Holding War Criminals Accountable with the Ethereum Blockchain
Hala Systems’ Sentry Early Warning System is using blockchain to secure immutable evidence in the ongoing Syrian Civil War
Since March of 2011, the Syrian Civil War has claimed the lives of over 500,000 innocent civilians, including 20,000 children and 13,000 women. The U.N. estimates that 3 million more lives will be at risk if Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, continues the air campaign against his people. Particularly troubling are the potentially devastating effects such a campaign would have against the Syrian province of Idlib, where it is estimated there are 1.5 million civilians displaced from other parts of Syria.
While the ultimate prevention of such attacks is a long ongoing process that has produced mixed results, new technology promises more effective emergency response to attacks and reduction of airstrike lethality in high-conflict areas of the country. By leveraging the Ethereum blockchain, early threat detection and reporting group Hala Systems is introducing a program that will prove the immutability of data collected from the ground in violent places, thereby providing a critically important tool for accountability and justice efforts. Such efforts help prevent or mitigate tomorrow’s violent conflicts.
Early Warnings for Airstrikes
John Jaeger and Dave Levin, two Americans who had previously worked in government and finance respectively, have developed an airstrike early warning system for the people living in areas of Syria targeted by indiscriminate violence. The system is called Sentry and is the main product of Hala Systems. By leveraging the Ethereum network, Sentry is able to prove that credible data has not been changed, edited, or tampered with in any way from the time and point of collection through now.
For the past three years, Sentry has helped protect the lives of civilians, reducing airstrike lethality in areas under heavy bombardment by up to 27%. Furthermore, the data they collect can be used by accountability-focused organizations such as the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner and the International Criminal Court.
Using Sentry, Hala is able to gather real-time reporting on threats against civilians by observing information throughout the lifecycle of a threat and/or attack. Using a combination of civilian observations and social media reporting, IoT sensors, and location, time, and environmental metadata collected by these sources, Hala is able to create a warning in advance of danger to civilian communities. These warnings are useful both to the civilians themselves and to accountability experts who seek to ensure international humanitarian law is enforced.
The accountability use case is not without issue, however. One of the biggest challenges Hala has faced is its status as a “private enterprise,” meaning it technically owns the data generated by Sentry. As such, it can be argued that any reports or data presented to justice or accountability organizations run the risk of being tampered with or mishandled by Hala simply because they own or at one point owned the data in question. That’s where immutable blockchain technology comes in.
Increasing Confidence with Ethereum
By leveraging the Ethereum network, Hala is able to effectively remove itself from the core of the Sentry reporting equation. When a report is submitted, instead of simply being sent directly to Hala, the timestamp and geotag of when and where the threat was detected is hashed to the Ethereum blockchain where it lives forever. On chain, it can be referenced but not tampered with.
Here’s how Sentry works:
- Observation is Made: user or machine observes an event of interest
- Report is Created: user or machine creates a timestamped and geotagged report for submission
- Report is Hashed to Blockchain: the timestamp and geotag are sent to the Ethereum blockchain where they exist immutably and accessible forever
- Report is Transmitted: report is submitted by app or sensor and transmitted to Hala server
- Report is Processed: collected data is processed further by Hala team
By placing this metadata on-chain, Hala can avoid common issues with data collection in high-risk areas. If the IoT ground sensors malfunction or falsely detect a non-threat event, there will be no corroborating open-source data such as social media posts or media reporting to reference. If there is no internet availability at the time of reporting, a ‘reported time’ data point is submitted as the timestamp. Hashing all of the human and machine-sourced data allows for easy organization and identification of threats and attacks by creating a publicly-accessible reference point of time and location. When analyzed, an ‘insight’ is made based on certain parameters and conditions that indicate a credible imminent threat or executed attack. These warnings are then issued to at-risk communities who can use the information to remove themselves from harm’s way.
Using the Ethereum blockchain, Sentry can both provide a fast and reliable threat warning system for civilians in high-risk areas as well as compile necessary data that can be used in justice and accountability proceedings. Although the truth or relevance of any data collected can still be disputed, the immutability and permanence of the data cannot.
Data collection on the conflict in Syria has been an ongoing process for the past eight years. It has and continues to be used to save thousands of lives by providing civilians with actionable information and warnings to protect themselves from imminent threats. Incorporating Ethereum may one day transform these data and reports into admissible evidence for legal proceedings in International Criminal Courts and U.N. action. Improving confidence in data reporting and removing any potential for tampering bolsters data value and efficacy where it matters most — reducing the lethality of war and holding war criminals accountable for their actions.
Learn more about Hala Systems and their revolutionary humanitarian efforts here. This article was written by Nathan Beer.
Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author above do not necessarily represent the views of Consensys AG. ConsenSys is a decentralized community with ConsenSys Media being a platform for members to freely express their diverse ideas and perspectives. To learn more about ConsenSys and Ethereum, please visit our website.
