Filecoin Filecoin - Use Cases, 17 Dec 2020

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From YouTube: Starling Case Study - The Testimony of Genocide

Description

The USC Shoah Foundation deploys the Starling Framework to protect the testimony of over 55,000 survivors of genocide.

For our case study, we developed a decentralized storage app to protect the Foundation's Visual History Archive and a capture app to secure document testimony of a Holocaust survivor in Los Angeles and Kurdish refugees in Iraq.

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The Starling Framework for Data Integrity is a joint project between the USC Shoah Foundation and Stanford University’s Department of Electrical Engineering.

A

So in the beginning people were, you know they didn't ticket seriously.

B

My father came along what is your profession saddle maker to survive, so it was no rhyme and reason of this election. I was always with one foot forward. I wanted to go home home.

C

After the war, I learned how important a human being is sooner or later is necessary. It can't be enforced, it can't be obligated, but it's necessary toward healing a lot of survivors. When we talk about it's not easy to find the words to describe what happened. This is the most important thing we should talk.

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To each other, my mantra is talk to each other.

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Testimony bridges, the divide between historical documentation and personal experience once you have seen the inside of that cattle wagon or understood what it means to get through that roadblock in rwanda from those who experienced it, you will see that history in a completely different way from then once.

B

A

Time they seized power, we thought it was finished, but it was just the beginning of the.

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Nightmare, what's engaged in the testimony of those who went through mass atrocity is their story of survival and resilience and tenacity and hope and resistance.

E

I see the witnesses in the archive of the show foundation as sort of mentors guides to the darkest places of humanity.

A

Always wonder what will have happened if something like this happened in the united states? Do you think it could well it could, but what will be the reaction of the people.

E

If there is a warning from these testimonies, it is that genocide can happen anywhere, and I mean.

E

E

The usc showa foundation is an archive of over 55 000 testimonies of witnesses to genocide from around the world over the last century.

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The mission of the show foundation is to develop empathy, understanding and respect through testimony when stephen spielberg founded the usc show foundation, he described a race against time to enable the taking of the testimony of holocaust survivors.

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Now we have over nine genocides in the archive reaching back to the beginning of the 20th century until you know the current day and we use the tools and skills that we have as historians to collect the stories of those who are at risk.

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In a time of manipulated speech and fake news and deep fakes, what we wanted to do was say we know for certain that this testimony was given at this place and then this time by this person- and this is their testament- we can send a flare up long before people are murdered and we want to use the skills at our disposal and this new framework styling to enable us to do that.

F

At the showa foundation, the importance of our mission pushes us to the edge of technology. We constantly have to innovate. The question for us is, as we collect testimony and it becomes digitized. What do we need to do to preserve those digital files moving forward today? What we do is we have large data centers that we keep both at the showa foundation in other locations around the world. To preserve the interviews, geographical diversification is important. However, what you also want to have is organizational diversification. In case one organization starts to have trouble.

F

We created the starling framework with stanford to figure out new ways to diversify storage and specifically to explore how the internet could help us do that.

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We asked ourselves what if we took the showa foundation's key archive and created another backup to it, one that was decentralized, allowing millions of people to be able to store pieces just on their mobile phones. How could everyone help ensure that none of these records were lost to time using cutting edge protocols from ipfs and filecoin? We worked with small data industries and post light studios to create a suite of tools that could make copies of the testimonies from the show foundation's archive and then put them securely on the decentralized web.

G

We orchestrated an array of devices from mobile phones to powerful servers in the cloud and even the internet archive all of them came together to protect the testimonies.

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The lesson we learned is that decentralization doesn't just mean more copies. It means more engagement of people, because the more people that become aware and then contribute their compute to this effort. The file seal becomes more secure and our historical records can become more resilient.

G

We then realized that we were using the phone for storage, but we could also use its camera so for the collection of new testimonies we built with htc and an amazing team in taipei called numbers, a prototype that allowed us to start our chain of custody right at the point of capture immediately as a new testimony is taken, we can seal the image and then lock in all the phone's sensor, information such as gps to basically prove that this image was taken in this exact time, and this exact place working with the foundation's engineers and researchers, we moved to test our new end-to-end technologies in the field we began with a holocaust survivor in her late 80s, giving a last chance testimony of her childhood.

G

She narrowly escaped the concentration camps through the intervention of swedish diplomats. Now, with our tech, she was able to seal testimony of her bravery and the memory of the heroes who saved her life.

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At the same time, we equipped the show foundations team in iraq and deployed them to document the plight of kurdish refugees, who today are facing a dire pre-genocidal situation.

G

These initial deployments inspired us to quickly expand our pilot program to explore how we could equip journalists like those at reuters who put their lives on the line to expose genocide and even war crimes, investigators who can hold people accountable for genocide.

G

These case studies provided innumerable lessons and solidified a powerful new technology framework to expand our network for years to come.

F

I've been part of watching a lot of technologies unfold over time and, what's exciting about the starling framework. Is that it's giving us an opportunity to build an archive directly on top of the internet? There's no one organization that actually owns it. It's distributed and that's powerful.

E

Preserving history is not the domain of one individual entity or organization; we all have a responsibility. What styling framework does is brings together a formidable group of people who care about authenticity.

E

What this changes is that now video becomes an historical document, because you can verify precisely where and when and how and whom. That document relates to. This actually changes the game for how we document history.

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