The digital detectives preserving the truth of war | Hadi Al Khatib

0:00A heads up before we begin, this episode includes discussion of war crimes and violence against civilians. Please take care in deciding whether and when to listen. If we don't verify and archive information published by citizens, we are at risk of losing the truth, of losing the history.

0:24You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Digital evidence technologist Hadi Al-Khatib has spent more than a decade trying to make sure history doesn't get lost. When violence breaks out today, people on the ground often record it on their phones and post it online, hoping the world will see. But what happens to all that footage after it's posted? This footage doesn't really stay online for the long term because it was published on social media platforms that were not designed to keep this information available and accessible for the future.

1:05Hattie is a TED Fellow, one of more than 500 early stage innovators around the globe whose work reaches more than 200 million people a year. They're not just improving broken systems. They're working to build a better future for all of us. In Hattie's case, he's challenging the idea that you can't investigate a war crime without being at the scene. In today's episode, he shares how his organization, Mnemonic, has archived more than 30 million records from conflicts in places like Syria, Sudan, Yemen, and Ukraine, verifying them so they can be used in court. And he's watching a new threat take shape.

1:42We really hope that the archives can play this role for the future generations, for them to understand the violence that we are facing in these different countries that we are working on. And to learn from that, to learn not to go through the same mistakes that we went through, and to make better decisions for the future. After he shares his story, Hattie sits down with TED Fellows program director, Lily James Olds. They get into how his work began with a Facebook group during the Syrian uprising, what he thinks social media companies owe the people who document abuses on their platforms, and how his team protects their own well-being while reviewing some of the most disturbing footage in the world.

2:32And Hattie explains what that wave of AI-generated content means for people trying to document the truth. It's all coming up right after a short break.

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4:49And now our TED story and conversation of the day. In order to prevent violence and create peace, we need to understand what happened. My name is Hadil Khateeb. I'm a digital evidence technologist. I work on turning online scattered information into evidence that can be used in court. Today, it's not only institutions that are creating the history and the narrative of what happened. People are doing that on a daily basis. They are recording information. They share it online. It is impressive how much technology has enabled people to expose injustices in real time. And we are able to create change using it.

5:37We're able to prevent violence using it. Once a war crime happens, people usually would record a photo or a video about it. And they would share it online because they want to make sure that these footage are seen. by as many people as possible to put attention to what they are experiencing and to ask for actions to stop the violence that they are experiencing. This footage doesn't really stay online for the long term because it was published on social media platforms that were not designed to keep this information available and accessible for the future. And the spread of misinformation and the manipulation of information also makes it difficult to understand what happens in certain events.

6:30If we don't verify an archive information published by citizens, we are at risk of losing the truth, of losing the history. I founded Mnemonic in 2017. Mnemonic focuses on building archives to store information securely and safely, organizing information, verifying information, and then sharing it with actors that can use it to bring justice. When investigating a specific event, we need to identify and verify the location. We use maps such as Google Maps in order to locate the specific streets or specific points, and then we compare the images with the satellites and the maps' images. we also need to verify the timing, when this footage was taken, who was there and how they were involved.

7:28We also try to identify and verify any objects. Does the video show any remnants of munition, any uniform, any vehicle or an aircraft? And we do this manually for every incident and every video or photo we collect. Mnemonic Archives have over 30 million records of information. 34 people work at Mnemonic, and these teams are from the countries they are investigating. Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Ukraine, Belarus, Iran, and other countries. We trained over 1 ,000 people in the last 10 years on how to create reports and share it with media outlets, how to create investigations and share it with legal institutions.

8:16One of the biggest challenges to our work is AI-generated content being used by different groups, even governments, to spread misinformation. One of the first things that anyone can do, search has this information been published before or not. Because there could be other versions of this information online that can tell if this is something that is created by AI or not. The second thing is to really look for any inconsistencies, any kind of impossible physics, anything that would not really work in real life. In August 2013, one of the biggest chemical attacks happened in Syria, which killed 1 ,000 people in one night.

9:01Many people and groups said that it is impossible to investigate such crime, especially if we don't have physical access to Syria and to the crime scene. But we had an archive full of footage and videos documenting what happened in that event. After years of submitting information, France have issued an arrest warrant against senior officials including the former dictator Bashar al-Assad. This was a huge milestone for justice, for survivors and the families of victims, and also for digital evidence. In 2023, a German-Palestinian family living in Germany went to Gaza to visit their relatives. As a result of an airstrike, all of them were killed.

