[Erin Foster] This is K-A-L-X Berkeley, 90.7 FM. Welcome back to Berkeley Brainwaves, a show highlighting stories from the Cal campus. I’m Erin Foster.
[Miriam Reichenberg] And I’m Miriam Reichenberg. On this episode of Berkeley Brainwaves, we continue our conversation with Alexa Koenig, co-faculty director of the Human Rights Center and Director of HRC’s Investigation Program, focusing on the work of the Investigations Lab at the Center.
Professor Koenig shares how the Investigations Lab came to be and its role in investigating, namely gathering evidence and documenting the occurrence of human rights violations across the world. We speak with Investigations Lab team leads, Maneh Davityan and Talia Harter, about their recent investigation into the human rights violations occurring at the Salvadoran prison, CECOT, and the methods used to conduct this particular investigation.
We briefly touch on the media coverage controversy that emerged following the release of the HRC’s report on CECOT and the effects this had on the visibility of the investigation.
Here’s Alexa Koenig.
[Alexa Koenig] In 2011, I was working very closely with our Center’s other faculty director, Eric Stover, and one of the big things we were looking at was the evolution of the International Criminal Court.
This is a court that was set up in The Hague to try to get justice for some of the most grave crimes that were being perpetrated around the world and try to get into that court some of the highest level perpetrators, whether they’re leaders of countries, commanding generals, or otherwise. A big issue that we began to concentrate on was that the International Criminal Court’s cases were falling apart, for the most part, at very early stages of investigation and prosecution.
And the question we here at Berkeley were asking was, why? So we sent a PhD student in from the History department to the court for a summer. She went through thousands of pages of records, and she came back and said, “According to the judges, the prosecutors have a problem. They’re over-relying on the stories of survivors without bringing in the corroborating information needed to meet the evidentiary standards to allow these cases to go forward.”
So that really launched the last fifteen years of our work, which has been all shaped around asking these questions of- What new forms of information exist that can be used to corroborate what people on the ground are saying is happening during moments of crisis or conflict?
So we began looking at things like satellite imagery. That had just become commercially available in the previous 10 years. Media was beginning to use it as a means of fact-finding and reporting. We were– If you think about what was happening in 2010, 2011, it was sort of the era of the rise of the smartphone and the spread of social media worldwide. So there was increasing amount of footage, photographs, videos that people were capturing and trying to get
out to broader audiences, whether those audiences were seeking, kind of, legal accountability or social forms of accountability.
And our challenge was really to help think about what does that mean for legal practice? What does that mean for human rights? And how do we bring that work to Berkeley? Because Berkeley’s on the edge of Silicon Valley, UC Berkeley’s obviously known as a hub of innovation in digital technologies, we were thinking about how do we bring together the expertise here on campus to help shape that future of fact-finding?
And in 2015, we were fortunate to win the MacArthur Award for creative and effective institutions. We were at our 15th anniversary, uh, 20th anniversary, I’m sorry, and we were beginning to say, “How do we begin to think about the next generation of human rights practice?” We realized there was no one training a next generation to think through the integration of digital technologies into human rights work, and so we set– I set up with Andrea Lampros the Investigations Lab in 2016 as a giant experiment to see if we could bring together people from all corners of campus to work on big issues in support of journalists, human rights lawyers, and human rights fact-finders.
So a big part of what we do today is we have teams of students who work in service of those end users. We’ve worked with everything, everyone from The New York Times to The Washington Post to the Associated Press, if it’s in the media space, to working with, some of the biggest human rights organizations in the world, like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, but also grassroots groups that are really trying to illuminate issues that are closer to home, and then, of course, with legal accountability bodies; so we feed information to UN fact-finding missions, commissions of inquiry, and also support some of the smaller human rights legal teams that are doing really courageous work with very few resources. So for the CECOT investigation, we knew that…we had begun to think about with current world affairs, where can a team like ours potentially make the biggest contribution?
And one understandable criticism of the human rights field for a long time has been that often you’re turning the lens towards other countries and communities than your own. I think that seeing the rise of protests and the Black Lives Matter movement, issues that were happening with contested elections, riots at the Capitol, et cetera, that there was an increasing need to think about the role, the responsible role of human rights investigations here at home.
And we knew that one of the things we were beginning to see was the forced deportation or the increased deportation of communities to countries outside of the United States. One thing that members of our advisory board, our students, our staff were beginning to be worried about was individuals who were being sent to third countries so countries that are not their country of origin- where they may have no family ties, no connection, don’t understand the language. We wanted to better understand what was happening to those individuals. So we had kind of made an internal commitment to think about how we could begin to shine a light on that package of issues, and we began talking with an organization called Cristosal, which was based in El Salvador.
