Sam Gregory on WITNESS’ new strategic vision to ‘Fortify the Truth’

If Sam’s name sounds familiar – it should! He has dedicated over two decades to WITNESS, most recently directing our programs and strategy. In that capacity, Sam has supported WITNESS’ global teams and partners in more than 100 countries addressing urgent issues such as land rights, state violence, and war crimes – as well as spearheading our pioneering work on emerging technologies such as deepfakes and AI. Sam brings both the history and an ambitious vision for the future of WITNESS. You can read his full bio here.

Sam steps into this role at an exceptional moment for those concerned with information technology and human rights. This era of omnipresent video, growing misinformation, synthetic media, and declining trust in a shared reality presents a serious threat to the idea of truth itself. Sam has led a global effort to ‘prepare, not panic’ for the new digital landscape, fighting for preservation of truth, trust in critical voices, and media integrity efforts. He is also a fierce advocate for centering the voices of those most removed from decision-making centers yet most profoundly impacted by the proliferation of new technologies.

WITNESS started out democratizing access to cameras, quite literally putting the power of video in the hands of activists around the globe. Today, we take that mission forward, fighting to ensure that global human rights defenders not only have access to skills and emerging tools, but are the deciders on how new tactics are used ethically and with impact, and are central voices on the development of new technologies that will hurt or could help them. -Sam Gregory

Sam’s appointment concludes an extensive global search led by a search committee, assisted by an international recruitment firm, and informed by wide-ranging input from our global staff and stakeholders. We believe Sam brings the expertise, vision, and leadership required by this moment of transition for WITNESS. Sam’s track-record and commitment to fostering a participatory culture and systematic listening also creates an invaluable opportunity for WITNESS to strengthen its DEIJ commitments across the organization.

We would also like to extend our enormous gratitude to our outgoing Executive Director, Yvette Alberdingk-Thijm, for her exceptional leadership over the past 15 years, shaping WITNESS into the global human rights organization it is today. 

Thank you for stepping up, Sam!

With Pride and Gratitude,

The WITNESS Board
Monica Aleman and Polly Fields, co-chairs

Ms. Cai has over a decade of experience working with and leading teams responsible for creating and maintaining policies that define acceptable behavior and content in online communities and platforms. As a trust and safety expert, Ms. Cai helps tech companies think about how to develop effective content moderation while also supporting employee well-being, and educating the public about why such practices are valuable to a healthy internet. 

Ms. Diniz is an award-winning academic, filmmaker, and activist who has expertise in using video and research for evidence-based advocacy, policy change, and strategic litigation for human rights. She is internationally recognized for her longstanding commitment to reproductive rights and health and efforts to combat violence against women and girls in Latin America and the Caribbean. She is an active presence on social media platforms where she engages in dialog with thousands of followers and community members. In 2020, Ms. Diniz won the prestigious Dan David prize, a lifetime achievement recognition for her contributions to gender justice.

Ms. Owono is the executive director of Internet Sans Frontieres, an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and an inaugural member of the Meta Oversight Board. She founded the Content Policy and Society Lab at Stanford University, which prototyped a novel approach to multi stakeholder collaborations on major content policy challenges. With expertise leading academic and non-governmental organizations, she regularly convenes representatives from companies, governments, civil society, with content moderators and researchers to exchange ideas and collaborate on the creation of rights-based policies and regulations to support a truly global internet. She recently published an analysis of Content Governance in the Metaverse. 

“We welcome Adelin’s and Julie’s deep, global experience and practical expertise on how to make the internet a more equitable space for participation and free expression,” said WITNESS Executive Director, Yvette Alberdingk Thijm. “Debora’s knowledge on gender equality and her leadership in video advocacy as a tool to realize rights will bring essential insights to our global team. As members of our Board of Directors, we look forward to drawing on their valuable guidance as we embark on our new “Fortifying the Truth” Strategic Vision, continuing to support the most vulnerable and marginalized communities turning to video and technology to create human rights change.”

Read more about Adelin Cai here, Debora Diniz here, and about Julie Owono here.

And read more about our full Board of Directors here. 

WITNESS partnered with Memorial in the mid 2000s to co-produce advocacy videos about forced disappearances, extra-judicial killings, and torture committed by the Russian military during the Chechen wars. The videos, “Missing Lives: Disappearances and Impunity in the North Caucasus” and “Crying Sun: The Impact of War in the Mountain of Chechnya,” centered the voices of communities directly impacted by so-called “counter terrorism operations,” and called for accountability.  