9:54The legal organization was not able to investigate this incident. They didn't have physical access to Gaza. The Mnemonic team worked on collecting every piece of record related to this event. We verified the location of the building. We collected satellite imagery to see the before and after. And we clearly saw how the building was damaged. We created the reports and they used it to submit this information to authorities in Germany. The investigation started in 2023 and it's still ongoing. It is very difficult to look into these footage on a daily basis. Airstrikes targeting home, children being injured, people dying.

10:41If we are able to build these systems and continue maintaining them, then we are taking a very important step toward justice, towards recording history, to support the families of victims, the survivors who witnessed these crimes. to be able to tell the truth about what happened.

11:13That was Hattie Al-Khatib. Coming up, a special conversation between Hattie and TED Fellows Program Director Lily James Old. They discuss why, in the age of AI, his team has chosen to move at what he calls the speed of trust, what it felt like when years of painstaking work finally led to real accountability and what he hopes future generations will take from the archives he's building.

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14:01Hi, Hadi. I'm looking forward to talking to you today. Hi, Lily. Same here. Really great to talk to you today. I'd love to start just by hearing a little bit about the background of how you ended up getting into this work to begin with. It was all in the context of the Syrian uprising in 2011 and the Arab uprising. also during that time when protests were happening in different countries and then it got into Syria. It was really clear to me that people were trying as much as possible to document what's happening, the protests, but also to document the violence against protests. So I was really all over social media trying to connect with sources and documenters that are publishing information online me and a couple of friends we started a facebook group called the syrian uprising information center to centralize information that was published by these documenters and translated into english because most of what they were publishing the photos and videos were in Arabic.

15:19So then the international media outlets needed information English about what's happening in Syria. And at the same time, we used Google Maps to locate these protests and then the violence against these protests. I was already outside of Syria in Jordan, in Amman. So doing this remotely with a couple of friends that were also doing this remotely. And we were connecting, of course, with our friends inside Syria as well. This is how everything started. Syrian archive was built at a later stage and then mnemonic. So was this really the first time that you understood there was this need to archive and verify this kind of evidence, this kind of documentation of these human rights abuses?

16:11It was not at that time because what I shared with you in this context was in 2011, but only until 2012 and 2013, I realized it is really important to archive this information that documentaries are capturing and sharing online. For different reasons, there was a lot of disinformation already in 2012. And this information was really denying all sorts of crimes that were happening. Even though you can clearly see it on a video or a photo, a footage of someone being tortured or a footage of violence against protesters or someone is being arrested by security forces, very clear. So that was really important for me to make sure that it's preserved to counter the disinformation and to counter the propaganda and the deniers of crimes that were happening based on documentation, based on evidence.

17:23At that time, I didn't have any idea about how to verify this footage. That's what I kind of needed to do at a later stage. But the other thing is that the pro-governments or pro-former regime at that point were abusing the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to report on the pages of documentaries to close it down. So I was seeing that some of the footage was being removed from online. When I started the Facebook page with other friends and we centralized everything in a map, clicking on a map for the videos that we centralized, I would not see some of the videos because they were reported and they were removed.

18:15So there were these certain reasons why I really wanted to make sure that this information is is archived there was a bigger moment really that happened 2017 this is when social media platforms and companies decided to use artificial intelligence to assist in content moderation i have seen in between one day and the other thousands of these videos being removed because they violated the community guidelines and privacy policy of these companies, the terms of service. Thankfully, 2017, already the Syrian archive was there. Another thing, 2013, I was in the south of Turkey working with documenters directly.

19:09My job was to facilitate training for them to ensure that their documentation is of a high standard and that it meets legal standards to be used in an accountability process and to be as professional as possible. and when I meet the documenters they would tell me they lost materials I would hear that a lot that we were moving from one location to another location and my laptop was seized or my laptop and my camera was in this apartment it was hit by an airstrike and my equipments were all damaged. That also is another reason why it was really important to centralize documentation. And I focused on centralizing documentation that is already published online.