They were looking at what had happened with men from Venezuela who were deported from the United States to a notorious prison in El Salvador known as CECOT prison. And we had
reached out to them to see if there might be some opportunity to support their work, understanding that they’re a small organization that was under tremendous stress.
One of the challenges this past summer though was that their legal, uh, I think their head of legal affairs was arrested by the Salvadoran government, and unfortunately, Cristosal at that time was really in a moment where they had to decide if they had to get out of El Salvador for their own safety and security.
So understanding the stress and trauma that they were under, we began to ask if they had other partners that might be a better fit for working closely with students. Realizing they wouldn’t have that bandwidth. And it turned out that they were partnering with Human Rights Watch – we connected with their Americas team, the Americas team very warmly invited us and our students in to start working on this project. And what they, what they had already done was they were interviewing the men who were released from CECOT prison, um, who were Venezuelan, to better understand experiences within the prison complex. It is known for its harsh treatment of detainees, and it’s very hard to get access as an outsider.
They asked if we could find open source information, so information on social media and elsewhere, that could help to corroborate what these men had said they’d experienced. And so they sent us a list of questions, the students dove in and began to look on social media sites and elsewhere for any clues about what the inside of CECOT is like.
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[Miriam Reichenberg] You’re listening to K-A-L-X Berkeley, 90.7 FM. This is Berkeley Brainwaves.
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[Talia Harter] Hi, I’m Talia Harter, and I am one of the co-team leads for one of our investigative teams.
[Maneh Davityan] Hi, I’m Maneh Davityan. Um, I’m also one of the co-team leads for the investigations team at the Human Rights Center.
[Talia Harter] So CECOT or the Terrorism Confinement Center is a prison in El Salvador, and the reason our team was so interested in investigating this site is because we were tracking, last semester, several Venezuelan immigrants who were sent by the Trump administration to be housed in El Salvador.
These individuals were not from El Salvador but they were detained in this prison on the grounds that they had criminal charges either in the US or the countries, um, from which they had migrated. So CECOT is known for its very brutal, uh, policy. You see 24-hour detainment. They have maybe 30 minutes outside of their cells a day. They’re not allowed outside of the actual buildings. They don’t get meat. They don’t get… like, the protein that they get maybe is, you know, an egg or something like that. The lights are on 24/7, which is, um, incredibly damaging to mental health. Oftentimes if they are cited by the prison authorities as being, uh,
disruptive, they will be taken to an isolation cell called The Island, which is dark, has no light except for a tiny hole in the ceiling, and the only sort of accommodations that they would have in that cell would be a concrete slab to lie on.
So the, the conditions in those, in this prison are incredibly brutal. They violate international human rights law. And so we were interested in seeing how can we investigate what’s actually going on in this prison and what’s actually happening to the Venezuelan migrants that we were tracking. And luckily, we were able to do so.
[Miriam Reichenberg] In the CECOT investigation, your team examined open source information. Could you guys walk me through what kind of evidence you guys used?
[Maneh Davityan] Yeah, sure. So we kind of focused on, um, just trying to gather as much open source information that we could find. A lot of the information we ended up finding from, like, these influencer-produced YouTube videos, which was super interesting because we kind of had a lot of mainstream media, either journalists or just news outlets, saying that they kind of requested to go into CECOT and to kind of do a tour and have, like, that same kind of a- level of access as these influencers, but they kind of weren’t given that same level.
And so we kind of went through a lot of those YouTube videos. We could look into the background of them and try to figure out the layout of the building, things like that. We also just tried to generally find anything else, like social media sites of what the government was producing, any images, I think we used Getty Images.
[Talia Harter] The influencer-produced videos, which were, um, I think, requested by the Salvadorian government to sort of make CECOT look intimidating and punitive because they are very proud of the structure that they’ve built and the policies that they’ve implemented. We also had members of our team who were focused on sort of doing geolocation tactics, so using Google satellite imagery to figure out the layout of the prison.
That’s one of my favorite techniques that we learn at the lab, where, I mean, again, this is open access information, so you just go on Google Earth, and you can sort of use those tools to help us sort of see into a prison that, you know, ostensibly did not have a lot of, you know, outside media being able to access it.
So the, the geolocation aspect, again, as Maneh mentioned, we used Getty Images as well, so images that were produced inside the prison to help us get the sort of, you know, person-level view, and then we got satellite imagery to help us get the above-ground view of what the prison looked like.
