‘It’s like the wild west’: Data security in frontline aid

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A Q&A on how aid workers handle sensitive data by Irwin Loy: “The cyber-attack on the International Committee of the Red Cross, discovered in January, was the latest high-profile breach to connect the dots between humanitarian data risks and real-world harms. Personal information belonging to more than 515,000 people was exposed in what the ICRC said was a “highly sophisticated” hack using tools employed mainly by states or state-backed groups.

But there are countless other examples of how the reams of data collected from some of the world’s most vulnerable communities can be compromised, misused, and mishandled.

“The biggest frontier in the humanitarian sector is the weaponisation of humanitarian data,” said Olivia Williams, a former aid worker who now specialises in information security at Apache iX, a UK-based defence consultancy.

She recently completed research – including surveys and interviews with more than 180 aid workers from 28 countries – examining how data is handled, and what agencies and frontline staff say they do to protect it.

Sensitive data is often collected on personal devices, sent over hotel WiFi, scrawled on scraps of paper then photographed and sent to headquarters via WhatsApp, or simply emailed and widely shared with partner organisations, aid workers told her.

The organisational security and privacy policies meant to guide how data is stored and protected? Impractical, irrelevant, and often ignored, Williams said.

Some frontline staff are taking information security into their own hands, devising their own systems of coding, filing, and securing data. One respondent kept paper files locked in their bedroom.

Aid workers from dozens of major UN agencies, NGOs, Red Cross organisations, and civil society groups took part in the survey.

Williams’ findings echo her own misgivings about data security in her previous deployments to crisis zones from northern Iraq to Nepal and the Philippines. Aid workers are increasingly alarmed about how data is handled, she said, while their employers are largely “oblivious” to what actually happens on the ground.

Williams spoke to The New Humanitarian about the unspoken power imbalance in data collection, why there’s so much data, and what aid workers can do to better protect it….(More)”.

Eight reasons responsible data for and about children matters

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stefaan Verhulst and Andrew Young: “…The relationship between the datafication of everyday life and child welfare has generally been under-explored, both by researchers in data ethics and those who work to advance the rights of children. This neglect is a lost opportunity, and also poses a risk to children, who are in many ways at the forefront of the steady incursions of data into our lives. In what follows, over a series of two articles, we outline eight reasons why child welfare advocates should pay more attention to data, and why we need a framework for responsible data collection and use for children….(Part 1) and (Part2). (See also Responsible Data for Children).

Archivists Make Sure the Internet Doesn’t Forget Russia’s War on Ukraine

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Karl Bode at VICE: “As the Russian invasion of Ukraine accelerates, professional and hobbyist archivists alike are rushing to preserve Ukraine’s online history, cataloging and storing everything from Ukrainian government and university websites, to the torrent of news and social media posts related to the accelerating conflict.

The Internet Archive has been archiving the broader conflict in Ukraine since 2014. But as Ukraine government websites face prolonged outages due to sustained cyber attack—as well as the looming risk of defacement or deletion—the organization has taken on another monumental task: backing up the entirety of the Ukrainian Internet.

Using the crowdsourced auto-archiving software running on a virtual machine they’ve dubbed Archive Team Warrior, the organization has leveraged volunteers around the world, many of whom have donated countless terabytes of storage capacity for the project. These volunteers have been steadily backing up the Ukrainian Internet since before the war began.

All told, 68 million items (web pages, documents, and other files) comprising more than 2.5 TB of data have already been hoovered up from various websites across the .ua top level Ukrainian domain. A second project dubbed Ukr-net aims to preserve tens of millions of additional items and terabytes of additional data across the Ukrainian Internet.

Elsewhere, organizations like the Center For Information Resilience have built a crowdsourced map attempting to document every single war-related post to social media made in the region, ranging from civilian photos of the movement of heavy Russian weaponry, to Ukranian government claims of alleged bombing raids on kindergardens…(More)”.

Can Ukraine’s Experiments in Local Democracy Survive the Invasion?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joe Mathews at Zocolo: “As I write this, Russian troops reportedly are moving north through the Odesa oblast, or region, toward the river Kodyma, along which sits a town called Balta.

This is not new territory for Balta, which like much of Ukraine has been contested over centuries of wars. But in recent years, Balta has actually broken a lot of new ground, at least when it comes to the practice of citizen-centered democracy. In 2016, Balta adopted participatory budgeting, an innovative process—originated in Brazil—in which citizens rather than officials determine their local budget. Balta also gave its young people their own governing council and a decision-making process to influence local policies.

Democracy, in its essence, is everyday people governing themselves. Such self-government happens most often at the local level, which is why countries tend to get more democratic when they decentralize.

Since the 2014 Maidan revolution, Ukraine has been among the more rapidly decentralizing, and democratizing, countries on Earth….

In a politically divided Ukraine, this devolution of local power had support across the spectrum, for a couple reasons.

