Recently, I spent several days exploring Kashgar, a city in Xinjiang, northwest China. I got to wander the streets of the old town and visit the bazaar and several mosques and take in the sights. I've never been to Kashgar personally, but through the YouTube videos and Instagram posts of tourists, I was able to experience the city at a key moment in time: October 2017, just as the mass detention campaign in the region was gathering pace. These videos could help us investigate the visual signs of the crackdown. The checkpoints at each intersection with their metal detectors, ID checks and iris scans, the CCTV cameras which pervade the city and the riot police on every corner.
最近,我在位于 中国西北的新疆喀什 转了几天。 我在老城区的街道上游荡, 去了当地的集市和几个清真寺, 不时驻足观赏。 我之前从未去过喀什, 但我通过其他游客的 Youtube 视频和 Instagram 照片, 得以在一个关键的时间节点 一窥这个城市的风貌。 这一节点 就是 2017 年 10 月, 当时正值该地区的 大规模拘留行动不断升级。 这些视频可以帮助我们 研究这一镇压行动的种种迹象。 每个十字路口都设有卡点, 并配备了金属探测仪, 还有身份证查验和虹膜扫描。 监控摄像头 遍布城市的各个角落, 防暴警察 把守着每一个街角。
Over the past decade, online and open-source investigations have taken off in the fields of journalism and human rights monitoring, using photographs, videos and the digital traces we leave behind as we use the internet to conduct investigations. Social media data is combined with tools like satellite imagery and 3D modelling, as well as more traditional journalistic techniques like interviews and searches of government documents. It's also brought new kinds of people to journalism. Software developers, animators, archaeologists, or, like me, an architect.
在过去的十年里, 在线的开源调查 在新闻和人权监察领域 被广泛运用, 使用网上的照片、视频 以及我们使用互联网时 留下的数字足迹 来展开调查。 社交媒体数据与 卫星图像和三维建模相结合, 同时辅以采访、 搜索政府文件等 更传统的新闻调查技巧。 在线开源调查也吸引了 一些新的群体加入新闻行业, 比如软件开发者、 动画师、人类学家 或是像我一样的建筑师。
I got involved in investigating Xinjiang in the summer of 2018 when I met Megha Rajagopalan, an American journalist who had been working in China for several years. Over the past few years, China has been carrying out a campaign of oppression in Xinjiang against Turkic Muslims, including the largest group, the Uyghurs. It's part of a campaign of forcible assimilation, and several nations have described it as a genocide. It's estimated that over a million people have been disappeared into detention camps. And while the Chinese government claims that these are part of a benign program of re-education, dozens of former detainees describe being tortured and abused and women being forcibly sterilized.
我在 2018 年夏天参与到 关于新疆的调查中, 契机是我认识了美国记者 李香梅 (Megha Rajagopalan), 当时她已经 在中国工作数年。 在过去的几年中, 中国在新疆展开了 针对突厥裔穆斯林的打压行动, 其中就包括当地最大的群体, 维吾尔族人。 这一打压行动仅仅是 强制同化行动的一部分, 被多个国家称为种族灭绝。 据估计, 有超过 100 万人被消失, 关进了拘留中心。 尽管中国政府宣称, 这些都只是 再教育行动的一部分, 数十名被拘留过的人表示 曾受到折磨和虐待, 还有女性被强制绝育。
And yet, for a long time, we lacked information about what was happening in Xinjiang, because the Chinese government controls the internet tightly and restricts journalists' work in the region. Journalists would be followed or detained, and the authorities occasionally even went so far as to set up fake roadworks or stage car crashes to prevent access to certain roads. Local people who did speak to journalists face the risk of being sent to a detention camp for doing so.
