Washington DC and a film noir classic

26:34There were many people who were really enthusiastic about this exercise, but those who were not were very, very difficult, and it became quite personal at times. By the time the conference ended, I was quite convinced that it would be an important part of history. An international criminal court, ICC, was an idea that had been around for decades. Kofi Annan, the then United Nations Secretary General, explained why the court was needed. At the end of the Second World War and following the exterminations of the Holocaust, We all said, never again, this should never happen again. But it has. In Cambodia, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Rwanda.

27:21And I think the international community realises that this international criminal court, a permanent international criminal court, is a missing link in the international juridical system. There had already been many discussions to try to make it happen. then in June 1998. A conference organized by the United Nations opens in Rome this morning aimed at devising a blueprint for what would be the world's first permanent international criminal court. I did not intend to go to that conference because I had other things to do. My involvement was actually accidental because some NGOs asked me to go and asked the minister for me to go to the conference.

28:07And then, of course, Adrian Boss, who had chaired previous preparatory work, fell ill and asked me whether I could replace him, which I agreed to do. But it was all very, very quick and very spontaneous. And in fact, I knew very little about the ICC when I joined the conference. Philippe was very experienced at handling negotiations. I had chaired many UN meetings. I normally had consensus agreement in a rather short time and I thought it would be the same with the ICC. I was wrong because the ICC was a much more complicated and politically sensitive subject. This is BBC News from June 1998. It's 50 years since the United Nations first called for a permanent court to try alleged war criminals.

29:00Now at last the goal is in sight. There's already an International Court of Justice in The Hague, but that deals only with disputes between states. Two criminal tribunals have been set up by the United Nations, but they're concerned only with the wars in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. A United Nations official said here yesterday that there was now a window of opportunity to protect the little people, the weak, the refugees, the people who've suffered in war. But it's clear there's still some hard bargaining to be done before a blueprint for the new court can be signed in five weeks' time. The conference took place in Rome.

29:34It was a huge event. There were thousands of people there. This is a very trivial thing, but it was the first conference with mobile phones. But the mobile phones were so big that they looked like guns from the far west, you know, with a holster and everything. There were many governmental delegates there, but Philippe said what really made a difference was the number of non-government organisations. They not only shared the expertise, but also, in fact, actually influenced the position of some states, particularly smaller states, which were absolutely not in a position to absorb the complexities of the issues being discussed.

30:17I was chairman of the committee of the whole of the conference, the one in charge of the negotiations. But we had a big problem, which is that because so many big issues were unresolved, states were unwilling to negotiate. They negotiated on fairly minor things, but on questions like the jurisdiction of the court, there was no progress. The conference lasted five weeks, which was very, very short because the preparatory work had compiled hundreds of proposals in square brackets. Square brackets means points of disagreement. And when I arrived in Rome, I thought that if we tried to deal with all those differences, we would never get anywhere.

31:05So we started from scratch. We created a new text on the basis of the discussion. Towards the end, when we realized that there were no real negotiations among states, we had two options. One was to say, all right, fine, it's not going to work. Let's have another session. Or present a package that could not be discussed. It was a take it or leave it approach. And that's what we did. They presented it saying you can accept it, you can reject it, but it represents such a fragile equilibrium that if you change it, it will collapse. Two states tried to change it, the United States and India. You know, it was a touch and go until the last minute.

31:50When we arrived in the morning, having presented the package late at night, which was actually a definite violation of normal procedures, but the delegations had had time to go back to their capitals. When we came back in the morning, we had no idea whether this package would survive or be rejected. The United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan is on his way to Rome today to join diplomats who are signing a historic treaty setting up the world's first permanent international criminal court. The treaty was approved last night by an overwhelming majority of the countries who spent the past five weeks working out the details.

32:31Work on establishing the new court and appointing its judges will begin as soon as the treaty has been ratified by 60 countries. That shouldn't prove too much of an obstacle, as twice that number voted to support the treaty last night. And because there was so much uncertainty, the Secretariat blocked the press from the room of the committee of the hall. We very much regretted it because the atmosphere in that room was historic. Delegates, who normally are fairly controlled, were in the arms of one another. They were on tables, they were crying. It was extraordinary. I never, never saw something like that in all my years of negotiations.

33:09It was very emotional. The relief and jubilation evident among delegates was not shared by the United States, which had forced a vote because it feared its peacekeeping troops might face vexatious prosecutions. The Americans also failed in their attempt to prevent the court having an independent prosecutor. As well as the USA, other countries that haven't joined the ICC include China, Israel, India, Russia and Indonesia. It was something that had been sought for many decades. And so the fact that it finally arrived was seen by every man as historical, positively or negatively, but historical. The Rome Statute, that's the name of this treaty that established the International Criminal Court, came into force on 1 July 2002.

