Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 22:36:38 -0700 (PDT)
Reply-To: iwar@egroups.com
Subject: [iwar] SIMSON SAYS: Mining data on mutilations, beatings, murders (fwd)
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simsong@vineyard.net thought you would be interested in this article at
Salon.com (http://www.salon.com/).
Your friend's message:
This ran in Salon over the weekend; it's my story on Patrick Ball's work
with human rights and computers. The full story is on the Salon
website.
-Simson
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Mining data on mutilations, beatings, murders
By Simson Garfinkel
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/garf/2000/09/08/patrick_ball/index.html
"This would be a good time to leave."
That's what Patrick Ball heard in 1992 when he was working for the
Salvadoran Human Rights Commission. Ball, a peace activist with
expertise in data mining, had spent two years in El Salvador building a
large-scale database that tracked atrocities and human rights violations
perpetrated by both the El Salvadoran government and militias during the
1970s and 1980s. It was a digital record of this most troubled period
in that country's history.
The Human Rights Commission had actually created two databases. The
first was a detailed account of threats, thefts, beatings, mutilations,
murders and massacres. This database was largely created from
eyewitness testimony -- more than 9,000 reports in all. The second was
a database that tracked the careers of El Salvador's police and
military, built largely from official records, newspaper accounts and
some personal recollections.
"What we were doing was tracking them by job, rank and unit from when
they graduated the military academy as young lieutenants until they
retired as senior colonels or generals," recalls Ball. "And then we
crossed these two databases, by unit and time." The technique allowed
the commission to develop "statistical human rights profiles" of
individual officers and units. It showed how units became more violent
when certain officers took control, and cataloged the crimes that had
been committed under the watch of specific individuals. Essentially,
the commission had created a Who's Who of the nastiest criminals of the
country's 20-year civil war. "And then we published in them in the
newspaper!"
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