Russia's invasion has made Ukraine a testing ground for the ways the internet changes war -- and that includes how war crimes are documented. With a tech-savvy society under direct attack, a stream of information posted by Ukranians to social media and the messaging app Telegram are offering a trove of real-time digital evidence of purported war crimes. But there’s a problem with presenting this evidence in court: Because it comes from the wilds of the internet, it’s open to all sorts of challenges to its veracity. So a lab at Stanford University is pursuing a solution that involves, of all things, blockchains. Earlier today, it submitted its second dossier of evidence related to the alleged destruction of Ukrainian schools in Kharkiv by Russian forces last March to the International Criminal Court at the Hague, the lab’s leader told me, two days before he is set to present on the submission in Davos. How does the technology behind cryptocurrencies help document war crimes? Blockchains, at their core, are just shared databases of information stored across networks of computers and use cryptography to help ensure their accuracy. In conjunction with the tech-driven social enterprise Hala Systems, Starling Lab took evidence scraped from sources like Telegram, and added relevant context about where and when the information came from. Then it “hashed” the data, a process that creates something like a digital fingerprint. Starling then posted the hash values to seven different blockchain protocols, creating a distributed verification key of the file for posterity. (Starling stores the data itself using FileCoin and Storj, decentralized file storage services.) Starling's blockchain method can't verify the underlying photo, but it can create a permanent record of what it looked like at the time it was hashed. That way, nobody can alter the information later — or have evidence thrown out on suspicion that it might have been tampered with afterward. While information stored in a centralized database could theoretically be manipulated by the database’s owner — for example, to make it look like a hash was entered into the database months before it really was -- public blockchains are a different matter, because thousands of computers independently record the same entry at approximately the same time. Jonathan Dotan, Starling’s founding director, likened the method to a digital, tamper-evident evidence bag. But like a real-world evidence bag, the blockchain-based method cannot prove a crime on its own, and the high-tech method entails some tradeoffs. Wendy Betts is the director of eyeWitness to Atrocities, which also uses hashing and encryption to verify evidence of war crimes, but does not make use of blockchains. She said it was unclear whether the added complexity that comes with incorporating blockchains was worth it. A court, for example, might struggle to understand the method, she said. And crucially, posting a hash to a blockchain does not prove the integrity of the data before it was hashed. If the underlying social media post was fraudulent, for example, that won’t be detected with this method. “Did that information have a lifespan before that date and time?” Betts asked. “That’s where defense counsel is going to go.” Starling — which submitted its first dossier of blockchain-verified evidence to the ICC last June — is aiming to address that question with its second submission. It relies on images taken on the ground by data collectors using a specialized camera app. The app records metadata, hashes the information and verifies its authenticity with a digital signature, before publishing it to blockchains. By capturing, hashing and posting the data all at once, and adding a trusted human collector who can vouch for the circumstances in which the data was captured, Starling hopes its latest process will create a new standard for the collection of digital war crimes evidence. Dotan is set to present the second submission at a panel with Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday. Ahead of the panel, Dotan told me that the boom in publicly available AI tools for generating images in the months since Starling’s first ICC submission has made the mission of authenticating digital evidence all the more urgent. “The manipulation of imagery is now a household issue,” he said.
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