Human Rights Program Rescues Computer Data [crypto, distributed storage]
Major Variola (ret)
mv at cdc.gov
Tue Jun 3 02:55:04 PDT 2003
Human Rights Program Rescues Computer Data
On April 7, thieves broke into the offices of
Guatemala's human rights
ombudsman, in a town about 150 miles from
Guatemala City; several
hours later, the home of a human rights advocate
in the capital was also
burglarized.
The crimes, which were reported by the
Associated Press (AP) the next
day, did not surprise Gustavo Meono, director of
a group founded by
Nobel Peace Laureate Rigoberta Menchu. He told
the AP (New York
Times, 8 April 2003) that thieves often target
the offices and homes of
human rights activists. They "come for
information and take files and
computer hard drives."
What the thieves may not yet know,
however, is that AAAS's human rights
staff has devised a way of protecting the
data that have become so precious to
both sides in the effort to demonstrate
who did what to whom during the
country's civil war from 1960 to 1996.
Some of the information collected in the
stolen computers represented
science-based evidence for prosecuting
people accused of killings and torture,
rapes and kidnappings, according to Alvaro
Caballeros, an archivist at
the Association for the Advancement of the
Social Sciences in
Guatemala (AVANCSO).
"The need for AAAS's help was related to
security," Caballeros said.
"Our archives are very important to our work
collecting information and
interviews regarding what happened during the
war."
AAAS's data-protection project was carried out
with funding from The
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation,
which recently
provided $700,000 to allow the Association's
human rights program to
continue providing technical assistance and
quantitative analyses for
large-scale human rights data projects in
Africa, Asia, South America,
and Eastern Europe.
AAAS computer engineer Miguel Cruz flew to
Guatemala in
November, carrying a "giant black duffel bag,
full of tools and computer
networking equipmentcables, routers, hubs..."
His job was to set up a
system that would allow Guatemala's human rights
groups to encrypt the
information they generated and to have it
automatically copied onto
network servers managed from safe locations in
other countries.
"We determined that the only really safe place
to keep the data was out
of the country," Cruz said.
Word of his work spread among the human rights
organizations, and
volunteers began showing up to help Cruz install
the basic infrastructure
that was missing in most of the buildings.
"I initially trained about half a dozen people
in the basics of network
wiring, and they all pitched in, putting their
jobs on hold to work late into
the evening wielding crimpers, digital cable
testers, screwdrivers, and
hammers," Cruz recounted. "In an incidental way,
of course, the project
has provided some good old-fashioned direct
development assistance,
by providing hands-on learning about
cutting-edge technology. It wasn't
the goal, but it's a nice side-effect,
especially considering that all the
assistance actually made the project faster and
cheaper."
http://www.aaas.org/news/newsandnotes/inside96.shtml
More information about the cypherpunks-legacy
mailing list