34:00The court is based in The Hague in the Netherlands, with the first trial starting in 2009. This resulted in Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga being found guilty of recruiting and using child soldiers. The Rome Conference was certainly the most difficult professional thing I ever did. And because of the uncertainty, you can imagine that when he did succeed, I was a very happy man. That's Philippe Kirsch, who went on to serve as the first president of the ICC. He was speaking to Jill Kersley. Now, if you're connected to the Internet, you're almost certainly worried about how secure it is. Who's looking at what you're doing and how easy is it for scammers to get at your computer?

34:48Back in Silicon Valley 25 years ago, it was no different. And that's when a security tool was born that would have a huge impact on all our lives. It was called CAPTCHA. Ashley Byrne has the story. So we're just on the balcony and starting to sing, okay, we can do optical character recognition, OCR, but it's probably difficult to do if you are mixing the fonts, if letters are not aligned. So we decided, OK, that's what we have to use, the combination of things that make things difficult for optical character recognition. The only thing that came to our mind that would be easy to generate would be essentially to do a recognized sound text.

35:37That's Andre Broder, a computer scientist whose early work on text distortion for spam prevention helped shape ideas that would later influence capture.

35:52It was the late 1990s and the internet was still in its infancy. At the time, Romanian-born Andrei Broder was a young computer scientist specialising in algorithms and web search. He'd moved to California, where he was working with the early search engine AltaVista. At some point they said, oh, we have this problem. We have a mechanism for people to submit URLs and people are using scripts and we get a lot of spam.

36:23AltaVista found submissions were being flooded by spam bots and as the internet grew rapidly, issues only began to increase. There was a desperate need for greater internet security. So on the balcony of their offices in Palo Alto, Andre and his colleagues began considering how they might solve the issue. One existing technology was Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, a system that lets computers read printed text, like scanning a document. But OCR had a weakness. It struggled with distorted or overlapping letters. So Andre and his team suddenly realised if spam bots relied on machine vision to flood websites with fake submissions, then a distorted text challenge could confuse them, while remaining readable to real human users.

37:18One nice spring day, because we are all on the terrace of this building in Palo Alto, which now houses A9, which is a subsidiary of Amazon. As usual in those days, we seem to have a lot more time. We're just chatting about this and that. And eventually we start thinking about how can we do it. And the Turing test is a very famous problem. It can be argued that it's a defining problem of artificial intelligence.

37:56Alan Turing was a British mathematician who worked at the University of Manchester. Widely credited with being the father of modern computers, he developed the Turing test in the early 1950s to determine whether a machine could convincingly imitate human intelligence in conversation. So Andre Broder's team decided to flip the famous Turing test on its head. In the Turing test, the examiner is a human. And in the anti-Turing test, the computer, the robot is the examiner. And the human has to pass the test. So it switches the role. But the test is the same thing. It is a hard problem for computers, but easy for humans.

38:43It is a pattern that humans recognize easily, but the computers have trouble recognizing. That principle, challenging computers with something humans intuitively understand, was eventually taken up by a group of scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in the year 2000. Leading the team there was Guatemalan computer scientist Louis van Han, alongside Venezuelan professor of computer science Manuel Blum and American's cryptographer Nicholas Hopper and machine learning researcher John Langford. They would eventually invent CAPTCHA, completely automated public Turing tests to tell computers and humans apart.

39:22This was a little bit of a joke. CAPTCHA somehow sounds like something you are catching the spammers. It was a nice coinage. but while the name caused some amusement the system worked but it wasn't universally accepted at the beginning marketing thought that they were absolutely outraged about the whole idea because you know whoever heard about asking people to prove they are human and so they were afraid we're going to get a terrible press. And at first, Andrei says users had real trouble accepting the distorted text. The remark was along the lines is that, well, I understand the need to prevent bots from entering URLs.

40:12But what do they have to use those crazy letters? They should have used Verdana or some other webmaster says, OK, this time they beat me. The reactions were pretty funny. Of course, people now have an intuitive understanding, even if they don't understand the technology. The test cannot be too easy, but it cannot be too hard. Well, you know, Andre, capture and now recaptures can be incredibly frustrating, whether it's squinting at blurry letters, clicking on endless pictures of fire hydrants or motorbikes, or trying to figure out what even counts as a crosswalk, a term, of course, that is not used much outside of the United States.