然而,在很长一段时间里, 我们一直缺少能够反映 新疆真实情况的信息, 这都归咎于中国政府 对互联网的严密控制, 以及对该区域记者活动的限制。 进入该区域的记者 会被跟踪或是拘留。 有时,当局甚至不惜 设置假的道路施工标识 或是伪装车祸现场, 来切断特定道路的通行。 和记者接触的当地人 则面临被关进拘留营的风险。
Megha had been the first journalist to visit one of the camps. But shortly after publishing her article, the Chinese authorities declined to renew her visa, and she had to leave. Other journalists had managed to visit a handful of the camps, but this still represented a fraction of what we believed was out there, and no one knew where the others were. But Megha was keen to find the rest. She just needed to find a way to work effectively from outside China.
李香梅是到访拘留营的 第一名记者。 但在她的文章发布后不久, 中国当局拒绝为她续签, 她只能离开中国。 也有其他记者成功到访了 几个类似的拘留营, 但我们认为,这些只占到 现有拘留营的一小部分, 并且没有人知道 它们的确切位置。 然而,李香梅非常想 找到那些剩下的拘留营。 不过她需要找到一个有效的方式, 从中国之外开展这项工作。
Another challenge was that Xinjiang is huge. It's four times the size of California, and that made it difficult to look for a network of camps that was spread across the region. Satellite imagery could help to solve both of those problems. But more importantly, satellite imagery was a source of information that the Chinese government couldn't control because the satellites and the imagery they produce was owned by US and European organizations. But that still left us with the question of where in that huge amount of satellite imagery to look.
另一个难处在于 新疆广袤无垠, 面积是加利福尼亚州的四倍。 这使得查找散落其中的 拘留营的位置 变得异常困难。 卫星图像则能够 同时解决这两个问题。 而且更重要的是, 卫星图像这一信息来源 是中国政府无法控制的, 因为卫星及卫星生成的图像 为美国和欧洲的组织所有。 但我们依然面临的 一个问题是 在海量的卫星图像中, 应该从何处着手。
And then I heard about something strange that was happening in Baidu Total View, which is the Chinese equivalent of Google Street View. Photographer Jonathan Browning had discovered that buildings and facilities like industrial estates were being photoshopped out of ground level imagery, often very clumsily. Yeah, it's bizarre, right? At the time, it wasn't clear why this was happening, but I realized that if industrial estates in eastern China were being obscured, then probably the same thing was happening with detention camps in Xinjiang. And I went to look at the imagery there to see what I could find. There were a handful of camps which had been visited by journalists. And so I went to those locations in Baidu to see what the platform showed. There was no street level imagery. But as I zoomed in on the satellite images, this weird thing happened. A light gray square suddenly appeared above the location of the camp and then disappeared just as quickly as I zoomed in further. It was a bit like the map wasn't loading properly, but then I zoomed out and in again only for the same thing to happen. I realized it couldn't be a problem with the map loading because the tiles would have been in the browser's cache. And when I found the same thing happening at the other locations we knew to be camps, I realized that we had a technique we could use to find the rest of the network.
然后,我就听说了 百度地图在全景模式下 发生的一件奇怪的事。 这是一个中国版的 谷歌街景。 摄影师乔纳森·勃朗宁 (Jonathan Browning) 发现, 百度全景下的 工业建筑和设施 被人为抹掉了, 通常还处理得很粗糙。 很诡异,对不对? 当时我们并不清楚 这么做的理由, 但我意识到,如果中国东部的 工业设施被抹掉, 那么有可能新疆的拘留营 也会被抹掉。 然后我就去看新疆地区的图像, 看看能发现什么。 好几个拘留营都有记者去过。 因此我在百度地图上 找到了这些地点。 这些地点都无法显示街景。 但当我放大卫星图像时, 奇怪的事发生了。 拘留营的位置 被浅灰色的方框盖住了, 当我再放大时, 浅灰色的方框消失了。 看起来就像是 地图载入出错一样。 但当我缩小再放大时, 还是同样的状况。 我意识到,这不可能是 地图加载的问题, 因为这一区域应该已经 载入至浏览器缓存。 当我发现 同样的状况也发生在 其他几个已知的 拘留营地点时, 我意识到, 我们有办法 找到其他的拘留营位置。
It's quite rare for maps and satellite images to have these blank spots because blank areas tend to draw attention to themselves. But here we got lucky. Obscuring the camps had inadvertently revealed all of their locations.