20:05What were those early days like? You know, you used to be at Bellingcat. Obviously, you have deep experience in this work in the field. But tell me about what those early days were like founding Mnemonic? It was really difficult because I spent a lot of time trying to explain that documenters are sharing content on social media platforms and that they are being removed, that they need to be centralized and archived. And that included the team that I started working with. it also included the documenters themselves because I remember talking to documenters and asking do you see this as an actual problem do you see that there is a need for an archive and every conversation I had with them about this they confirmed that this is an actual need some of them were answering that our archives are social media platforms when we get into the conversations more deeply, they realized that the social media platforms were not designed for these type of materials.

21:20Also, early days included talking with experts, talking with people who did investigations, who did journalism, who did archiving, technical people, researchers, historians because I really needed to ensure that there is a strong methodology of how to do this strong technical infrastructure and I needed to collect this advice in order to get there so a lot of consultations really and I also remember in the early days certain people were saying this is impossible or this is a crazy idea and why would you do this because it might not happen it's really hard to convince funders to do it that was true it was not easy at all and it took a lot of time more or less this was really the early stage and we then me and some of the colleagues who joined the team at the beginning started then working on the methodology on the technical infrastructure and I used the experience that I've learned with other organizations like BillingCats or Human Rights Watch or others to conduct this research and ensure that we have a strong verification method for the materials that we are collecting.

22:55So Hadi, I'd love to understand how does Mnemonic work? How does your team find the evidence and work to verify and archive it? What's that process like? From the early days when we started working and creating the Syrian Archive first, we needed to ensure that we built a technical system and a methodology to allow to collect vast amount of information being published by documenters. So many sources were publishing information about Syria. At that time we mapped these actors, hundreds of them, and we connected with them, we verified what they're doing, and for the ones that were constantly publishing relevant content about Syria, documenting war crimes, documenting arrests and other types of violations, we automated the process of archiving from them on a daily basis.

24:06We also do this manually. So if the team is doing their own monitoring of what's happening in the country in different locations, then they can also do that manually. So it's a combination of both automated and manual process in order to collect as much relevant content as possible. When it comes to verification, this was really important for us from the start, is to be able to verify content for us to use it in investigations and publish this content. We were not able to verify everything in the archive when it comes to Syria and later on the other archives that Mnemonic hosts. But we conduct specific investigations and in these investigations there will be the records that we verify.

25:08It's essential for us to verify dates, times, locations. It's very important for us also to be able to corroborate different records from different sources, just to ensure that we have as high level of confidence about the investigations that we are published as much as possible. In addition to this, part of our methodology is not just to document that an incident has happened, but also to connect it to perpetrators, to connect it to who is responsible. And we built a methodology with our partners to ensure that we collect information about perpetrators, about the areas where they were located during these incidents when they were happening.

26:04and we try then to create their chain of commands. We create the areas that they operated in and we connect them to the incidents or potentially their link to the incidents that we are investigating. This is part of the methodology that we've been building in the last 12 years. Junko Awe will be right back with more of Hattie's conversation. This episode is brought to you by Okta, helping you secure and govern AI identity by bringing agents out of the shadows. AI agents are changing the way we work, helping businesses move faster than ever. They're running operations, making real-time business moves, and working together behind the scenes, often completely on their own.

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29:43you spoke earlier about how these social media platforms are not built to do this work they're not built to as archives essentially i'm curious though with the experience you have what responsibility do you think falls on the institutions the the tech platforms you know What do you think they should be doing, these different platforms, to document these human rights abuses that are posted? I'm just curious how that has evolved, how your thinking on that has evolved. What responsibility do you think they should have in this work? One of the main really useful thing that social media companies can do in situations of crisis, whether it's humanitarian or human rights or whether it's a conflict, is to archive these materials themselves.

30:44It is hard for civil society organizations like us to do the work that social media companies are able to do when it comes to the preservation of this content on the long run. So that's one of the things that can be really useful because then in the future, we've seen how during our work, how accountability processes takes a long time. We get many requests from war crime units and investigators working in different countries asking for certain videos from us that is removed from online. Sometimes we have it and we're really lucky and then we're able to share it with them. We're able to verify it and use it for the legal process or the investigation that is open that they are working on.

31:42But in a lot of cases, it doesn't exist anymore. That's something that is really practical, is preserving these materials as social media companies, finding a way to easily share it with judicial authorities, with the police, and ensure that these materials can be then part of an accountability process. the second thing is to ensure also that social media companies have human rights expertise within their companies hired and have also contextual expertise in different areas that they are working on because if they have both then they will be able to identify these materials on their platforms in order than to protect it, to preserve it.