Based on our experience with Memorial and many other groups over the past 30 years, we know that frontline witnesses are navigating immense risks as they capture and share video documentation of potential human rights violations and war crimes. 

Building on learnings from these collaborative experiences, we evolved our training model to provide resources and best practices to millions of people. For example, shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine earlier this year, we tailored and began distributing resources for witnessing war in multiple languages. And we continue to support documentation efforts during the protracted conflict. 

Memorial’s decades-long efforts to document abuses by the government against its people led to it being disbanded by the Putin regime last year. But its legacy lives on. And the voices of its leaders, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov and Natalia Estemirova, head of Memorial’s Chechnya office who was murdered in 2009, will not be silenced. 

We thank Memorial for its lasting contribution to the global movement championing video for human rights. 

Content moderation is a major focus area of our Tech Advocacy program. The policies often adversely affect human rights content as our Program Manager for Tech Advocacy, Dia Kayyali has written about.

On Tuesday, February 5, 2019, Dia will speak at the “Content Moderation & Removal at Scale” conference being held at European Parliament in Brussels. The conference will explore how Internet companies develop and implement internal rules and policies in the area of content moderation. What are the challenges they currently face to moderate or remove illegal and controversial content, including hate speech, terrorist content, disinformation, and copyright infringing material? And how could or should future European regulations affect these practices?

Dia will be sharing a response to the panel “Illegal content: terrorist content and hate speech.” Dia recently spearheaded an effort by WITNESS to bring together 26 human rights defenders, journalists, archivists, digital rights organizations, and alternative media to tell members of the European Parliament that a proposed regulation to erase extremist content online will erase human rights too. Read the open letter here.

The conference is open to the public. If you are in Brussels, you can register here.  It will be recorded and live-streamed and you can follow the conversation on social media with  #COMOatScale.

Photo credit: © European Union 2014 – European Parliament (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons license). 

The proposal is a serious threat to online free expression in Europe and freedom of expression globally. It is likely to inspire dangerous copycat laws and encourages increased use of opaque machine-learning algorithms to remove content—including content created by human rights defenders, alternative media, and journalists.

Leaving it up to algorithms to detect “extremist content” will create innumerable false positives and damage human rights content that is critical to ensuring accountability for perpetrators; content for which activists and journalists often risk their lives.

The ideas and concerns expressed in this letter are based on the real-world experiences of WITNESS, our partners, and the 25 other signatories. We are honored to bring together the diverse voices on this letter in defense of online freedom of expression and, specifically, the protection of human rights content.

Read more about this consortium, our opposition to the Regulation on Dissemination of Terrorist Content Online, and the full letter to the European Parliament on our blog.

However, ahead of this year’s formal declaration of his commitments, The Guardian asked technology experts, policymakers, and activists two questions:

• What do you predict Mark Zuckerberg’s 2019 personal challenge will be?
• What do you think Mark Zuckerberg’s 2019 personal challenge should be?

WITNESS’ Tech Advocacy Program Manager, Dia Kayyali, was one of the experts asked to predict and advise. Here’s what they had to say:

Will be: Some other, similarly broad, challenge that relates to making Facebook a force for good in the world.

Should be: Take personal responsibility for turning Facebook around as a company. That means publicly committing to creating an ethical and principled company that respects civil society, and ensuring that at every level Facebook makes decisions based on human rights instead of market forces. It means personally committing to a Facebook that doesn’t accidentally make decisions that aid violent regimes, white supremacists and other bad actors. Above all, it means simply being honest about Facebook’s largely detrimental role in global society. That would be the biggest challenge of all.

Shortly after The Guardian ran this piece, Zuckerberg shared his 2019 personal challenge. Following another terrible year for Facebook, Zuckerberg pledged “….to host a series of public discussions about the future of technology in society — the opportunities, the challenges, the hopes, and the anxieties.”

Unfortunately, Dia’s prediction was pretty spot on.

Dia leads WITNESS’ Tech Advocacy program which engages technology companies and supports digital policies that help human rights advocates safely, effectively, and ethically use technology for good. The program includes direct, sustained advocacy to those in leadership positions at companies to ensure that anyone, anywhere can use the power of technology to protect and defend human rights.

