34C3 - Forensic Architecture

34c3 intro

Herald: Okay, so again, once again: Good
morning to everyone! We are really sorry

for the delay, but as you know this is the
Chaos Communication Congress. Chaos is

part of the show. In any case, we are
ready to start our first speaker for the

day. This is a talk that I'm personally
very excited about. Very interesting in my

opinion. Our first speaker is an
architect. He's a professor of spatial and

visual cultures, and the director of a
forensic architecture at Goldsmiths

University in London. Please give a big
round of applause to Eyal Weizman.

applause

microphone off, inaudible

Eyal Weizman: excited to be here. My first
congress, atually, and I'm sure it's gonna

bring good luck. The fact that we had some
technical equipment problem right now. I'm

running in London something that is better
described as a counter forensic agency, as

a civil society counter forensic agency.
There's no better way to explain what

counter forensics is, a certain turning
around, repurposing of the forensic gaze

towards the state, then looking at a
series of issues where security forces or

the police are the perpetrator. So, what
I'm going to show you today, very fast,

are three cases. The first one in Israel,
second one in Germany, third one in Mexico.

Each one involves violence or alleged
violence by the police and each one also

involves a different mode of research and
technique, in doing so. First one is a

place where I come from, Israel Palestine,
and the issue is really the force eviction

of Bedouin communities that have been
living in the north part of the Naqab or

Negev desert in the south of Israel, for
generations now declared by the state to

be illegally occupying those places and are
subject to continuous raids by which the

police... Oops, you don't see the slides.

Slides? Slide? Guys? Okay. Sorry, one second.

Inaudible

laughter

All right, so I'll tell you a
little bit more about forensic

architecture until until they do so.
Basically what we are is a group of

architects, filmmakers, some investigative
journalists, coders and we join together

to create a forensic agency.
It was a kind of an experiment that we

started around 2010, because we felt that
both,technological and political changes

enabled and demanded a form of counter
forensics that we are now practicing.

Initially, we were working in conflict
zones. Towards, or starting, really, in

this millennium, in the year 2000, war
became an urban phenomena. Almost all

conflicts that we were looking at took
place in cities, in and amongst buildings.

So in a very straightforward way, just
like a medical doctor, a physician can

turn into a pathologist, we architects,
we're turning the tools of our trade,

understanding of building, a way of
interpreting its materiality, its

physicality into an evidentiary technique.
So initially, what we were doing was a

kind of archaeology. Archaeology of the
very recent past, or archaeology of the

present - this is a term by Gilles
Deleuze - and looking at piles of ruin,

of a building that was destroyed in a bomb
or in a firefight, and trying to read from

the disposition of the rubble something
about what has taken place within

and around it. So it started as a kind of
an archaeological practice. But then

again, very often, when we start working in
conflict zones, and the first projects we

had were in Palestine and then in... we
were working to uncover drone warfare in

the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, we
realized very fast...

Technician: Sorry, could you... inaudible
Eyal: Should I what?

Technician: The presentation on that stick
so you can use this laptop.

E: Oh, this gonna take 20 minutes to pass
them.

T: Really?
E: Yeah.

I mean, because I started to put it on a stick,
and... Listen, can you connect this

I'm gonna do something else...
Technician: This is connected. Can you...

E: If you can get an image from this, I'm
just gonna run things from my website.

So, as I said, the first level of our work was
archaeological. Material archaeology,

trying to uncover what has taken place,
where people were. But increasingly, we

realized that we cannot really get to the
places where it was most important for us

to research. That states, when they
violate human rights, or...

T: If you want, you can...
E: Okay. Thank you very much.

Often also do two things: They close the

area to any investigator, any human
right group, or anyone that works to

collect evidence against them. And they
limit the ability of signal to come out of

them. This is actually what happened in
2008, 2009 in Gaza. Very little signal was

coming out of Gaza under attack by Israeli
forces and this is what happened when at

the beginning of the American drone strike
campaign in Pakistan Afghanistan, they

were effectively limiting it. So what
we had to do, and this is what you're

gonna start seeing, is to undertake
archeology through looking at media and

interpreting, really, the kind of flood of
social media images that were coming our

way.

