Where on [Google] Earth?: Geolocating the arrests of political activists in the Democratic Republic of Congo
The constitutional mandate of the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo came to an end on December 16th 2016. No elections were scheduled and Joseph Kabila — the incumbent — showed no signs relinquishing the position he’d held since January 2001.
Anti-Kabila protests began in 2014. Amnesty International has frequently voiced concerned about arbitrary arrests and violence against those who have taken to the streets. Following protests in November of 2016, Sarah Jackson, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes, said: “this powder-keg of human rights grievances is likely to blow up in more violence unless concrete measures are taken to ease tensions and allow dissenters to freely express their frustrations over the delayed elections.” With social media sites being cut on December 18th, the day before Kabila’s mandate expired, many expected demonstrations, arrests and, possibly, violence. With restricted access to many places in-country, and many grassroots human rights organisations able to circumvent governmental internet restrictions through the use of tools such as Tor, Amnesty’s Digital Verification Corps set up a team to monitor and gather information through social media feeds.
The DVC — combining volunteers from the human rights centres at three universities; UC Berkeley, the University of Essex and the University of Pretoria — started to monitor feeds across a variety of social media platforms. Primarily, we used Tweetdeck and also have some access to Facebook’s Signal which helps monitor both Facebook and Instagram.
The police presence across the DRC’s major cities meant that most protests on the 19th were stopped before they even started, but through the day reports of demonstrations and arrests started to emerge.
On our monitoring of Facebook, the pictures above emerged that purported to show an arrest of activists in the city of Goma. They were posted to an open Facebook group entitled RDCNews24h/24. One of the first reflexes of any research monitoring an event like this should be to hunt for corroborating content on social media. With, according to research by Deloitte, around 6 million mobile internet users in the DRC as of November 2015, it’s not unreasonable to expect more pictures of arrests at protests leaking out onto the internet — despite the government ordering internet firms to block access to social media platforms.
And, indeed, this was the case. Colleagues at Human Rights Watch posted more pictures of this event — including the same image alongside others we hadn’t seen.
And journalists based in the DRC were also posting pictures of seemingly of the same event.
It’s important to understand that it’s highly probable that the people uploading these pictures were not the same people as those who actually pressed the button and took the photograph — and in such a tense, fast-moving situation, this is hard to check. But the fact that they were getting through the government-imposed firewall made them important for us to check.
First of all, the fact that many people were posting these images — including people from organisations we trust, such as Human Rights Watch — automatically lends to their credence. We conducted reverse image search, which showed that they had not previously appeared on the internet. We had a good feeling that they were what they said they were.
What particularly interested us, however, was exactly where on earth had these arrests taken place? The social media posts told us the arrests were in Goma. To find the exact place, we could use tools such as Google Street View — which shows us what buildings look like from a street level. However, Google Street View only exists in certain parts of the world — that doesn’t include Goma.
With a city as big as Goma, and no Street View, how can we narrow this down and find the location?
One way — and the way that worked in this example — is to use corroboration to verify some of the landmarks we see in the images. What does this mean? It means looking for any clues you can find in an image and using these to your advantage. Of course, here we’re lucky. We have a lot of content that can help us out.
If we study the four postings above, we can see a lot of identifying factors in the images. First of all, we see the same man in a light blue shirt across the images [green box highlight]. Secondly, we see the same military truck and personnel in three of the pictures [yellow box highlight]. Third, note the paving across the images [red box highlight]. This is very distinctive. This allows us to conclude that all the images are from the same location. This allows us then to bring in other unique identifiers into play. Notably, the red roof [orange box] and the Airtel sign on the building [blue box]. These three geographical identifiers (pavement, roof and Airtel sign) can help us a lot.
A first step here is to analyse the Airtel sign. Notably, the words underneath the Airtel sign, which state:
This gives us a lot to go on. Unfortunately, a search on a search engine brings up no images for this building and very little information about it.
One way we can try and find this is through using Facebook. Many people often post public pictures to groups or pages that could well help us.
A search for images of Airtel Kivu Goma in Facebook immediately brings up several images that help us.
Here, very quickly we can find two different images posted to Facebook several years before December 2016 that unlock the key to the location of the arrests. Note the paving which is the same as in the arrest photographs and note the Airtel sign. All the same. Also note the high perspective from which the image on the left was taken — indicating a bridge, and note, in both pictures, the distinctive cylindrical shape of the front of the Airtel building. All features that help us locate where the arrests took place.
The cylindrical shaped building is truly distinctive — even from a satellite image on Google Earth. A hunt around Goma is a lot easier when looking for such a distinctive landmark. It still took some time, but with a little patience, we were able to track down exactly where the arrests on December 19th took place.
Note the cylindrical shaped building [yellow], the paving on the road [orange] and the bridge [blue]. All these are found at geocode -1.679340, 29.228583.
Each piece of content brings its own verification challenges — and understanding what different tools you can use on which piece of content can be key to solving each of them.