[Miriam Reichenberg] Yeah, that was going to be my next question, like, how do you actually access this information?
But because it’s open source, it’s all out there. You just have to go find it. I’m curious about what the conversations in the lab look like when you discuss what information would be helpful to go and find and use.
[Talia Harter] We have a great team of staff leads, so oftentimes they’re kind of working with our partners.
In this case, for this project, we were working with Human Rights Watch on a major report that they were doing on what was happening to these Venezuelan prisoners. We talked with them about what would be most helpful for us to do, which was, in this case, to help validate and confirm the testimonies of these men.
So what we talked about with our team lead was to sort of use these open source videos. So he had already gathered some for us to look at, and then we went out and searched for more. You know, sometimes some of these videos were using the same clips. They were u- sort of bouncing off of each other.
So we were really trying to find, okay, if we don’t have anything that’s, you know… If we can find something that’s off this list, let’s use it. Let’s examine it. And then of course, with the satellite imagery, that’s sort of something that we just are kind of taught to do in the lab. And in this case, you know, the, the location of the prison is not a secret. We knew where it was. We were able to grab that satellite imagery. Do you wanna add anything?
[Maneh Davityan] Yeah, I guess for the most part, kind of, you kind of covered a lot of it. Um, but we kind of tried to… like, a lot of the information that the Human Rights Watch was using and, like, including in their source or in their report, they kind of were interviewing a lot of kind of individuals who experienced that, and it was a lot of kind of individual, like, testimonies.
So we kind of were the back end of just verifying and, like, corroborating all that information, but we also didn’t have access to any of it. So it was kind of nice to have that, like, a lot less biased kind of source where we kind of didn’t know what they were looking at or kind of what information they’d gathered from those, like, individual testimonies.
So we went in and were able to provide that information for them. But yeah, I think a lot of it was just kind of making sure that all the things that they were looking for we kind of were able to answer. And we obviously couldn’t find everything, but for the most part, a, a lot of the kind of information was broadly found kind of just looking through those videos.
[Talia Harter]: Yeah, they gave us… the Human Rights Watch gave us a list of questions. So we didn’t see the content of what they had gotten from, um, their interviews and the testimonies from these men, but they sent us a list of questions to answer. So that’s all we, we had. We didn’t get to see the report until it, it really, it came out, which was pretty cool.
And I think that really helped guide our investigation. So it wasn’t just sort of a broad investigation of like what is CECOT, right? It was more like, okay, can you answer these questions, would help them verify testimony. We didn’t know what the testimony was at the point of our investigation, which I think made our investigation stronger because we were sort of independently verifying information and therefore, again, as Maneh mentioned, we didn’t have that sort of bias towards trying to find information that, you know, Human Rights Watch already had.
Since we didn’t know what they already had, we were really sort of independently doing this open source investigation which I think made the overall final report that Human Rights Watch produced much stronger.
[VOICEOVER Miriam Reichenberg] I asked the students about what surprised them most about the information they collected and reviewed related to CECOT.
[Maneh Davityan] In our case with the YouTube videos it felt like they kind of, the government wanted this information out, and so… And the influencers were typically, like, they wouldn’t even necessarily be in that field of like- talking about either CECOT, El Salvador, anything like that. And so they’d sometimes be, like, college students our age just going around and, like, being shown their, you know, armory and just walking through their, their, like, general prison system. And so it was just really crazy to kind of see. And it was, like, super detailed, and they kind of wanted everyone to see, you know, how many, like, guns they had, almost, like, showing off. So I think in a lot of these cases, especially with looking into kind of other war crime kind of investigations, a lot of the times these governments will kind of prod- produce that information on their own, especially with either Twitter or Facebook videos.
And just I think for the most part, we kind of treat whenever we get the information or whatever we’re looking at, we try to make sure that it lines up with everything else. And so we try to kind of cross-check it and just kind of make sure that we’re not sending out any information that is inaccurate.
[Talia Harter] Yeah, and for the many of the videos, um, they were walking both inside the prison complex, so in the actual buildings, but they were also walking outside, and that helped us verify that these videos were accurate. Because again, we could cross-check with the Google satellite imagery to make sure that, you know, they’re not in some entirely different building.
That they were at CECOT, we could tell. Um, the other thing is, in a lot of these videos, the warden himself was actually giving a tour. So you know, we, of course, we take it with a grain of salt, but a lot of times the warden was very openly answering questions, you know. Through some of his statements, we were able to confirm that the lights in the prison are on 24/7, right?