地图和卫星图像 很少出现这样的空白区块, 因为空白区块本身 就容易引起注意。 但这次我们相当走运。 对拘留营的遮挡 无意间也暴露了它们的位置。
(Laughter)
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We worked with developer Christo Buschek, who specializes in documenting human rights issues and building tools for open-source researchers to map the masked-tile locations. We had to work quickly and secretively to map the masked tiles before anyone found out what we were doing and removed them because our investigation relied on access to that information. The idea was that we could go and look at the masked-tile locations and then look at that same location in other unaltered satellite imagery and see what was there. And this is what we saw. This is a former high school that became Kashgar Vocational Skills Education and Training Center. Zooming in on the satellite imagery, we can see the barbed wire in the courtyards that creates exercise pens for the detainees adjacent to the buildings. In other images, we can even see people, all wearing red uniforms, lined up in the courtyard. These features could help us decide whether a location was a camp or not.
我们与开发者里斯托·布切克 (Christo Busche) 展开合作。 他专攻人权问题的记录, 并为开源研究员们开发工具, 用以在地图上 标记这些被遮挡的位置。 我们不得不悄悄地赶在别人 发现我们的意图并将它们移除前 迅速标记这些 被遮挡的位置, 因为这些信息是开展调查 所不可或缺的。 原理就是先找到 被遮挡的地理位置, 然后在其他未经修改的 卫星图像上 找到同一位置, 看看这里都有些什么。 这就是我们所看到的。 这里先前是一所高中, 后来被改造为喀什 职业技术教育培训中心。 拉近卫星图像, 我们可以看到 院子周围的铁丝网。 围住的地方是放风区, 供周围被拘留的人使用。 在一些其他图像中, 我们甚至可以看到人, 他们穿着红色制服, 在院子里列队排开。 这些特点可以帮我们确定 某个地点是不是再教育营。
As we investigated further, we realized that the camp's program had evolved away from the early days of makeshift camps in former schools and hospitals, and had become more permanent, that the camps were now larger, higher-security and purpose-built. This is the largest camp that we know of. It's in Dabancheng. The complex is two miles long, and it would cover a quarter of New York's Central Park. In the satellite images, we can see the thick perimeter walls, the guard towers and these blueish buildings, which we believe to be factories. We estimate that this complex can hold over 40,000 people without overcrowding. We corroborated these locations using government documents, many of which mention the camps address, the few media reports which did exist on the camps and our own interviews with former detainees who had managed to leave Xinjiang and are now living in Kazakhstan, Turkey or Europe.
随着调查的推进, 我们意识到, 再教育营在不断演化, 不再是最初由学校和医院 改造而成的临时营地, 而变成长期固定的设施。 我们也意识到, 现在的营地更大, 安全措施更严密, 修建的目的性也更强。 这是我们所知的最大的营地, 位于达坂城。 该营地长有两英里, 面积相当于 1/4 个纽约中央公园。 从卫星图像中, 我们能看到厚厚的围墙, 哨塔,以及这些蓝色的建筑, 我们认为都是工厂。 我们估计该营地 可轻松容纳 40,000 人。 为了印证这些地点, 我们使用了政府文件, 因为其中许多文件 都有提及营地的地址; 我们借助现存的少量 关于这些营地的媒体报道; 我们还采访了一些 曾被拘留在营地中的人, 他们后来成功离开新疆, 现在居住在卡萨克斯坦、 土耳其或欧洲。
In total, we found 348 locations bearing the hallmarks of camps and prisons. And we believe that this is close to being the full network. We estimate that these facilities have been built to hold more than a million people. That's enough space to detain one in every 25 of Xinjiang's residents. And that doesn't take into account the overcrowding that so many former detainees have described. So that number could be even higher.