40:57It does sometimes feel like these puzzles are harder for humans than they are for robots. One of the things I tend to say is that probably we are four of the people that are most cursed in the world, right? Because people are trying to solve something and they say, who the hell invented this stuff? Who is putting this obstacle in front of me?

41:27Captcha was rapidly adopted in the early 2000s. One of the first major deployments came when Yahoo integrated it to prevent bots from creating fake email accounts. Within a few years, it became a standard security measure across major platforms, from email providers to ticketing websites, and it continues to block millions of automated bot attacks daily. Meanwhile, ReCapture would streamline the process by allowing users to verify themselves with simpler interactions like clicking a checkbox instead of deciphering distorted text. Andrei's work, and that of the team that would eventually create Capture, has greatly influenced our lives.

42:09But he says he had no idea of its real significance at the time. I don't think we realise that, oh, this is something super important, we should go around the world and talk about it and so on. It seems like, oh, you know, they have this problem, let's do some solution. We didn't even bother to do some kind of report or a scientific paper or anything. Andre believes CAPTCHA is as relevant now as ever.

43:05able to pass the Turing test.

43:10Andre Broder was speaking to Ashley Byrne for that Made in Manchester production. Next, a sports story from the past. In 1989, a flare was thrown onto the pitch during a Football World Cup qualifier appearing to injure Chile's goalkeeper, Roberto Rojas, until one photo exposed the truth. Photographer Riccardo Alfieri has been telling Megan Jones what happened. Roberto Rojas was really an extraordinary goalkeeper he wasn't a normal goalkeeper he was a great goalkeeper and I don't understand why he made that sporting error and that an image by me would also lead to him being banned for life as a football player

43:59it's the evening of Sunday the 3rd of September and the iconic Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is full of excitement. For 67 minutes, Chile and Brazil have been battling it out in a crucial World Cup qualifying game. Football photographer Ricardo Alfieri is in the perfect position on the side of the pitch, looking out through the lens of one of his three Nikon cameras. Suddenly, I saw a flare coming out of the upper stands of the Maracanã. They normally go up and towards the sky. This one made a curve and fell behind the Chilean goalkeeper Robert Rojas. The flare, when it hit the playing field, created a significant cloud of smoke.

44:44When the smoke disappeared, he appeared with his entire face, his forehead, his shirt covered in blood, because he really had a very serious wound. Muy importante. Over 130 ,000 fans are watching from the stands. The game was televised by Rede Globo, which is the most important sports network in Brazil, with 10 cameras. I don't know how or why, but the image they had was Rojas in the middle of the smoke. When the smoke goes away, Rojas is bleeding, but at not time did they have the flair touching him. If the flair didn't touch Rojas, how has he been injured? You would have thought those 10 cameras and the 130 photographers around the pitch would have captured the moment and be able to clear this all up though, right?

45:41This was more than just a game. The winner would go on to the 1990 FIFA World Cup finals in Italy. It is not just a sporting event. It is a commercial event where there is an entire infrastructure for tourism, trade, airplanes and hotels. It is all a very important movement and much more than just points from a match. Three weeks earlier, both teams met in a passionate encounter in Santiago, Chile, which ended 1-1. Brazil were leading on goal difference, so Chile needed the win. It was a very complicated match. The Chilean public were very aggressive. There were some very strong plays, fights between the players.

46:28That is to say, the atmosphere of the match was really complicated. With around 20 minutes remaining, Brazil are leading 1-0. But an unknown plan was about to be set in motion. Something has been thrown towards the goalkeeper. I don't know if it hit him or not, but the way he's behaving there, it would certainly appear something is amiss. Looks like a firework. Rojas is being carried off. I put my money on it. Those two gentlemen there walking towards the referee, a FIFA delegate. They're certainly not dressed to play. And he's called it off. He's called the game off, which we can only presume means that Chile refused to appear.

47:07You might have guessed that wasn't the actual commentary as we don't have the rights, but we did our best with the recreation. Amongst all this chaos, something just isn't adding up for Ricciardo. My friend Paulo, who is a photographer, went with me to the game. And he says to me, Ricardo, did you see something? And I say to him, look, Paulo, I was able to take a sequence of about eight or ten photos, one of which was the flare falling. Then Rojas throwing himself back in the smoke. When that clear, I see his shirt is all covering blood and his forehead is bleeding. I really don't understand what happened because for me it didn't hit him.

