Witness.org Brings Truth of Human Rights Abuse to the Eyes of the World

A revolutionary web-based social networking project, Witness.org has created a platform for delivering evidentiary video documenting human rights abuses for the collective conscience of the online world. 'The Hub', as the video sharing platform is called, is designed to ensure that individuals who have documented potential human rights abuses, or who are able to give their testimony via video, can put their message before the eyes of the world.

Begun in 1992, after a number of prominent occasions made it clear that video evidence made it far more difficult to obscure brutal acts of state violence (namely Tiananmen Square, and in an American media phenomenon, the Rodney King tape), Witness was started as an organization whose mission was to find documentary evidence and make it available, in the interests of promoting human rights and righting injustices.

The Hub is now providing select human rights activists with pocket-sized digital video cameras, in hopes they can gather interviews from witnesses to human rights abuses around the world, and begin creating a video archive of testimony from those who know and those who can help to motivate change and spur public opinion abroad to take an interst in specific crises, like those in Darfur, Burma or the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Witness has helped to bring abourt awareness of abuses in Darfur, Chechnya, Burma, and many other places, as well as focusing on the plight of the most ignored victims of mass tragedy: internally displaced people (IDP), refugees who remain within the borders of a war-torn country with a totalitarian or ethnically repressive regime, or which is subject to a state of continual anarchy and bloodshed.

Hyper-convergence of Media & Services Necessitates New Paradigm for Securing Personal Data

The potential for broad-scope "electronic agents" —preprogrammed service aggregators and self-organizing databases with proactive marketing capability—, aiding in everyday information-related activities, will require a new security standard to prevent identity theft, which could become one of the gravest threats to economic performance and individual liberty.

Digital IDs will have to be maintained through unbreakable private information management systems, entirely parallel to and separate from the information actually sent, which will behave as a single identifying set of characteristics for a given internet user, when ID is called for.

Individuals will be able to use a complex array of mental-reference data, unique to personal knowledge, to block hackers' access to the actual management system itself, which will allow users to take instant corrective-protective action in case of hacked or apparently compromised online IDs.

The main purpose of this service would be to achieve security of personal data by securely matching real personal data with an official, singular digital ID, containing none of the real ID data. Thus, there would exist an impenetrable barrier (semantic separation) between sensitive personal ID data and the malicious intent of those who may seek to misuse it.