So certain questions that we had that Human Rights Watch wanted confirmed because it was, you know, certain things that, that these men had said in their testimonies, we were able to confirm not just through, you know, observation and all the videos that we were seeing, even those filmed at, you know, 3:00 in the morning, the lights were on in the prison, but also through the statements of the warden.
Again, it was… You know, when the influencers were there, they had pretty open access, right? Not just to walking around the prison, but to the warden himself who was answering these really, these really important questions that we needed to have answered, but also were, you know, that were just… He was very open about what, what they were doing in the prison.
And again, what I keep coming back to is sort of the, the sort of pride around, you know, what they were doing. Th- this isn’t something that they’re trying to hide. This isn’t something that they
feel ashamed about. This is something that they want the world to see because they want people to understand how punitive this prison is, how poor the conditions are, right?
Like, they, they’re, you know, they’re very happy to talk about how hot it gets in the prison, right, for these inmates who have no air conditioning. There’s no sort of, there’s no hiding what they’re doing. And they could, right? They didn’t have to let these influencers in. They’re letting this information get out.
[Miriam Reichenberg] That is a great point. They want people to know what they’re up to. MUSIC
[Miriam Reichenberg] You’re listening to K-A-L-X Berkeley, 90.7 FM. This is Berkeley Brainwaves.
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[Miriam Reichenberg] This brings me to another key point I want to discuss. When you collect and authenticate all this information, and you send it off to, let’s say, the International Court of Justice… what happens? Like, what is the process with them taking in that information?
[Alexa Koenig] How does that happen? It- that’s such a great question, and I’ll try and keep it fairly straightforward because, um, you know, just there’s so many different machinations of what can take place. One of the most common processes that we’re seeing are these groups that are closest to conflict or crisis, or groups like Bellingcat that professionally grab content that they think might be relevant to later accountability or later reporting, um, they gather this information.
What we’ve seen historically is that the question then becomes, all right, we know it’s important to archive this stuff and safeguard it, but now who do we give it to? And there [00:19:00] are so many factors that go into that determination because in international criminal law, they set up these giant experiments where they’re like, “Okay, for Syria, we know there’s terabytes of data related to the conflict there. Where’s it all going to go?”
You don’t want to send it to the International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice or some other law enforcement body for a whole host of reasons. One, the ICC doesn’t have jurisdiction over Syria. That’s a long story, but it would drown the legal investigators in data that they can’t humanly go through in their lifetimes.
So they’ve set up giant experiments, um, that are called mechanisms that are basically giant aggregators where everyone can send their data if they choose to, and then the mechanisms can kind of package it for legal investigators that may come calling or others who may have a reason, an official reason, to use that data.
The problem is some civil society groups don’t want to give their data to those mechanisms ’cause the minute they do, they lose control.
And if you’re Ukrainian, you don’t want that information eventually going to Russia. You know, there’s so many different geopolitical conflicts right now that really kind of limit when people want to give consent for their data to be used, which is why we’re trying to look at how can we keep the data in control, in the control of the individual groups and allow this determination to be made on a case by case basis, but at the same time, make sure that they have storage so that this stuff isn’t disappearing over time.
Right now, the way it eventually ends up in court is usually there’s a one-to-one relationship. So we may know investigators at one of the mechanisms or at the International Criminal Court or at the ICJ, International Court of Justice- Or lawyers who are building cases, and they may come directly to us to see what we have.
For groups that are less connected with the tech sector or with the international legal sector, it can be a lot harder to signal that you have potentially relevant data, even though it might be some of the most powerful data out there.
[VOICEOVER Miriam Reichenberg] The Human Rights Center is currently working to build an international archive, a kind of digital library to preserve material so it’s available when accountability finally comes.
But authenticating and preserving this information is only part of the battle. Getting it in front of the public is another.
[Miriam Reichenberg] There was controversy around media coverage of CECOT. CBS editor in-chief, Bari Weiss, she attempted to pull the segment from the 60 Minutes clip. So can you speak to what role journalists and open source investigators as a whole play in making this kind of information publicly available, and why this kind of investigation is important, especially now?
[Alexa Koenig] We were very surprised to learn very last minute, right before the segment was set to air, that the piece was being pulled by CBS. Um, we were not given any reasoning for this. They told us that they were hoping that this may still air at some point in January, and of course it eventually did.
