How Amnesty International built Smokescreen to track gruesome killings in Iraq
On May 21 Sam Dubberley presented Smokescreen to Hacks/Hackers London. A six-month-long investigation into how smoke grenades were used by Iraqi security forces to kill and maim protesters in Baghdad last October.
In his talk, he detailed the challenges of building the platform.
Sam Dubberley is a human rights researcher, journalist and writer. He leads the Citizen Evidence Lab, a group of technologists and investigators that use open-source research as part of the Amnesty International Crisis Response Team.
Read on for a summary of his talk below or watch the full talk on our YouTube channel and at the end of this post.
Behind Smokescreen
Smokescreen is a 3D reconstruction of events produced by Amnesty International and NYC-based architecture research group SITU. The platform uses a mixture of eyewitness video, mapping, ballistic analysis and scrollytelling to show how protesters were targeted in a corridor between Baghdad’s Tahrir Square and the Jumhuriya Bridge.
The Crisis Response Team decided to investigate the events after videos showing gruesome deaths emerged, and reports indicated that security forces deployed some particularly heavy grenade canisters.
Amnesty’s analysis shows that the grenades used weighed 250 grams each –ten times heavier than the ones previously used by police. In collaboration with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, they discovered that the weapons used were Serbian-manufactured M99 grenades, M651 tear gas grenades and M713 smoke grenades created by Iranian defence manufacturers. “We needed to show something more, there was a pattern from the Iraqi security force and they were deliberately using heavy grenades to kill,” Sam said.
Challenges
The Amnesty Crisis Response Team and SITU faced theoretical and practical challenges while building Smokescreen.
“We wanted to understand the use of the weapons in relation to the urban space in which they were being deployed”
The most important issue was how to address the potentially traumatic impact of showing the videos from Baghdad to an audience, without causing vicarious trauma. This is an issue Sam is very aware of, having written several studies about how such imagery can affect journalists and human rights researchers — a reading list is included at the end of this article.
The solution they found was to use gel modelling: ballistic gelatin reproduces the effect of bullets penetrating muscles without the need of showing stronger images that would scare the audience away.
The other main challenge was more practical in nature. The team wanted to convey the action in the context of the long corridor from Jumhuriya Bridge down to Tahrir Square and create a smooth scroll-based experience.
“We started with 30cm high-resolution satellite imagery from the dates around the protests and used that as a foundational map to build the whole area” Sam explained. The satellite imagery allowed the team to identify the main landmarks in the area, to work out the positioning of the security forces barricades, and also understand where the protesters were coming from.
After collecting nearly 70 videos the team mapped them using Blender, an open-source 3D computer graphics software tool. Motion tracking techniques were used to compute the motional micromovements of the videographers. “Then we built those in the software platforms to actually situate each of the videos within the model and to move the model around the video as we were building the platforms,” Sam said.
The final result is a site that resembles a digital flipbook: “We took each video and turned it into a sequence of discrete images which would allow a granular analysis”. This technique is new for Amnesty and SITU and lets the reader engage with the story in a more interactive way. More importantly, the analysis clearly showcases the researchers’ findings: how the deliberate use of these grenades by security forces and the low angle of fire caused a lethal outcome.
Read more about the story
Amnesty International Evidence Lab
- SMOKESCREEN: Behind the scenes of our visual investigation into Iraq’s lethal use of tear gas grenades
- Iraq: Iranian tear gas grenades among those causing gruesome protester deaths
- TEAR GAS: AN INVESTIGATION. What it is, how it is abused and why you should care
Readings on vicarious trauma
- Journalism and Vicarious Trauma- A Guide for Journalists, Editors
and News Organisations - Digital Witness:Using Open Source Information for Human Rights Investigation, Documentation, and Accountability
- The hidden victims of repression — how activists and reporters can protect themselves from secondary trauma
Want to join Hacks/Hackers London? Check our website or subscribe to our newsletter for future events and info about our guest speakers. You can also watch the talks from previous meetups on our YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