I'm not used to this.

Okay.

applause

Okay, so the first example I would like to
show you is work we've done with a

Palestinian human right organization, Al
Mezan, and Amnesty in Gaza in 2014. We

could not go. We asked for permission to
go to Gaza at that time. Our access was

denied and all we had was about 70
thousand images, that we have collected

during that day and what we had to do,
really, is tell a story of one day: August

1st 2014, morning to evening, which was
the most violent, and the day where most

Palestinian casualties were sustained.
What we didn't have was the metadata on

those clips and images, because of course
they were harvested either from mainstream

or social media and we effectively had to
develop a technique to look at the bomb

clouds themselves to look at them, and
compose the architecture of the bomb cloud

plumes in order to see and collect images
that refer to the same explosion and, back

from there, to determine the time and place
of each one of those bombs. So those bomb

clouds were for us the metadata, they
were kind of like physical metadata. Here

is how we geolocate one of the images
that we found - or one of the clips that we

found - by comparing points on a
perspective of the video with what we see on a

satellite image, located the place where
the photographer was. And by cross-

referencing three of those, of the same
cloud, we managed to find the precise

place where the bomb has finally landed.
So, this is effectively a way in which you

can reconstruct metadata, a time space
location from what we call physical

clocks, that is to say, analog things that
exist within the image itself.

However, we can see other things on this
photograph, too. If we look at one of

those images, here, we have the
videographer capturing two shadow lines in

this photograph. Just a second before
closing off the camera, and what we need

to do is to try to establish the time. If
we can establish the time on that image,

and we know that form of the cloud is that
time, we can triangulate on and establish

the times of other videos, and then move
further. So, effectively by building a 3D

model and running a Sun simulation on it,
we could arrive at a very precise,

within five minutes margin of error, time
on that image. And now we know where this

image, where this video was taken and what
time it is taken in. There is, however,

another in the satellite image that we
obtained - this is a kind of a very rare

occasion. We saw an actual bomb on the
satellite image. Again, this is something...

the satellite image has metadata. And we
started looking, started hunting for that

bomb in images from the ground. Again, if
we could locate that what we see in the

top view on from a ground view, we will be
able to to start establishing times on the

sequence. As you see, this sequence has
metadata, but the metadata is wrongly set

at around midnight. So we compose that
kind of panorama of the bomb

clouds off of the city around that time
and we could identify that cloud. This is

the cloud in side view, this is it in top
view. We could find a precise location, a

precise time, and then by confirming that
is actually the same, we can move back and

correct the digital metadata. So this is
all techniques of actually establishing

the very basic foundational stone of
research time-space relations, between

events.
Here, for example, we could see in two

different corners of the web we find those
images. We can verify it's the same camera

by seeing the same scratch on the lens.
Correct the metadata, establish the time

difference between them and now, here
again, the same camera man with the same

scratch on the lens. And now we can
compose a timeline of bombs during that

day. And after that, of course these kind
of cloud atlases are a technique that was

used by artists and by amateur
meteorologists all the way from the 19th

century on. What we did is creating that
kind of archive of clouds, but here what

you see is that we were able to convert
them to information on the ground, and

then invert the image move from cloud to
city. What you see here, the model, is

something that we call the architectural
image complex. Architectural models are

the only ways to make sense and to place
those multiple images in space-time, so

that we can navigate rather than edit
them. We can navigate between one image

and the other. What you've seen here is
that on one of the images, looking so

carefully at the bomb cloud, we start
seeing two images in mid-fall. We found

the craters, where they have landed. And,
we could, for lawyers calculate the kind

of like the destruction radius there. You
would see now, again those horrific thing