The first was positive and driven by economics. Putting more money and power in localities was seen as the best bet for addressing poverty and inequality, and developing Ukraine in a balanced way that would make it a better fit with the rest of Europe, which has strong local governments. Since the 2014 Maidan revolution, Ukraine has been among the more rapidly decentralizing, and democratizing, countries on Earth.

The second reason, however, was defensive: the threat of separatism. In a country the size of Texas, greater local control was seen as the best way to placate localities and regions that might think of leaving—especially Donetsk and Luhansk, two Russian-speaking Ukrainian oblasts where Russia would make incursions (and which Putin would declare “independent” as a pretext for his new invasion).

“The path of decentralization was an asymmetrical response to the aggressor,” said Andriy Parubiy, a former speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, in 2017. “The process of the formation of capable communities was a kind of sewing of the Ukrainian space.”

Many of these newly empowered Ukrainian local governments have seized the opportunity, and not just for economic development. Municipalities have embraced political reforms—adopting ethics codes, making their records and decision-making transparent, establishing citizen-directed processes like participatory budgeting, and adding new guarantees for representation and participation of women, men, and underrepresented groups in local politics.

Just this past December, two Ukrainian cities, Khmelnytskyi and Vinnytsia, finished first and third, respectively, in a global contest for innovation in government transparency. Mariupol, a city in the southeast reportedly under siege by the Russian military, has won international praise for its model of sharing governance power with local organizations….(More)”.

How climate data scarcity costs lives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paula Dupraz-Dobias at New Humanitarian: “Localised data can help governments project climate forecasts, prepare for disasters as early as possible, and create long-term policies for adapting to climate change.

Wealthier countries tend to have better access to new technology that allows for more accurate predictions, such as networks of temperature, wind, and atmospheric pressure sensors.

But roughly half the world’s countries do not have multi-hazard early warning systems, according to the UN’s World Meteorological Organization. Some 60 percent lack basic water information services designed to gather and analyse data on surface, ground, and atmospheric water, which could help reduce flooding and better manage water. Some 43 percent do not communicate or interact adequately with other countries to share potentially life-saving information.

The black holes in weather data around the globe

Availability of surface land observations (Map)WMO/ECMWFUS reports weather observations every three hours, as opposed to the every hour required by World Meteorological Organization regulations. It says it will comply with these from 2023.

See WIGOS’s full interactive map

“Right now, we can analyse weather; in other words, what happens today, tomorrow, and the day after,” said Ena Jaimes Espinoza, a weather expert at CENEPRED, Peru’s national centre for disaster monitoring, prevention, and risk reduction. “For climate data, where you need years of data, there is still a dearth [of information].”

Without this information, she said, it’s difficult to establish accurate trends in different areas of the country – trends that could help forecasters better predict conditions in Tarucani, for example, or help policymakers to plan responses.

Inadequate funding, poor data-sharing between countries, and conflict, at least in some parts of the world, contribute to the data shortfalls. Climate experts warn that some of the world’s most disaster-vulnerable countries risk being left behind as this information gap widens…(More)”.

How Tech Despair Can Set You Free

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Samuel Matlack: “One way to look at the twentieth century is to say that nations may rise and fall but technical progress remains forever. Its sun rises on the evil and on the good, and its rain falls on the just and on the unjust. Its sun can be brighter than a thousand suns, scorching our enemies, but, with some time and ingenuity, it can also power air conditioners and 5G. One needs to look on the bright side, living by faith and not by sight.

The century’s inquiring minds wished to know whether this faith in progress is meaningfully different from blindness. Ranking high among those minds was the French historian, sociologist, and lay theologian Jacques Ellul, and his answer was simple: No.

In America, Ellul became best known for his book The Technological Society. The book’s signature term was “technique,” an idea he developed throughout his vast body of writing. Technique is the social structure on which modern life is built. It is the consciousness that has come to govern all human affairs, suppressing questions of ultimate human purposes and meaning. Our society no longer asks why we should do anything. All that matters anymore, Ellul argued, is how to do it — to which the canned answer is always: More efficiently! Much as a modern machine can be said to run on its own, so does the technological society. Human control of it is an illusion, which means we are on a path to self-destruction — not because the social machine will necessarily kill us (although it might), but because we are fast becoming soulless creatures…(More)”.

The giant plan to track diversity in research journals

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Holly Else & Jeffrey M. Perkel: “In the next year, researchers should expect to face a sensitive set of questions whenever they send their papers to journals, and when they review or edit manuscripts. More than 50 publishers representing over 15,000 journals globally are preparing to ask scientists about their race or ethnicity — as well as their gender — in an initiative that’s part of a growing effort to analyse researcher diversity around the world. Publishers say that this information, gathered and stored securely, will help to analyse who is represented in journals, and to identify whether there are biases in editing or review that sway which findings get published. Pilot testing suggests that many scientists support the idea, although not all.

