Presented at
30C3 (2013),
Dec. 29, 2013, 5:30 p.m.
(30 minutes)
For over thirty years, human rights groups in Guatemala have carefully documented the killing and disappearance of many people in the early 1980s. There are tens of thousands of records in many databases, and over 80 million paper pages of police records available in the Archives of the National Police. Most of the prosecutions of the former military and police officials who committed the atrocities depends on eyewitnesses, specific documents, and forensic anthropologists' examination of exhumed bones. However, data analysis helps to see the big patterns in the violence.
This talk will explain how data analysis illuminated the selective patterns among mass killings in the prosecution for genocide of former de facto President General José Efraín Ríos Montt. The talk will also explain how looking at the communications metadata from over 20,000 randomly sampled paper memos helped illuminate command patterns in a disappearance case.
Presenters:
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Patrick
Patrick has spent more than twenty years conducting quantitative analysis for truth commissions, non-governmental organizations, domestic and international war crimes tribunals, and United Nations missions in El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, South Africa, Chad, Sri Lanka, East Timor, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Kosovo, Liberia, Perú, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Syria.
Patrick began working in the human rights field in El Salvador in 1991. From 1993 to 2003, he worked in several capacities in the Science and Human Rights Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where he began recruiting colleagues to build HRDAG. From 2003 to 2013 he continued to develop HRDAG from within Benetech, a nonprofit technology company in Silicon Valley. A great deal of his, and HRDAG’s, work has been to support truth and reconciliation commissions through database development and data analysis.
Patrick provided testimony in two cases at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the first in the trial of Slobodan Milošević, the former President of Serbia. He provided technical advice to the Special Court in Sierra Leone and the International Criminal Court. In 2013 he provided expert testimony in Guatemala’s Supreme Court in the trial of General José Efraín Ríos Montt, the de-facto president of Guatemala in 1982-1983. Gen. Ríos was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity; it was the first time ever that a former head of state was found guilty of genocide in his own country.
In April 2005, the Electronic Frontier Foundation awarded Patrick with their Pioneer Award. In June 2004, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) gave him the Eugene Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics, and in 2002, he received a Special Achievement Award from the Social Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association. He is a Fellow at the Human Rights Center at Berkeley Law of the University of California-Berkeley; a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Democracy and Conflict Resolution (IDCR) at the University of Essex; and a Research Fellow at Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Human Rights Science. He has been profiled by The New York Times Magazine, Wired, Foreign Policy, Salon.com, and the Christian Science Monitor, and he has been featured in a PBS film.
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