This law makes records of police misconduct unavailable to the public. As highlighted in our Profiling the Police project, “The law now gives officers a blanket shield from public disclosure or accountability and unfairly puts the burden on the community to expose abuses and push for accountability.”

According to the letter sent to New York state lawmakers, “Full repeal of 50-a is the only way to guarantee an end to officially sanctioned secrecy for police misconduct and the systemic lack of discipline and accountability for misconduct. The public should have the right to know how police departments respond when officers engage in misconduct.”

The full letter is available here.

photo credit: Adrian Owen/Flickr

Our U.S. program team have been partnering with affected immigrant communities, advocacy groups and allies over the last year and a half. Through our Eyes on ICE program, we provide “know your rights” and video documentation trainings for how to safely and effectively capture details of encounters with ICE and Customs and Border Patrol. The program has provided crucial information and resistance to communities at a time when raids and arrests by the agencies are up significantly across the country.

Al Jazeera spent time with us during a series of trainings in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas earlier this fall and reported on our work with our partners the Equal Voice Network and communities there and throughout the United States.

From “The Listening Post”:

With the president’s ceaseless talking and tweeting about threats like a government shutdown if Democrats refuse to fund his border wall, or that migrant caravan from Honduras, stories about ICE and its sister agency, CBP – Customs and Border Protection – are right up there on the mainstream media’s agenda.

But the role the media play in this particular narrative goes well beyond just covering the story. Over the past year, NGOs and legal advocacy organisations have collaborated with media outlets to track cases of enforcement abuse. And they train communities to use their own media tools to document wrongdoing.

Cases like that of Perla Morales-Luna, Juan Hernandez, or Romulo Avelica Gonzalez are just three examples of thousands that surfaced because they were caught on camera, explains Palika Makam, programme coordinator, WITNESS.

“Eyewitness footage has been so crucial in exposing ICE’s manipulative tactics. Romulo Avelica-Gonzalez was arrested by two ICE agents who were in unmarked vehicles, wearing jackets that only said ‘police’. There’s a reason why they don’t identify themselves, they are trying to use manipulative tactics to get information from immigrants or people who they’ve racially profiled in order to arrest and deport them.”

Watch the full report here:

WITNESS stands by the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. As we said recently in a submission to the United Nations, “companies must make a commitment to adhere to international human rights standards, including freedom of expression, even when it affects their financial bottom line or requires them to affirmatively defend attacks on rights by States.” And, even when it means they cannot enter a new market. This is especially true in the case of international technology platforms like Google, which have an enormous impact on freedom of expression, privacy, and other human rights. Entering a market cannot be an excuse for participating in the violation of fundamental rights.

Today’s letter follows an August 28 letter from 14 organizations, including WITNESS, which called on Google to “[Disclose]what steps, if any, Google is taking to safeguard against human rights violations linked to Project Dragonfly and its other Chinese mobile app offerings” and “Guarantee protections for whistle-blowers and other employees speaking out where they see the company is failing its commitments to human rights.” The letter outlined concrete concerns with the project and how it would aid surveillance and censorship. It also builds on two open letters from Google employees calling on the company to drop Project Dragonfly.

Google’s October 26th response was lackluster. The company notes that it hasn’t committed to building a censored search engine, but it also doesn’t explain how the project could possibly comply with Google’s previous public statements about upholding human rights and freedom of expression.

Read the letter in full below:

OPEN LETTER: RESPONSE TO GOOGLE on PROJECT DRAGONFLY, China and Human Rights

To: Sundar Pichai, Chief Executive Officer, Google Inc

cc: Ben Gomes, Vice President of Search; Kent Walker, Senior Vice President of Global Affairs; Scott Beaumont, Vice President, Greater China & Korea

11 December 2018

Dear Mr Pichai,

We are writing to ask you to ensure that Google drops Project Dragonfly and any plans to launch a censored search app in China, and to re-affirm the company’s 2010 commitment that it won’t provide censored search services in the country.

We are disappointed that Google in its letter of 26 October[1] failed to address the serious concerns of human rights groups over Project Dragonfly. Instead of addressing the substantive issues set out in the August letter,[2] Google’s response – along with further details that have since emerged about Project Dragonfly – only heightens our fear that the company may knowingly compromise its commitments to human rights and freedom of expression, in exchange for access to the Chinese search market.