47:53It turns out those TV cameras and the other 129 photographers just weren't in the right position to capture what actually happened. Even though the match has been called off, the officials are determined to get to the bottom of it. I was comfortably drinking a Coca-Cola, sitting in an armchair and suddenly about 40, 50, 60 journalists came at me with microphones and they wouldn't let me stop and drink. So, after putting his drink down, Ricardo started giving interviews and word was spreading about this other version of events. An hour and a half, almost two hours passed in all this and Ricardo Teixeira, who was the president of the Brazilian Football Federation, and some other people from FIFA sent for me.

48:45And I had to go to tell them what I thought had happened because up to that point, Brazil were going to be eliminated from the 1990 World Cup in Italy and their points were going to be given to Chile. The photos would have to be developed, but it was already nine o 'clock on a Sunday night. I told them, look, no, I'm going to reveal the material tomorrow in Buenos Aires. They say, no, no, we have to reveal it today, because the FIFA inspector is leaving tomorrow on the first flight to Zurich. A very reluctant laboratory technician got out of bed and came to develop the photos. Then, almost two hours later, the evidence was uncovered.

49:36the photos show the flare falling onto the ground and then you see rojas throw himself back and then there is all this smoke and then when the smoke clears he's covering blood all that lasted seconds in two of the photos you can clearly see that the flare fell two meters behind rojas The photos were published the next day for the world to see. But it still wasn't clear how Rojas had been injured, and at first he was sticking by the story that he was hit by a flare.

50:13After three or four days, they called Roberto Rojas to Zurich, and he started to say that he played the game with a razor blade inside his glove, waiting for an opportunity. Then he would cut himself and it would look like the team had been attacked and look for the disqualification of Brazil. A month later, FIFA announced Rojas would be banned for life from playing football, with other members of the team also being punished. Chile were also fined and banned from the 1994 World Cup. The flare thrower was identified as a 24-year-old secretary who claimed a stranger gave the device outside the stadium.

50:52Eight months later, Rojas admitted his guilt in a daily Chilean newspaper with the headline Soy culpable, which translates to I am guilty. Over all of these years, have you ever spoken with him or met him? No, no, no, no. We never spoke. But he acknowledged in a report that I've heard that it was a mistake he made and that he's deeply sorry and that these are life lessons he's learning. and in life you do make mistakes and you also make successes. Ricardo retired from photography in 2019, but not before taking some other pretty important photos. I worked with Maradona. As his personal photographer, I took pictures of his daughter's birthdays.

51:42I mean, I've had experiences of everything. It is a profession that enriched me. I say it enriched me as a person. The sports photographer Riccardo Alfieri was talking to Megan Jones. Finally this week, from sports to the arts, and one of the most acclaimed films of the last century, the 1949 film noir thriller The Third Man. It's one of my personal favourites, and I must have seen it about ten times. But during the filming in Austria, was it obvious that this post-war masterpiece would win the praise that it did? Here's Phil Jones. Come out, come out, whoever you are This is the moment that the film's star, Orson Welles is revealed by a shard of light It's one of the most dramatic opening appearances in movie history Holly Martins shouted, come out, come out, wherever you are The famous shot, Orson Welles' entrance in the film which is I think one of the greatest entrances of all times whoever saw the rushes and had not been on the set was amazed at that shot.

52:52Angela Allen was a 19-year-old continuity assistant. I was very excited about getting the job and being told that the location was in Vienna. In the late 1940s, Orson Welles was a towering figure in world cinema. He'd already directed the critically acclaimed Citizen Kane. In The Third Man, he's playing the anti-hero Harry Lyme, one of his most celebrated roles. Orson Welles' presence is immense in the film, but he's only interested in himself and his scenes.

53:29The movie is set in the shadowy ruins of post-war Vienna and is essentially a story of good versus evil. It follows the American writer Holly Martins, played by Joseph Cotton as he investigates the mysterious death of his friend Harry Lyme. Lyme has feigned his own death to escape from the police. This first appearance by Wells comes halfway through the film. Until then, his character is only spoken about, adding to the mystery. The fact of his entrance being silent was, I think, even more magical. For a few seconds, Wells smiles. I've heard it's called the most famous smile since the Mona Lisa.

54:15Was it a smile? Was it a smirk? Oh, I think it's the mixture of the two. Wells' brief but magnetic performance transforms the film. He dominates key scenes, from the famous cuckoo clock speech to the final pursuit through the sewers. But when the director, Carol Reid, needed his star on set, he wasn't there. When Orson Welles was required, he went missing. When they wanted him, they called Paris and sent somebody to collect him. And the poor person got there and he'd flown, I think, to Rome because he was very mischievous. I'm sure he considered it probably a small film. It wasn't going to be a Citizen Kane for him.