to see a bomb just split seconds before it
land on the ground and would kill 16

palestinian, an entire family. But the
lawyers asked for the size of that bomb,

in order to bring in a kind of a supply
chain action on it. When we see that on

the photo frame we can locate the
photo frame within the model of the city

and actually measure those bombs in a very
precise, with a very small under ten

percent margin of error and then go to the
catalog and find exactly which bomb it was

that landed, and that would enable
activists to go after the manufacturer,

after the policy of doing that.
So again, here we are moving within the

model, with thermodynamic specialists we
look at the way the cloud is changing, in

order to really realize we're looking at
the same clouds. We're picking up now

images and events within the city as
clouds being the anchors of the

reconstruction and that project has in
fact gone later, as evidence was

submitted to the ICC, to the International
Criminal Court and was used in various

other form of activism on the ground. And,
to certain extent, might have contributed

to a change of policy by the IDF, about
the honeybell directives, that is

something that they've enacted during that
day. And the bomb cloud were also

something that was very important, were also
like memory anchors. The witnesses on the

ground remembered and could sequence their
movement according to those bomb clouds.

So think about an element that combines
and ties together material evidence, media

evidence and memory evidence at the same
time. So that's, I don't even, I'm

basically just improvising. It's not at
all the lecture I wanted to show you

before. Here is a very recent
investigation we've undertaken in

Cameroon, and were together again with
Amnesty International we were able to

expose a secret detention center run
by the Cameroonian military where

Boko Haram prisoners or suspects of Boko
Haram prisoners were actually tortured. We

had access to people in Cameroonian
prisons. It is very rare occasion, we were

able to actually send questions back and
forth and reconstruct the architecture of

the prison and the conditions of
incarceration.

But what became very important through the
questions that we continuously posed and

continuously received from those suspects
is that they've actually seen in, at the

beginning we did not know if this was
correct or not, they were obviously seeing

people being tortured and killed outside
of the detention center, but at some point

they also confirmed seeing something
different: American soldiers that were

present
on the site.

Now, as you know the US has claimed that
it has stopped rendition, and stopped

involvement in torture, but this is
something that we started very closely

digging in to see whether we could find
any traces of US soldiers and other

European militaries involved within that,
sort of, incarceration and torture of Boko

Haram suspect. First thing that we saw,
that we noticed was, and sometimes traces

are left in the most kind of unexpected of
places. A contract, an American contract

to connect that base to the Internet. The
minute that we saw that, that was put on

the public domain we started following on
Facebook and seeing some American soldiers

actually forgot to disconnect the location
tagging and you know they're kind of like

holiday photographs. Could be very easily
located onto the base.

Again we've built a model of the base, in

order to confirm, precisely, where each
one of the photograph was taken and we can

see that they had access to the entire
base. Again, a base where people are

executed, tortured, etc. And then tracked
the unit, and as you see the site is

actually under construction. Something
that we could not believe seeing was

American soldiers training the unit that
is doing those atrocities and here in this

almost comical film they train them in
night-vision equipment by playing

football. So they all play football in the
dark with night vision and you could see

that the involvement is very
direct. So that the exposure of that base

led to sort of a full American, at the
beginning denial, always denial, then

admission, then a full investigation by
the US about these allegations.

Another important case that we were
involved with recently is the Ayotzinapa

case. I think maybe many of you know the
story of the 43 students, Mexican

students, that were forcefully disappeared
in Mexico. We were asked by the parents,

and by other civil society group to
in fact.. investigate that.