We stand with current and former Google employees speaking out over recent ethical scandals at the company, including Project Dragonfly. We wholeheartedly support the message from hundreds of Google employees asking Google to drop Dragonfly in their open letter of 27 November, and commend their bravery in speaking out publicly. We echo their statement that their “opposition to Dragonfly is not about China: we object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be.” [3]

New details leaked to the media strongly suggest that if Google launches such a product it would facilitate repressive state censorship, surveillance, and other violations affecting nearly a billion people in China. Media reports state that Google has built a prototype that censors “blacklisted” search terms including “human rights”, “student protest” and “Nobel Prize”, including in journalistic content, and links users’ search queries to personal phone numbers.[4] The app would also force users to sign in to use the service, track and store location information and search histories, and provide “unilateral access” to such data to an unnamed Chinese joint venture company, in line with China’s data localization law – allowing the government virtually unfettered access to this information.[5]

Facilitating Chinese authorities’ access to personal data, as described in media reports, would be particularly reckless. If such features were launched, there is a real risk that Google would directly assist the Chinese government in arresting or imprisoning people simply for expressing their views online, making the company complicit in human rights violations. This risk was identified by Google’s own security and privacy review team, according to former and current Google employees. Despite attempts to minimize internal scrutiny, a team tasked with assessing Dragonfly concluded that Google “would be expected to function in China as part of the ruling Communist Party’s authoritarian system of policing and surveillance,” according to a media report.[6]

Actively aiding China’s censorship and surveillance regime is likely to set a terrible precedent for human rights and press freedoms worldwide. A recent Freedom House report warned that the Chinese government is actively promoting its model of pervasive digital censorship and surveillance around the world.[7] Many governments look to China’s example, and a major industry leader’s acquiescence to such demands will likely cause many other regimes to follow China’s lead, provoking a race to the bottom in standards. It would also undermine efforts by Google and other companies to resist government surveillance requests in order to protect users’ privacy and security,[8] emboldening state intelligence and security agencies to demand greater access to user data.

Google’s letter makes several specific points that are directly contradicted by other sources. The letter states that it is “not close” to launching a search product in China, and that before doing so the company would consult with key stakeholders. However, as reported by the media, comments made in July by Ben Gomes, Google’s Head of Search, suggested the product could be “six to nine months [to launch]” and stressed the importance of having a product ready to be “brought off the shelf and quickly deployed” so that “we don’t miss that window if it ever comes.”[9]

The letter also states that Google worked on Dragonfly simply to “explore” the possibility of re-entering the Chinese search market, and that it does not know whether it “would or could” launch such a product. Yet media reports based on an internal Google memo suggest that the project was in a “pretty advanced state” and that the company had invested extensive resources to its development.[10]

Google’s decision to design and build Dragonfly in the first place is troubling. Google’s own AI Principles commit the company not to “design or deploy” (emphasis added) technologies whose purpose contravenes human rights. Given the company’s history in China and the assessment of its own security team, Google is well aware of the human rights implications of providing such an application. Moreover, Google’s letter fails to answer many questions about what steps, if any, the company is taking to safeguard human rights, including with respect to its current Chinese mobile app offerings, consistent with its commitments.

We urge Google to heed concerns from its own employees and from organizations and individuals across the political spectrum by abandoning Project Dragonfly and reaffirming its commitment not to provide censored search services in China. We also note that the letter makes no reference to whistle-blowers, and thus we urgently repeat our call to the company that it must publicly commit to protect the rights of whistle-blowers and other workers voicing rights concerns.

We welcome that Google has confirmed the company “takes seriously” its responsibility to respect human rights. However, the company has so far failed to explain how it reconciles that responsibility with the company’s decision to design a product purpose-built to undermine the rights to freedom of expression and privacy.

Signed, the following organizations:

Access Now

ActiveWatch – Media Monitoring Agency (MMA)

Adil Soz – International Foundation for Protection of Freedom of Speech

Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB)

Amnesty International

Article 19

Articulo 12 – Son Tus Datos

Association for Progressive Communications

Asociacion para una Ciudadania Participativa

Bolo Bhi

Briar Project

Bytes for All (B4A)

Cartoonists Rights Network, International (CRNI)

Center for Democracy & Technology

Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR)

Center for Independent Journalism (CIJ)

Child Rights International Network (CRIN)

Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)

Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF)

Foro de Periodismo Argentino (FOPEA)

Freedom of the Press Foundation

Freedom Forum

Fundación Datos Protegidos (Chile)

Fundacion Internet Bolivia

Globe International Center (GIC)