55:07When he did arrive, it was a case of real events being just like the movie. In other words, the bad boy turns up late and steals the show. While Wells was keeping everyone waiting, Angela was given another job. My unit used to do the cat shots. So you had an original in Vienna so that when you needed another cat, you had to get one with the same markings on it or as near as you could. Cats are really quite fussy. So to get them to lick the boots and look up at Orson Welles was quite a trial. Yes, the cat revealed him to be alive because he recognised him and smelt him. and that's why he'd crawled into the doorway, to be on his feet.

55:56The cat was crucial in exposing Harry Lyme as the villain. The cat looks up at Wells because obviously he'd been his boss and cats, like many animals when they have an owner, that's who they feel most loyal to. Another important moment happens on Vienna's huge, 65-metre-tall Ferris wheel. I think the scene in The Wheel was important because it is the only time that you see Orson and Joe Cotton together. This is the emotional core of the film, symbolising a battle between good and evil. Cotton the good guy, Wells the bad. We'd just finished the war, but Austria was a pretty evil country. After all, it is the country from which Hitler came.

56:51After the Second World War and the Holocaust, the cost of human life was cheap. Listen to Wales. Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat. I talk about the suckers and the mugs. No one thinks of human beings anymore. Well, that perhaps is the remark a greedy, egotistical man would make. because he doesn't give a damn about anybody except himself. High above the city, the two men watch the people below. Welles' character Lime coldly suggests he'd erase one of those human dots without hesitation, if the price was right.

57:33Down there, would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you£20 ,000 for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? You are asking me, you know, it's good versus evil. Yes, of course it is, but he was an evil man. Harry Lyon was an evil man. Wells used to brag he wrote all his own lines. Not true. But he was responsible for the most famous words in the film, the cuckoo clock quote. The cuckoo clock turned into a great line, but it was certainly not thought of at the time.

58:18But it became absolutely crucial, emphasising Lyme's chilling belief that human suffering is inconsequential if it leads to profit and greatness. Natalie, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. That's the line everyone remembers, but the film's climax is pretty exciting too, as Wells is hunted down beneath the city streets. The character Harry Lyon disappears into a kiosk, which leads into the sewers, so then it becomes the chase in the sewers to the end.

59:10But again, Wells proved to be difficult When he arrived at the sewers he saw all the crew eating their sandwiches and he went mad he thought it was disgusting and he refused to ever go down the sewers again They ended up having to make a replica set No, Mr Wells would not go down the sewers so it cost them quite a lot of money to have to rebuild the sewers in London. Was there an expectation that the film was going to be this great masterpiece? At the time, no. We all hoped it was going to be a success, but nobody knew. It's a lot of people's favourite film. Is it yours? I don't have favourites.

1:00:00I've worked on too many films. it's certainly one of the most memorable but it's hard to say it's my favourite film am I proud of being part of it? well in retrospect yes you do not know, you take on a job you try to do it as well as you can but you never know how it's going to turn out

1:00:31Wonderful. Production assistant Angela Allen was speaking to Phil Jones. The third man won a Best Cinematography Oscar in 1951, and in 1999 the British Film Institute voted it the greatest British film of all time. If you haven't seen it and you get a chance, I highly recommend you do. It still has a lot to say about the human condition. And it brings us to the end of this edition of the History Hour. We'll be digging through the archives and finding more first-hand witnesses for you next week, But until then, this is Max Pearson from all of us here. Thank you for listening. Goodbye. A moment in time captured by what they heard.

1:01:05I heard some people making phone calls. OK, which runway would you like at Teterboro? What they saw. I put my head down. I saw the movie of my life. So I'm going through my head. What they smelt. I still remember the smell of the fresh fish. And I completely lost my appetite. Moments captured which last for a lifetime. Scientists have made the atomic bomb. That sort of flash set on fire the birds, and they all fell down without their feathers on. The way was clear for Hitler to realize all his demonic plans. Stories from people with first-hand accounts of events that have shaped our world. At the end, Kissinger called me into his office, and he said, you did a good job.

1:01:50I left the office with tears in my eyes. She called me and told me, I'm doing Studio 54. she'd already become a star in Paris. She came back a superstar. Listen now. Search for Witness History wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Hi, I'm Dan Snow, historian and host of Dan Snow's History at Podcast. I want to tell you about a brand new series I don't want you to miss, about the real history behind the Odyssey. With a major new Hollywood adaptation arriving this month, we'll trace Odysseus' epic journey across the Mediterranean, uncover the world of Mycenaean Greece, and investigate the mysteries of Homer and what draws us back to this timeless masterpiece again and again.

1:02:34For everything you need to know about the Odyssey, check out Dan Snow's history hit wherever you get your podcasts.