Blockchain can help anonymously document war crimes

Human rights investigators appointed by the United Nations have confirmed that war crimes have been committed by Russian forces in Ukraine. The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine was established in March 2022 to provide a framework for UN human rights investigators to report war crimes in the region.

Erik Møse, head of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry for Ukraine, stated in the UN article that “investigators visited 27 cities and settlements and interviewed more than 150 victims and witnesses.” Møse also noted that “places of destruction, graves, places of detention and torture, as well as remains of weapons” were inspected.

Although the report developed by the commission has allowed UN investigators to document war crimes in Ukraine, tools and protocols are still needed to enable individuals to accurately and securely report these acts. In addition, the need to preserve evidence of war crimes has become critical as the war in Ukraine enters its seventh month.

Given these challenges, industry experts believe that blockchain technology has the potential to solve many of the problems faced by individuals and organizations documenting war crimes. For example, Jaya Klara Brekke, head of strategy at Nym – a platform powered by the Cosmos blockchain that protects the privacy of various applications – told Cointelegraph that Nym is developing a tool known as AnonDrop that will allow users to upload data securely and anonymously. She said:

“The intention is for AnonDrop to become a tool that democratizes the collection of evidence that can be used to pursue human rights cases. In the current climate in Ukraine, this will be particularly important for the purpose of securely documenting and sharing evidence of war crimes anonymously.”

“The core technology of Nym is a mixnet, which takes data from regular users and mixes it together using encryption to make everything look identical. It protects against people watching the network, along with metadata monitoring and IP tracking, she elaborated. While Nym provides an anonymity layer to allow users to transfer data without revealing their identity, the information is stored on the Filecoin decentralized storage network.

Will Scott, a software engineer at Protocol Labs – a company working with Filecoin on its decentralized storage solution – told Cointelegraph that some of humanity’s most important information is stored on Filecoin to ensure data remains publicly available.

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A blockchain network combined with decentralized storage can be a critical tool for documenting war crimes since it allows individuals in regions like Ukraine to anonymously report, share and retain data. A Wall Street Journal article published in May 2022 stated that “Prosecutors say that with Russian forces occupying so much of the country, it is impossible to process all the evidence of any potential war crime.” Also, Ahmed Ghappour, Nym Attorney General and Associate Professor of Law at Boston University, told Cointelegraph that it is becoming critical for witnesses to human rights abuses to come forward without fear of retaliation. He said:

“In Ukraine, where witnesses to war crimes face a technologically sophisticated adversary, network-level anonymity is the only way to guarantee the safety and security needed to obtain evidence to prosecute perpetrators.”

A work in progress

Although the potential behind AnonDrop is obvious, Klara Brekke noted that the solution is still in an early stage of development. “We participated in the Kyiv Tech Summit Hackathon this year hoping to find people who could help us expand AnonDrop’s functionality. For example, AnonDrop’s user interface isn’t quite up yet, and we still need to find a way to verify the authenticity of images that are uploaded to the network,” she explained.

Ghappour elaborated that verification is the next critical requirement to ensure evidence uploaded to the Nym network can be used in court. “I think one of Russia’s greatest strengths in this war is the region’s ability to deny that any evidence is valid. Russia’s use of deepfakes and misinformation is another strength. We must protect ourselves against these attacks.”

Ghappour mentioned that to combat this, image provisioning features need to be implemented in AnonDrop to enable easy verification when documents are examined in a court of law. Although such image verification processes currently exist through tools such as SecureDrop – a solution that allows individuals to upload images anonymously for the media to use – Ghappour believes these are limited to siled organisations.

“We want to take photo verification a step further by democratizing the process, ensuring that this feature is available to users rather than just media.”

Once video surveillance is implemented, it may become easier for court officials to confirm war crimes. Brittany Kaiser, a legal expert on human rights, told Cointelegraph that she believes such a tool could help advance the field of human rights documentation, where individuals often feel too vulnerable to submit findings themselves.

“Only through images is it possible to verify typical indicators of atrocity crimes, including but not limited to mass graves, torture marks, hand-binding, executions and other violations of international human rights law that constitute war crimes or other atrocity classifications,” she noted.

Given the potential for this use case, it should come as no surprise that AnonDrop is not the only blockchain application focused on the preservation and verification of war crimes. Starling Labs—a Stanford-based research lab focused on data integrity using cryptography and decentralized web protocols—also uses blockchain technology to report war crimes. However, verifying the integrity of data remains the biggest challenge for both Nym and Starling Labs, even with imaging provisioning in place.

For example, Scott pointed out that progress needs to be made to ensure that the images are legitimate and that verification works well. He further noted that access to the Internet in different regions of Ukraine is censored: “There are distributional issues that are important to consider here.”

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Challenges aside, it is noteworthy that organizations responsible for prosecuting war crimes are considering using technology to advance traditional processes. For example, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague noted in its strategic plan for 2016 to 2018 that it could “support the identification, collection and presentation of evidence through technology.”

The report further noted that the ICC is interested in developing partnerships with non-governmental organizations and academic institutions to facilitate the use of technological advances for the documentation of war crimes. Meanwhile, Ghappour stressed that Nym will continue to push forward with enabling AnonDrop to be used in regions such as Ukraine: “Russia has prolonged wars in the past, so we have to move forward with this project anyway.”