What this raised, though, were alarm bells about the ability to get very thorough, very careful reporting out to broader publics on topics that may not be favorable to the current, uh, US government administration. So we were immediately reached out to by Democracy Now! They asked if they could do an interview about what the experience had been like of putting together the underlying research for the segment, shooting the segment, and then having it pulled.
I think that there were also broader issues at play in the sense that, um, there were a lot of… there’s a lot of maneuvering right now about who owns media and whose voices, whose agendas are going to dictate what happens in the media. And I think for CBS, understanding that there was a potential merger or potential purchase of their, uh, of a number of different actually platforms that they are a part of, there was a real concern that this could be seen as an attempt to effectuate or to affect the potential of that buyout.
So for us, I think it was mostly, it was really heartening to see how many people, not only around this country, but around the world, became very interested in this particular segment. I think for both good and bad, unfortunately, the narrative of what happened with CBS at times drowned out what these men had experienced.
And that really is the story that we want to make sure is heard and understood. Um, that a lot of times people are going into detention facilities that aren’t even kind of living up to the minimum standards of what you would expect under international law. But at the same time, to see how many more people actually ended up viewing this segment as a result of what some have called censorship, I think that’s a really powerful example of how people coming together can do great things.
[Maneh Davityan] Just in general having 60 Minutes kind of want to put out a piece on CECOT and also specifically focusing on the Human Rights Watch report, I think was really important and kind of showing that information on a larger scale ’cause realistically, like I don’t know if that many people aside from kind of the international community and people actively working in the field are necessarily going to be reading the report, as much as I’d love for everyone to.
And so I think the 60 Minutes piece kind of offers… obviously, their audience is like larger and just reaches a different audience. So I think it was really important that they are kind of choosing to cover it, and also choosing to come to the Lab and talk to our team about how we kind of added to the report and verified their claims.
But yeah, I think having the piece be pulled was like really unfortunate. I think it just speaks to kind of corporate censorship, um, and just like in general with free speech and like media coverage in the US and how it definitely has been limited over the years. And I think this is kind of a perfect example of it.
And I do think it was really unfortunate kind of what Bari Weiss specifically said about our team and how like she didn’t really see the value in kind of our team’s contribution to the 60 Minutes piece. Because I think in general, as much as they want to say like, oh, it’s Berkeley students,
so like we were biased, and of course, we’re going to want to kind of add to this report. The report itself was never supposed to be kind of insulting or, you know, criticizing the Trump administration. It was specifically just about how intense the CECOT prison system is, how many human rights violations it was violating, um, and then also kind of why the US chose to send Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador when they know about just how intense the prison system is, um, and how harsh their punishments are.
So yeah, it was more so just kind of investigation on why they decided to choose to kind of send migrants there.
[Talia Harter] Yeah, and we had a really great experience with the team from 60 Minutes who came and filmed our segment. I really want to just thank Sharyn Alfonsi, the correspondent who we worked with, for her dedication to getting this piece out.
She wrote an open letter- or it wasn’t an open letter, but it was a letter that came out into the open- about the segment getting pulled, and she really stood firm, and I’m sure was a big part of
why the piece did eventually air. So the team that we worked with directly at CBS was great, and they were really invested in making sure the story got out.
I think what was most disappointing for our team was the fact that when this segment was initially pulled, what was really happening was the silencing of the stories of these men, right? You know, we are very proud of our research, but our research is completely secondary to making sure that what happened to these men becomes public knowledge.
You know, the suffering that they endured in CECOT is really horrific and they deserve to be able to share what happened to them. And the pulling of the segment, you know, initially definitely made it so that their stories were silenced. So we are very grateful that the piece did eventually air.
But it was very, very frustrating that, you know, the piece was pulled because even though it got a lot of media coverage, so much of that media coverage was then focused on the actual, you know, “The segment was pulled. This is, you know, this is corrupt. This is silencing, you know, voices.” And I think that in the end it did take away a little bit from the focus of, you know, this is a story about these men who were imprisoned, who were detained, and who were treated horrifically.
And that’s really unfortunate because had the piece aired just without any interference, there might have been more of an understanding of this is the root of that story. It is important to acknowledge the censorship aspect of the segment being pulled, but it is also very unfortunate that that took away from the story of these men.
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[Miriam Reichenberg] The segment did eventually air, and the story got out. But as Maneh and Talia reminded us, the point was never the research or even the censorship. It was the men inside the CECOT prison whose stories nearly didn’t make it. And so the work of the Human Rights Center continues. To learn more about the Investigations Lab, visit humanrights.berkeley.edu.