The effort comes amid a push for a wider acknowledgement of racism and structural racism in science and publishing — and the need to gather more information about it. In any one country, such as the United States, ample data show that minority groups are under-represented in science, particularly at senior levels. But data on how such imbalances are reflected — or intensified — in research journals are scarce. Publishers haven’t systematically looked, in part because journals are international and there has been no measurement framework for race and ethnicity that made sense to researchers of many cultures.

“If you don’t have the data, it is very difficult to understand where you are at, to make changes, set goals and measure progress,” says Holly Falk-Krzesinski, vice-president of research intelligence at the Dutch publisher Elsevier, who is working with the joint group and is based in Chicago, Illinois.

In the absence of data, some scientists have started measuring for themselves. Computational researchers are scouring the literature using software that tries to estimate racial and ethnic diversity across millions of published research articles, and to examine biases in who is represented or cited. Separately, over the past two years, some researchers have criticized publishers for not having diversity data already, and especially for being slow to collate information about small groups of elite decision makers: journal editors and editorial boards. At least one scientist has started publicizing those numbers himself….(More)”.

NIH issues a seismic mandate: share data publicly

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Max Kozlov at Nature: “In January 2023, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will begin requiring most of the 300,000 researchers and 2,500 institutions it funds annually to include a data-management plan in their grant applications — and to eventually make their data publicly available.

Researchers who spoke to Nature largely applaud the open-science principles underlying the policy — and the global example it sets. But some have concerns about the logistical challenges that researchers and their institutions will face in complying with it. Namely, they worry that the policy might exacerbate existing inequities in the science-funding landscape and could be a burden for early-career scientists, who do the lion’s share of data collection and are already stretched thin.

Because the vast majority of laboratories and institutions don’t have data managers who organize and curate data, the policy — although well-intentioned — will probably put a heavy burden on trainees and early-career principal investigators, says Lynda Coughlan, a vaccinologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, who has been leading a research team for fewer than two years and is worried about what the policy will mean for her.

Jorgenson says that, although the policy might require researchers to spend extra time organizing their data, it’s an essential part of conducting research, and the potential long-term boost in public trust for science will justify the extra effort…(More)”.

Russian disinformation frenzy seeds groundwork for Ukraine invasion

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zachary Basu and Sara Fischer at Axios: “Russia is testing its agility at weaponizing state media to win backing at home, in occupied territories in eastern Ukraine and with sympathizers abroad for a war of aggression.

The big picture: State media has pivoted from accusing the West of hysterical warnings about a non-existent invasion to pumping out minute-by-minute coverage of the tensions.

Zoom in: NewsGuard, a misinformation tech firm, identified three of the most common false narratives being propagated by Russian state media like RT, Sputnik News, and TASS:

  1. The West staged a coup in 2014 to overthrow the Ukrainian government
  2. Ukrainian politics is dominated by Nazi ideology
  3. Ethnic Russians in Ukraine’s Donbas region have been subjected to genocide

Between the lines: Social media platforms have been on high alert for Russian disinformation that would violate their policies but have less control over private messaging, where some propaganda efforts have moved to avoid detection.

  • A Twitter spokesperson notes: “As we do around major global events, our safety and integrity teams are monitoring for potential risks associated with conflicts to protect the health of the platform.”
  • YouTube’s threat analysis group and trust and safety teams have also been closely monitoring the situation in Ukraine. The platform’s policies ban misleading titles, thumbnails or descriptions that trick users into believing the content is something it is not….(More)”.

Commit to transparent COVID data until the WHO declares the pandemic is over

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Edouard Mathieu at Nature: “…There are huge inequalities in data reporting around the world. Most of my time over the past two years has been spent digging through official websites and social-media accounts of hundreds of governments and health authorities. Some governments still report official statistics in low-resolution images on Facebook or infrequent press conferences on YouTube — often because they lack resources to do better. Some countries, including China and Iran, have provided no files at all.

Sometimes, it’s a lack of awareness: government officials might think that a topline figure somewhere in a press release is sufficient. Sometimes, the problem is reluctance: publishing the first file would mean a flood of requests for more data that authorities can’t or won’t publish.

Some governments rushed to launch pandemic dashboards, often built as one-off jobs by hired contractors. Civil servants couldn’t upgrade them as the pandemic shifted and new metrics and charts became more relevant. I started building our global data set on COVID-19 vaccinations in 2021, but many governments didn’t supply data for weeks — sometimes months — after roll-outs because their dashboards couldn’t accommodate the data. Worse, they rarely supplied underlying data essential for others to download and produce their own analyses. (My team asked repeatedly.)

Over and over, I’ve seen governments emphasize making dashboards look good when the priority should be making data available. A simple text file would do. After all, research groups like mine and citizens with expertise in data-visualization tools are more than willing to create a useful website or mobile app. But to do so, we need the raw material in a machine-readable format….(More)”.