最终,我们共找到了 348 个 具有再教育营和监狱特征的地点。 我们认为这一数字 较为接近实际。 据我们估计, 这些设施总共可容纳 超过 100 万人, 足以拘留 1/25 的新疆居民。 而且这一估算并未考虑 许多曾被拘留的人所提及的 超容羁押的情况。 所以,实际容纳人数可能更高。
And then one morning, a few months after we had published our map, I woke up to a series of messages about a YouTube video that was doing the rounds on Chinese social media. A Chinese vlogger, who goes by the name Guanguan, had taken our map and traveled to Xinjiang. In his video, we see him driving down a main road past a compound with barbed wire on top of the perimeter wall and bars on the windows. Next, he pretends to take a wrong turn down a side street so that he can film the facility at the end. The sign on the gate says "13th Division Detention Center." And then he hurriedly turns his car and drives away. Later, he hangs his camera from his backpack as he walks past this huge prison complex in Ürümqi. From Ürümqi he drove to the Dabancheng, that small town with the enormous detention facility that I showed earlier. He turned off the main road and drove up a gravel track, then got out of his car and climbed up on an earth berm overlooking the new compound. This was a recklessly brave thing to do because, as he notes in the video, tourists don't go to that place. He had no plausible deniability for being there. But this is the view from the top, and it's the first image that I'm aware of of the new camp at Dabancheng.
在我们的地图公布 几个月后的一天早晨, 我被多条信息吵醒, 当中提到一个 Youtube 视频 正在中国社交媒体上疯传。 一个叫关关(谐音)的 中国视频博主 拿着我们的地图去了新疆。 在他的视频中, 我们看到他开车沿一条主路 经过一处场地, 围墙顶部布满了铁丝网, 窗户装上了栅栏。 然后,他假装走错, 拐进了一条小巷, 目的是拍摄位于巷尾的设施。 该设施大门上的标志写着: “第十三看守所”。 随后,他急忙掉头离开。 接着,他将摄像头挂在背包上, 步行走过这个 位于乌鲁木齐的大型监狱。 然后,他驱车离开乌鲁木齐 前往达坂城, 就是刚才我给大家看的那个 拥有大型拘留设施的小城镇。 他下了主路, 驶入一条碎石路, 然后下车,爬上路旁一个土堆, 俯瞰整个新建的设施。 这么做虽然勇敢, 却也鲁莽, 原因他自己也在视频里说了, 游客是不会去这种地方的。 而对于为什么会出现在这里, 他给不出任何可信的托词。 这是从土堆顶端看到的画面, 这是我所知的 第一个关于达坂城 这一新建营地的影像资料。
This video showed us places from ground level that previously we had only seen from above, indicating that our interpretations were correct. Seeing the signs at the gates of the facility, which told us the name and the type of facility, added further evidence that these places were camps. This video helped us to corroborate a series of locations where previously all we had had was satellite imagery.
这个视频从地面的角度 向我们展示了 此前只能自上而下 观察的地点, 也表明了我们 此前的解读是正确的。 我们通过该设施大门上的标志 得知了该设施的名称和种类, 更进一步的印证了 这一类地方就是营地的事实。 这个视频作为佐证, 帮助我们确认了一系列 此前只有卫星图像的地点。
In Xinjiang, open sources have allowed us to examine and counter the Chinese government's claims about what's happening in the region. But this isn't the only time that open-source data has led to a government losing control of their narrative. At the time, the civil war in Syria was probably the most documented conflict ever, as people filmed bombings and their aftermath and uploaded the videos to social media. Researchers like Bellingcat then used that material to investigate allegations of war crimes, such as the use of chlorine gas against civilians. Open-source data has allowed journalistic work that previously would have been really difficult, either because it happened in a place that you can’t safely go to or because often there previously wouldn't have been adequate evidence to examine.