It's one of the biggest controversies in
Mexico right now, still, although it's

three years since the disappearance.
Students involved in very grassroot, left-

wing politics enter the Intercity that was
very much involved in narcos trade and

were destroyed by the police, the military
and organized crime. What we've done here

is not really collect new evidence, but
look at thousands and thousands of

existing reports and wanting in fact to
data mine them. They were, you know,

hundreds and thousands of documents and
the only way to to make sense of them was

actually to look at relations between
different events in space-time, the

relations between all phone calls,
photographs, movements of cars and gunshot

started creating a very different picture,
than the Mexican government has actually

was willing to admit and that is that
there was some local gang or local sort of

organized crime group that was in charge
of these actions. So, we created a

platform in which we placed every named
actor in space-time, a timeline in all the

communications so that we could start
seeing relation between evidence. Often

it's not a bit of evidence in itself, it's
not the casing or a gunshot that matters,

but actually patterns, coordinations and
patterns of escalations and other things

that actually expose what was going on and
we could show really a direct involvement

between three different police forces and
the military and organized crime at the

same time, the location of all CCTV cameras
that were there and removed, and somehow

the relationship between phone calls and
attacks became most clear indication of

command and control. That these events were
actually coordinated by the police.

Here we are analyzing CCTV cameras and
what they would have seen. Of course the

state, immediately after the event erased
every CCTV camera that existed, that was

available in the city and they said or
they didn't show anything. We could show

exactly what they would have shown at that
moment.

Another element to this is, we

go... so this is the platform, you can
actually go and explore it yourself rather

than as sort of like a work with images.
As I said, this is a work with data. In

one of the most important drawing and in
fact became one of the very influential

drawing during that, in our investigation,
was a kind of a working drawing that we

kept for ourselves, because we had to keep
track of where every agent was. What was

the relationship between them, and also
the multiple narratives that were told. So

we kind of kept a very very long drawing
at the office, plotting the movement of

different actors, until at some point we
realize that what we were drawing, that

working drawing became in fact an image of
disappearance.

Because disappearance is not about,
enforced disappearance of people, is not

only about grabbing people, killing them
and hiding the bodies. Disappearance is

also an attack on evidence. It is the
continuous withdrawal and destruction of

evidence. It is the introduction of false
narratives and subterfuge. So

disappearance is in fact a narrative form
in itself and so here that drawing we

could actually kind of like show how the
state narrative, here in black, I'm not

going to go exactly into what everything
means because we lost a lot of time in

this presentation, but these are the
movement of the students according to the

state narrative. A state narrative that is
still officially holding, although it's

being currently revised in response to
many things, but including also our

investigation. And now you would see that
the victim, the survivor's narrative

completely different. Starts... they enter the
city at a completely different time. They

move through it and the divergence
between the black and the red narrative in

fact is the space of denial and
disappearance. Disappearance as an ongoing

crime, disappearance as a crime on
narrative etc. I'm gonna skip forward,

just that you could see how the drawing is
built up with another here on top the

purple images are, the purple lines,
those of the narcos and, so, each one

tells a different story, and the multiple
stories are in fact that kind of space of

disappearance. Here you would see these
are movements of police, throughout the

city and you would see how that police
force is precisely next to the students

all throughout the attack and moving along
with them. In fact, what we have finally

done - and this is now green, is the
military, etc - is built that we knew about

the, you know, who is it ...

So this is the complete drawing that we've

actually printed as an enormous mural. In
Mexico, murals are kind of sites of

political pedagogy, you can think about
Diego Rivera's great murals in Mexico, in

the US, where their narratives about the
history of the state and about the

struggle of the working class. In a
certain sense, we thought that this is a

kind of a mural of the 21st century, feel
like a kind of a data mural, that is

complicated to read but its complication
is in fact the image of disappearance.

These, the entangled line and
interruptions within it, is what makes

that space.. hold on...

exhibition... I want
to show you the image of that mural in the

space, and it has become, ever since, a
kind of a site of political assembly and

political activism, of protest, for the
families and others, and it kind of shows

for us the use of cultural and art spaces
in the context of our work. Index is another

problem in counter forensic. Very often
our evidence cannot enter the very

official spaces of state justice, they
cannot. It's very rare that one can

actually take the state, challenge the
state legally in its own institutions.