32:40And unfortunately, we see more and more that social media companies are not prioritizing this process to protect these materials on their platforms, which is the reason why Mnemonic exists and why our work on archiving and sharing information to different actors is really relevant. Are there policies or other large system changes you can imagine being put in place that would shift that to put more of that onus on the social media platforms or companies to make these changes that you're suggesting? There is a policy called the Digital Services Act in Europe that regulates the work of social media companies.

33:28And there are certain opportunities there for civil society organizations to have access to platforms and also to ask for certain materials to be preserved. So this is something that we're trying to understand more and we're trying to see how best that we can use. And if it works for us in Europe, then how this can apply for countries that are not European or not US-based in order to have similar regulations and policies that can be used by communities in different countries too. So the Digital Services Act is a really good step towards better understanding of how content moderation work, how preservation work with social media companies and better way for us to access these platforms, to conduct research, learn more.

34:42And then based on that, give the recommendations that we think would be best in a situation of crisis, whether it's a humanitarian or a conflict. I want to go back to this shift that's happening with AI content. I think just first to understand how, as a group of human beings, which is your team, how do you keep up with all of this content? What is your process for even beginning to go through it all? Do you also use AI for good? Talk us through that and how you're utilizing and also just seeing the use of AI in these spaces, AI-generated content. Absolutely. AI-generated content is getting better every day.

35:30It's not going to be surprising that when a new conflict happens, we will see vast amount of AI generated content that looks a documentary footage from Syria in 2011 or Ukraine 2022. And it will be really hard for us to figure out what's real and what's not. Our job is going to be much harder. Verification becomes really essential. our strategy as mnemonic is to ensure that we have strong relationships with communities and networks on the ground because this is a really important step to understand context in order to verify if a photo or a video is AI-generated or not. This doesn't really scale.

36:32It's still manual work. It's still relationships with communities, trust that needs to be built, and trust takes time. But we don't see really an alternative to this process. But if we combine also that with artificial intelligence to help us prioritize content by organizing it, then that could also be very helpful. So if we have a team, let's say, in Ukraine of five people looking into millions of records, than an AI that can help extract the information from the texts, from the photos and from the videos in order to organize them in a certain way, to prepare them for verification, to prioritize them based on incidents that we are working on or based on requests that we are getting from governmental institutions or the UN or others.

37:40This could be a way to counter what's happening right now with so much content being online that is not relevant, that is really misleading. I think what you just said of trust takes time is really powerful. I think about that phrase, moving at the speed of trust. And it seems very much like that's what your team is doing day in and day out. So is what you just talked us through, is that a way that you can imagine keeping trust as moving at the speed of trust while simultaneously accelerating to meet the needs of this misinformation that is just being thrown at us? Exactly, exactly. I think moving moving with trusts moving slowly it's going to give us the really advantage of having the communities supports having context in place and mitigate making mistakes when verifying information when publishing investigations online.

38:54There's a lot of this information already online and misleading content. If we are able to be slow, but with strong context and with good verification, then we are, in this case, adding value and we are sharing information that is really needed in a critical situation that can be helpful. And I think connected to that, knowing that your team does this work day in and day out, how do you take care of yourself? How do you take care of your team? I mean, that seems like such an important piece in order to continue to do this work over the years. How do you think about that as a leader of this organization and doing this very, very trying work?

39:48One of the key things is to make sure that we're not fast all the time. We're not doing the work maximum all the time. And that we take moments to slow down. We take moments to reflect. We prioritize the work. We are living in a world that is full of conflict right now. and hundreds of incidents every month, unfortunately. So being able to understand that we have limited capacity and we need to take care of ourselves is really important. So not asking the team to keep pushing, pushing, pushing, even though this work is really critical, but then it would really affect the well-being of the team and the continuity and the sustainability of this work.

40:51So that's one thing. The other thing is I really believe in celebrating the small wins. It gives me and it gives the team lots of motivations. So it doesn't need to be that we, because of the documentation we shared, the former president of Syria, Bashar Assad, was being accused of the use of chemical weapons and there are arrest warrant against him. It can be smaller than that. So, for example, if we're able to connect with certain communities and listen to them, listen to what they're thinking about the experiences that they have faced and the future that they want to get to celebrate this relationship with the communities.