在新疆,我们借助 开源信息去检验 和驳斥中国政府 关于该区域 真实情况的说法。 但这并非头一回 政府因开源数据 而失去其叙事的主导权。 叙利亚内战 可能是历史上 记录资料最多的冲突。 人们录下了空袭轰炸 及硝烟散去后的满目疮痍, 并将视频上传至社交媒体。 然后像 Bellingcat 这样的调查者 使用这些资料 调查战争犯罪相关的指控, 比如针对平民使用氯气炸弹。 开源数据拓宽了 新闻工作的宽度, 让此前难以开展的 新闻工作成为可能。 此前的难处或是在于 新闻发生地过于危险, 抑或是由于前期一直缺乏 调查所需的足够证据。
Now researchers are using these same tools and techniques to monitor the most recent Russian invasion of Ukraine. One of the first signs of the invasion came in Google Maps with a traffic jam created by Russian artillery moving across the border that blocked the roads for civilian traffic. TikTok videos have given away Russian troop movements. Researchers are investigating potential war crimes and aiming to fact-check claims about the war in close to real time.
目前,研究人员正在利用 相同的工具和技术 来监控最新一轮 俄罗斯对乌克兰的入侵。 此次入侵最早的信号 来自谷歌地图。 地图上的交通堵塞,是由俄罗斯炮兵 陆续跨越边境, 阻塞民用道路所导致的。 抖音上的短视频 同样暴露了俄军的动向。 调查人员目前正在调查 潜在的战争犯罪行为, 目标是实时地核实 俄乌战争相关信息的真实性。
To do this work, satellite imagery is essential. In Xinjiang, we were lucky enough to have satellite imagery, high-resolution, up-to-date, often taken every month or so and available to us for free. This allowed us to verify potential camp locations and to follow the progress of the camp's construction closely. But this isn't true of everywhere that journalists would want to investigate, and we need affordable access to imagery of those places as well. We also rely on access to other forms of data. We not only need people to take photos and videos, we need them to upload them to a platform where researchers can access them. And then we need that material to be preserved. Often social media platforms have removed material showing violence, even when it's providing key evidence of human rights violations. Civil society actors such as the Syrian Archive have stepped in to download and preserve that material.
要实现这一点, 卫星图像至关重要。 我们非常幸运地获得了 新疆的卫星图像。 这些图像分辨率高 且更新及时, 更新频率在一个月左右, 而且可以免费使用。 这才让我们能够确认 营地可能的位置, 并且密切跟进营地的建设进展。 但并非所有 记者想要调查的地方 都有免费、实时、 高清的卫星图像。 同时,这些图像的获取成本 要在可承担的范围内。 我们同样也依赖 其他形式的数据。 我们不仅需要 人们多拍照、多录像, 还需要他们 将这些照片视频 上传至研究人员 能够访问的平台。 然后,我们需要有人 将这些材料保存下来。 社交媒体平台通常会移除 那些展示暴力的内容, 即使这些内容可作为侵犯人权行为的 关键证据也不例外。 像 Syrian Archive 这样的 公民社会团体 已经介入, 去下载保存这些材料。
With social media data and satellite imagery, we can provide evidence of human rights abuses in a way that wasn't possible before. We can move beyond looking at individual instances of human rights violations to show the scale of what's happened. We can corroborate the testimony of eyewitnesses and provide further proof of their stories. We can build a more detailed picture of what's happening to inform policymakers or to provide evidence that can be presented in court. With open-source data, we can provide the evidence needed for accountability and then, hopefully, action.
我们利用社交媒体数据 和卫星图像, 为侵犯人权的行为提供证据, 这在以前是不可能实现的。 我们能够不再局限于 一个个侵犯人权的具体案例, 进而去反映 人权侵犯行为的规模。 我们可以使用证人的证言 进行相互佐证, 为他们的故事提供更多证据。 我们能够更具体地 描绘事件的原委, 为政策制定者提供信息, 或是提供 可以提交法庭的证据。 在开源数据的帮助下, 我们能够提供证据去归究责任, 甚至是采取行动追究责任。
Thank you.
谢谢。
(Applause)
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