Today On the Move, Begüm Başdaş talked with Sam Dubberley, the managing director of the Digital Investigations Lab in the Technology and Human Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. From videos of rights violations to satellite images, to eyewitness accounts disseminated on social media, human rights investigators have access to more data today than ever before. Thus, the ability to make use of this digital content has become a critical skill for human rights researchers and advocates. Sam Dubberley explains the tools of open-source investigations and how new technologies have an impact on human rights reporting and documentation. Dubberley also underlined the significance of the right to privacy, that human rights organisations when doing open-source investigations must think through human rights law and should not breach human rights themselves.
Sam Dubberley is the managing director of the Digital Investigations Lab in the Technology and Human Rights Division at HRW. Prior to joining HRW, Sam was the head of the Evidence Lab at Amnesty International where he conducted and led on a wide range of open source research for Amnesty International. He is a fellow of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex, where he was a research consultant for their Human Rights Big Data and Technology Project. He has been a fellow of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Colombia University and was a founding partner of First Draft News – an organisation established in 2015 to combat harmful misinformation. Sam is also the co-editor of the book ‘Digital Witness: Using Open Source Information for Human Rights Investigation, Documentation, and Accountability’ published by Oxford University Press.
