Time: How Ukraine Is Crowdsourcing Digital Evidence of War Crimes

Chatbot, created by Ukraine’s Digital Ministry and dubbed “e-Enemy,” is one of half a dozen digital tools the government has set up to crowdsource and corroborate evidence of alleged war crimes.

  • Since the start of the invasion, Ukrainian officials, lawyers and human-rights groups have scrambled to design new ways to catalogue and verify reams of video, photo and eyewitness accounts of criminal behavior by Russian forces.
  • Ukraine has adapted popular government apps to allow citizens to document damage to their homes, used facial-recognition software to identify Russian military officials in photos, and rolled out new tools to guide users through the process of geo-tagging and time-stamping their footage in hopes it may help authorities hold the perpetrators responsible.
  • The apps, chatbots and websites designed by Ukrainian officials categorize different kinds of war crimes and human-rights violations and all feed into one centralized database set up by the office of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General. These include the killing or injury of civilians by Russians; physical violence or imprisonment; denial of medical care; looting; and seizure of property by occupying forces.

Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, says the country’s collection and use of so-called “citizen evidence” is another way that Ukraine is reinventing modern warfare. “This war has been the most radical shift in warfare since WWII, at least in Europe. If you look at what happened in cyber war, we have changed the playbook basically overnight…I firmly believe that we will be able to change the way international justice is being administered as well in the aftermath of this war.”

Read more via Time

You can support our team and donate to TechUkraine here.
Ukrainian entrepreneurs donate to the military-1
Support Ukraine!
Come Back Alive is one of the largest charitable foundations that supports Ukrainian soldiers, founded by the IT specialist Vitaliy Deynega. The organization collected more than 210 million UAH (more than $7M) in 2014. According to Na chasi, the Patreon page Come Back Alive is in the top ten projects by the number of financial donations.

 

There are several other organizations to support:

  • Army SOS, which develops drones;
  • Everybody Can, an organization that supports internally displaced people;
  • Help on the Ministry of Defense website.
 
#StrongerTogether
#staywithukraine
Menu