Attracting a crowd: What societal verification means for arms control

Abstract

The idea that ordinary people might contribute to verification of arms control treaties is not new; abstract discussions of the concept date back decades. But powerful and portable electronic devices have spread so widely in recent years that societal verification now seems an imminent reality. Motivated individuals might, for instance, collect treaty-relevant data through onboard sensors that smartphones can carry and then transmit the information to multilateral verification bodies or, as is already happening, share it online with global communities that subject it to crowdsourced analysis. But will societal verification generate enthusiasm in the developed and developing worlds alike? What legal protections must be established for participants? And will information gathered through societal verification ultimately prove useful and trustworthy? Three authors explore these emerging questions: from Burkina Faso and representing the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, Lassina Zerbo (2013); from the United States, research fellow Nima Gerami; and from Malaysia, nuclear engineer Jamal Khaer Ibrahim (2013).

More than 20 years ago, renowned physicist and Nobel laureate Joseph Rotblat took to the pages of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to argue in favor of societal verification—an arrangement whereby everyday citizens would be empowered to monitor implementation of, and national compliance with, arms control treaties and agreements. Whole communities could enhance national technical means used to monitor treaty compliance and greatly reduce the chances that violations would go undetected (Rotblat, 1992, 1993).

Even insignificant violations of a treaty or agreement can erode confidence in the ability of arms control to enhance security and stability. Societal verification might serve as the scalable solution to the verification problem, one that could help experts detect attempted violations in a timely manner, especially as what is to be detected becomes smaller and easier to hide.

Today, the worldwide expansion of handheld devices—particularly smartphones and tablet computers equipped with wireless Internet connectivity, powerful processors, data storage, and embedded sensors such as accelerometers, microphones, cameras, and Global Positioning Systems—has helped usher in a new era of transparency. There are almost as many mobile phone subscriptions in the world as there are people. An estimated 2.7 billion people, nearly 40 percent of the world’s population, use the Internet (UN ITU, 2013). Though access to the Internet is not distributed uniformly across the globe, strong demand for information and communication technology services—in particular, mobile broadband—suggests that geographic coverage for these services will continue to grow.

At the same time, the Internet itself has expanded and evolved, becoming a more dynamic and interactive technological space. The advent of free and publicly accessible Web 2.0 technologies— including Wikis, blogs, social-networking sites (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), video-posting and image-sharing tools (YouTube, Flickr, Panoramio), and geospatial visualization applications (Google Earth and Google Maps)—makes the use of handheld devices an attractive platform for crowdsourcing information (Glennon and Goodchild, 2010; Howe, 2008; Pabian, 2010). ¹ Ordinary citizens, equipped with sensor-rich and Internet-enabled smartphones, can now collect streams of data—including audio, video, and geographic coordinates—and easily share them on the web.

In the arms control arena, the affordability and availability of information and communication technologies have increased opportunities for citizens, nongovernmental organizations, and online communities of interest (for example, armchair enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, policy wonks, dissidents, and activists) to become more involved in monitoring treaty compliance (Aday and Livingston, 2009; Crowley and Persbo, 2006; Scheffran, 2010). As Rose Gottemoeller (2012), the State Department’s acting undersecretary for arms control and international security, has said:

Our environment today is a smaller, increasingly networked world where the average citizen connects to others in cyberspace hundreds of times each day. We exchange and share ideas on a wide variety of topics. Citizens are armed with more information tools than ever before. Why not put this vast problem-solving entity to good use?

Communities of interest are already finding ways to harness both the power of Web 2.0 and the collective intelligence of virtual crowds for monitoring arms control. In 2011, amid reports that a textile factory near the Syrian town of Al Hasaka had attracted the interest of inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), members of the blogging community Arms Control Wonk attempted to determine the facility’s true nature and purpose. The community studied photos, video, and satellite images of the area, as well as Arab-language media reports that described the facility as a textile mill constructed decades earlier with East German assistance. These blog posts caught the attention of German journalist Paul-Anton Krüger, who then found the original construction project’s chief engineer and manager to confirm that the facility indeed had been built for textile production. Further analysis of low- and high-resolution satellite images from Google Earth and NASA’s Landsat 5 satellite corroborated a construction timeline on the website of the Hassakeh Spinning Company (Lewis, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c).

More recently, Arms Control Wonk crowdsourced analysis of four videos apparently taken with mobile phones and posted to YouTube by members of Syrian opposition groups (Lewis, 2013). The videos appeared to indicate that opposition forces had captured the site of an undeclared nuclear reactor at Al Kibar that had been bombed by the Israeli air force in 2007 (the site is also known as Dair Alzour). Blog readers, including former IAEA safeguards official Olli Heinonen (who, as part of an inspections team, had visited Al Kibar in 2008, after the destroyed reactor building had been razed and replaced with a large, metal-sheathed missile facility), verified that the videos seemed authentic. Examining the videos, bloggers identified within a seized building at least five stationary launchers for Scud-type missiles, each of which could be fired through an opening in the roof. If nothing else, this crowdsourced effort substantiated reports that the Syrian government had indiscriminately fired ballistic missiles on urban areas in northern parts of the country (Human Rights Watch, 2013).

Yet another example of the power of crowdsourcing is Ushahidi, a nonprofit technology company that built a website to map citizen reports of violence in Kenya after the country’s disputed presidential election in 2007. An expanded version of the Ushahidi platform—which combines elements of Google Maps, web forms, e-mail, text messaging, social media, and RSS feeds—enables users to create their own interactive maps. After Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, this open-source platform was used to rapidly collect information provided directly by Haitians and proved useful in emergency response (Heinzelman and Waters, 2010). Other groups have used Ushahidi’s crowdsourcing application to gather reports of human rights violations in Syria; to map, share, and assess information about Iran’s nuclear program; and to collect radiation measurements following the accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

The implications of all this for societal verification are promising. The revolution in information and communication technology is facilitating efforts to enlist citizen reporters for monitoring the implementation of international treaties and agreements. If carried out strategically, with appropriate incentives tailored to the right communities, crowdsourcing arms control can yield high rewards. ²

However, as Rotblat recognized (1993), the success of a societal verification regime relies on ensuring that citizens are assured of the right, and prepared to accept the obligation, to report suspicious activities or attempts to violate treaties. The Internet and other technological advances will not eliminate the need for whistleblower protections and for regulations concerning freedom of information—at the national and international levels, and in democratic and nondemocratic countries alike (Deiseroth, 2000). Societal verification and anonymous, crowdsourced arms control efforts therefore depend not only on imbuing citizens with a sense of personal responsibility, but also on protecting them from retribution. Legal and technical methods of protecting the anonymity of citizen reporters will require serious consideration if societal verification is to succeed.