since you mention Nazis and mass graves, there is already at least one case where that was a lie. There are mass graves in Poland which the Soviets blamed the Nazis for. Turns out that it was the _So
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In the absence of some first-hand information from down there, how _do_ you draw the right conclusions from just a satellite photo?
You're going around in circles, mate. They already told you (5 posts up) that given the first hand information on the intricacies you are talking about, the satellite imagery adds to the evidence needed to establish the case. It's not meant to prove that group A is bad and group B is good - it's just meant to show, from an overhead-view, what everybody on the ground has seen.
Re:Manipulation at its finest (Score:5, Insightful)
Why a troll such as you got modded "interesting" befuddles me, but I'll bite.
No, it couldn't have been "anything." "Anything" includes meteorite strikes, Acts of Gawd, and other such unlikelihoods.
Systematic burning of _disconnected_ villages over hundreds of miles over long stretches of time is not a "forest fire" especially when there is no forest.
"E.g., take the Great Fire Of London"
No, you take it. Part of the reason that the Great Fire spread so quickly was the density of flammable wooden structures. What we actually see in the satellite photographs is not dense urban construction.
I don't know what you're trying to prove in your message, but being so disconnected from reality is never a good thing. Maybe you can't wrap your brain around the fact that the long tradition of killing your fellow man has gone on for millennia and isn't all that uncommon. I don't know. I do find your twisted logic, if you can call it that, disturbing.
--
BMO
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I understand your upset or annoyance at someone suggesting that this is reactionary inference, but Slashdot comments are supposed to be debate about the issues surrounding a story. Inform and educate, rebuff
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll bite.
Perhaps you can set down the Red Bull for a second and read the OP again.
His point was (clearly enough to me anyway) NOT that massacres didn't hap
Re:Manipulation at its finest (Score:5, Insightful)
Evidence is evidence; no one bases anything on a single piece of information. Our military has the most sophisticated satellite imagery in the world, do you think they plan entire missions over a single photo?
You know the image in that article more likely than not is a village murdered. It's more than enough evidence to go look for the bodies.
Why do I suspect the parent poster supported the Iraq war based on its "evidence"?
Parent
Danger ! Danger ! (Score:2)
It's my desire ! It's My Desire !
Re: (Score:2)
Thing is, you could use the same media manipulation techniques to that one too. (If they had photography back then, which they didn't.) Get a few refugees to testify with tears in their eyes about how the Jews are ethnically cleansing them by poisoning their water supplies, show some photographs of piled bodies, show some satellite images of whole areas which turned from fertile farmland back to woods because the p
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)