41:51So this really gives us lots of motivation. And then, of course, we need to make sure that there are professional well-being experts that are able to check in with the team and we get the best advice to continue our work in a sustainable way. There are many different techniques that we are using, even techniques that are more technical. So when we designed the platform to see the materials, we made sure that it was not designed for footage to immediately pop up for the researcher to see and shock with graphic imagery. But it's organized in a way that a researcher needs to take certain steps and needs to be very aware about what he or she is doing in order to get to the footage, to the photo or video that they are trying to verify.

42:55So there are certain techniques that we are trying to use as much as possible because these are really difficult moments, difficult materials. And to do it sustainably, it needs to be taken really seriously. Yeah, that's so fascinating to think about how you've even embedded this kind of mindfulness and care for your employees even into the technical structure. You just mentioned celebrating the little wins and obviously the arrest warrant against Bashar al-Assad and the senior officials. That was a very big moment. What does it feel like when this work that you're doing year after year translates in these ways to actual accountability?

43:49It feels amazing. It feels that all these years that we believed justice could happen one day, it actually happened. There were many moments during the last 12 years where everything was really difficult. The conflict was continuing. Violations were getting even worse. There was no way that we saw a solution, but we kept pushing and we kept supporting each other and believing that hopefully this moment will come. And hopefully what we are doing and these archives that we are building will play a role because other types of evidence are being destroyed, because investigators and journalists cannot access certain conflict areas because of security situations or because they are restricted.

44:51And when it happened with the use of chemical weapons in August 2013, it was really huge. It was really big for everyone in the team. It gave them a lot of motivation to continue and to build on what we have been working on the last 12 years. You talk about the importance of a collective memory for future generations. What do you hope that future generations looking back on this archive that you've built with your team, what do you hope it makes them think about, remember, understand about this moment that we're alive right now? We really hope that the archives can play this role for the future generations, for them to understand the violence that we are facing in these different countries that we are working on.

45:52and to learn from that, to learn not to go through the same mistakes that we went through and to make better decisions for the future. Remember the people that sacrificed their lives for us to get where we are getting. In the case of Syria, for example, when I was there last time, just last week, I was in one of the areas there in the countryside of Damascus that is called Daraya. I visited with the team, the community there, and we went to one of the cemeteries where hundreds of people died in a matter of two days. So over 700 people died in a matter of two days by the former regime. And some of these people were documenters, were activists.

46:55Some of them were just civilians. So all of them really sacrificed for us to be living this moment, the moment of freedom in Syria, freedom of speech, the moment of pushing for a better country. And it's really important to ensure that this legacy continue and what they have done is remembered to protect the future of the country and to ensure that we are not falling into the similar authoritarian regimes as we did in Syria in the last 50 years. So I really hope that the archives creates this memory for people in the future to build a better future and for new generations to learn from what's happening right now.

48:00Hadi, thank you so much for being with us today and sharing your work. I'm very grateful for your time. Thank you, Lily. Thank you for the talk.

48:13That was Hattie Al-Khatib and In Conversation with Lily James Olds. To learn more about the TED Fellows Program, which supports a network of global innovators, and you can watch all of the TED Fellows films, just go to fellows.ted.com. If you are curious about TED's curation, please visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was produced by Lucy Little, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by Ava Dasher. The audio you heard at the top comes from the short film made by Divya Gadongi and Owen McClain, and story edited by Corey Hajim.

48:53Additional support from Lily James Olds, Leonie Horster, and Allegra Pearl. Our team includes Aspen Fitzgerald Dorsey, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Shu Han Hu, Debbie Rolfe, Emma Taubner, Connor Titsworth, Tonsika Sungmar Nivong, and Hannah Yu. Additional support from Isabella Aslarona, Daniela Balarezo, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Christopher Faze-Bogan, Cinnamon Horn, Lainey Lott, Matthew Polis, and Yadi Vasquez. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

49:57on their own. But moving fast with AI shouldn't mean leaving security behind. When invisible agents operate in the dark, they create massive security blind spots that make it hard to keep track of them all. Okta helps your team grow while staying secure by answering four critical questions. Where are my agents? What can they do? What are they doing? And how do I respond if they go rogue? You get a clear view of your agents, govern their identity, trace their behavior, and pull the plug the moment something goes wrong. Bring AI agents out of the shadows. Okta secures AI. Learn more at Okta.com.

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