As I mentioned in my 2025 reading roundup, I spent some time last year immersed in studying the international protocols which have been devised to collect, categorise, and preserve digital evidence of war crimes, and crimes against humanity, for use in future tribunals.

These are the standards which allow human rights defenders to ensure that the video of something horrible which somebody filmed on their phone – perhaps while they were just walking along, minding their own business – meets the standards needed for submission as legal evidence for the next Nurembergs, whilst being safely preserved long enough to make it there.

The result of this research, a final paper for one of my MSc courses, was the only essay I’ve ever written for which I needed to add a content warning, because rape is a weapon of war.

Although my research focused on Ukraine, I made the point that these protocols have been used in Syria, Sudan, and Yemen.

I now make the point that they also need to be used in America.

I am both tremendously relieved and simultaneously horrified to learn that others have been thinking the same thing, and to that end, you should read more about this at Tech Policy Press.

What are the protocols?

So once you’ve read that article:

here are some of the protocols and systems I looked at.

It’s important to stress that these protocols are not meant for individuals to parse and implement on their own. They are meant for organisations to use to create the structures needed to do this work. If that means your organisation, please set aside some time to take this seriously.

1. The Berkeley Protocol on digital and open source investigations
2. The Electronic Discovery Reference Model
3. Mnemonic, a Berlin-based NGO which does both archiving and training
4. Ukrainian War Archive for their organisational setup
5. Yale University Humanitarian Research Lab for a case study in what happens when the archiving organisation, itself, becomes a target

There is also an excellent reference work from Oxford University Press which I used extensively in my research and which is fairly affordable in ebook and paperback editions, whilst being offensively priced in the hardcover. You should buy it if you can.

And no, today is not the day I want to kick off a fight about the DRM, copyright, and pricing of what is essentially an emergency first aid manual. FFS, OUP, you can afford to let this one book go into open access.

Won’t somebody think of the children! aka the other thing to worry about

In the final essay I wrote, I had to call out my own bias (e.g. being ethnically 50% Ukrainian and therefore 100% perpetually pissed off) for why I did not write about equally important cases. But go me for making this point:

Although this paper focuses on Ukraine, the conflict in Syria presents the same scenarios for evidence and jurisprudence and is equally worthy of independent study. The OSINT collection and curation taking place in Ukraine has the same civil society parallels in Syria. Of note were the legal issues raised by the mass deletion of OSINT war crimes evidence which had been uploaded to YouTube on the grounds of violating that platform’s terms and conditions regarding graphic and violent imagery. (That, Gellhorn might suggest, was the very point of it.) In response, activists accused YouTube of siding with authoritarians, an issue which is now global in 2025. In that context, the Syrian activists’ concerns now stand as warnings of the ‘imperial boomerang’, where repressive techniques are tested on vulnerable and minority groups as practice for rollout on the wider populace.

(insert mental image of Hannah Arendt chainsmoking and glaring at you).

So you know what I’m going to say now about that:

At this particular pivot point in history, and by that I mean right now, you need to be very wary of people shouting a little too loud about “the children” seeing “violent content” on their “phones!”

Particularly if they are shouting that while wrapped in the flag, holding a cross.

And you need to ensure that “child safety” is not being used as an excuse to shut down public dissent, censor reportage, and delete evidence from the record.

Because these people would do that. They would absolutely do that.

They already have.