Hong Kong Journalists Association

Human Rights in China (HRIC)

Human Rights First

Human Rights Watch

Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC)

Independent Journalism Center (IJC)

Index on Censorship

Initiative for Freedom of Expression – Turkey

Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR)

International Campaign for Tibet

International Service for Human Rights (ISHR)

International Tibet Network Secretariat

Internet Sans Frontières

Latin American Observatory of Regulation, Media and Convergence – OBSERVACOM

Media Rights Agenda (MRA)

Mediacentar Sarajevo

NetBlocks

Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD)

New America’s Open Technology Institute

Norwegian PEN

OpenMedia

Pacific Island News Association

Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA)

PEN International

PEN America

Privacy International

Reporters Without Borders (RSF)

Software Freedom Law Center, India (SFLC.in)

South East Europe Media Organisation (SEEMO)

Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA)

Students for a Free Tibet

Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM)

Tibet Action Institute

Việt Tân

WITNESS

World Uyghur Congress

Signed in individual capacity (affiliations for identification purposes only):

Chinmayi Arun

Assistant Professor, National Law University Delhi

Arturo J. Carrillo

Clinical Professor of Law, The George Washington University Law School

Richard Danbury

Associate Professor, Journalism, De Montfort University Leicester

Ronald Deibert

Professor of Political Science and Director of the Citizen Lab, University of Toronto

Molly K. Land

Professor of Law and Human Rights, University of Connecticut School of Law                                                                                  

Rebecca MacKinnon

Director, Ranking Digital Rights                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Deirdre K. Mulligan

Associate Professor, School of Information and Faculty Director, Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, University of California, Berkeley

Paloma Muñoz Quick

Director, Investor Alliance for Human Rights (IAHR)                                                                                                                 

Edward Snowden

President, Freedom of the Press Foundation

Lokman Tsui

Assistant Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

——

[1] Letter from Kent Walker, Senior Vice President for Global Affairs at Google, responding to concerns of multiple human rights organizations and individuals, 26 October 2018, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/ASA17/9552/2018/en/

[2] Letter to Sundar Pichai from multiple human rights organizations and individuals, 28 August 2018, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4792329-Google-Dragonfly-Open-Letter.html

[3] Google employees, ‘We are Google employees. Google must drop Dragonfly’, 27 September 2018, https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-employees-google-must-drop-dragonfly-4c8a30c5e5eb

[4] Ryan Gallagher, ‘Google China Prototype Links Searches to Phone Numbers’, The Intercept, 14 September 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/09/14/google-china-prototype-links-searches-to-phone-numbers/ ;  Jack Poulson, Letter to Senate Commerce Committee, 24 September 2018, https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/328-jack-poulson-dragonfly/87933ffa89dfa78d9007/optimized/full.pdf

[5] Ryan Gallagher and Lee Fang, ‘Google Suppresses Memo Revealing Plans To Closely Track Search Users In China’, The Intercept, 21 September 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/09/21/google-suppresses-memo-revealing-plans-to-closely-track-search-users-in-china/

[6] Ryan Gallagher, ‘Google Shut Out Privacy and Security Teams from Secret China Project’, The Intercept, 29 November 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/11/29/google-china-censored-search/

[7] Freedom House, ‘Freedom on the Net 2018: The Rise of Digital Authoritarianism’, October 2018, https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/freedom-net-2018/rise-digital-authoritarianism

[8] Reform Government Surveillance Coalition

[9] Ryan Gallagher, ‘Leaked Transcript Of Private Meeting Contradicts Google’s Official Story On China’, The Intercept, 9 October 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/10/09/google-china-censored-search-engine/

[10] Ryan Gallagher and Lee Fang, ‘Google Suppresses Memo Revealing Plans to Closely Track Search Users in China’, The Intercept, 21 September 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/09/21/google-suppresses-memo-revealing-plans-to-closely-track-search-users-in-china/

We are aware of the recent sexual harassment allegations against Stalin K. Padma, the co-founder and director of Video Volunteers. Effective immediately, and pursuant to our policies, WITNESS will not be working with or associated with Stalin K. Padma in any manner, pending a full investigation into these allegations.

We took note of Video Volunteers’ recent announcement that Stalin K. Padma “has been removed from his role as director and will have no day-to-day contact with the organization.” As a human rights organization that fights for human dignity and security, we strongly recommend that Video Volunteers ensure that an independent, full investigation is conducted into any allegations.