What we need to establish are alternative
forums, and for us these could be public

spaces, exhibitions, etc. I think some of
you might know about the work that we've

done on the NSU, on the Temme, or the
Verfassungsschutz agent, that was suspected

to be present in an internet cafe in
Kassel during the time of a racist

killing, and us showing that he was there.
He could not have missed this event, that

was presented in Documenta, and Documenta
offered for us another very interesting

forum. The fact it was shown there
has in fact mobilized the process,

including in a German federal
investigation, and also in a Hessen

parliamentary investigation, where
different delegations from

this parliamentary investigation came to
Documenta to see it. And finally, that work

was presented to Temme. He was forced to
look at it and to comment upon it.

I think, I should probably leave some time
to question. I'm sorry about the chaotic

presentation, but I guess this is the
nature of this event, so I'm happy to have

had at least a chance to present to you
some work. Thanks for listening.

Applause

Herald: So, thank you all for a very
interesting talk, despite of the

difficulties. If you have any questions,
then there are four microphones, here in

the center aisle and two on the side. And
you can line up and ask your questions,

and first question microphone number one.
Microphone 1: How much has any official

state tried to shut down your
investigations, or...

Eyal: Well, this is... shutdown is a
complicated term. First of all,

we face interruptions initially in not
being allowed access to sites. And this is

very much the question in the West Bank
and Gaza. Our investigators, when they

land in Tel Aviv Airport, sometimes are
interrogated, sometimes they're turned around.

Nothing of that is comparable to what the
Israeli state would have done if these

were Palestinians trying to do the same
thing, so to a certain extent me being an

Israeli Jew, I'm privileged by the state.
And the attempt is to use those privileges

to undo those privileges to a certain
extent. We continuously had interruptions

from the FBI, for example, when we did the
white phosphorus research, that included

work on their attacking Fallujah, Iraq, with
white phosphorus. We had some of our

collaborators in the US's home being
raided. We have, you know,

been trolled and threatened.
But, it's kind of a continuous sort of

dance of us being to, kind of protect our
staff, protect our data, and attempt to

penetrate it. Attempts to smear us on a
public domain, and feel very little

victories sometimes.

Herald: Microphone 4.

4: Thank you very much for your talk. Two
part question here, the first one is about

the framework. Have you developed it
special for this case, do you have it

available, if you build new ones for each
research, and the second part is: How

do you sustain yourself financially.
Eyal: Actually, it's the same question,

because our aim is to develop new
evidentiary techniques, so we kind of

never do the same investigation twice or
we never use the same methodologies twice.

What we do, after we develop any software,
is that we put it on the public domain, we

put it as an open source code. And we, or
if it is kind of techniques of more

architectural or editing image based
techniques, we have academies, we teach

activists how to do it, so we try, whenever
we work with partners on the ground, to

leave capacity behind us. And that is also
the reason... or what enables this to us is

that we are sustained on research grants,
rather than only on commissions.

Although, you know, I mean, if a
prosecutor, human right group, or any other

civil society group would like to
commission us, we would... they would pay

for part of the investigation, but the
large part of it is actually research

grants that translated into open source
stuff, and the investigations are being

put in the public domain. It's kind of, when
you look at our videos, they're a little

bit like cooking programs, because they
both tell you what we find, and they tell

you exactly how to do it. It's kind of,
take you step-by-step, this is what you do

here, then that, then this, etc.

Herald: Microphone 4

4: Thank you so much for your work on
this. My question is like, how would any

of us be able to get involved in this,
support you in one way or another.

Eyal: We, in fact, we are now about 15
architects, coders, and filmmakers and we

are recruiting because we're growing. I
will stay here for the day, so anyone that

wants to come and work with us in London
or remotely, I'll be delighted to speak to

you.
Herald: Microphone 4

4: I have a question about which tools,
which techniques and tools do you use to

perform the 3D reconstruction, and if you
have partnered with any kind of company

that already has inaudible and already
does inaudible 3D inaudible as a

baseline.
Eyal: We started doing now

photogrammetry, as 3D reconstruction
from existing open source images. So

imagine, you know, a place in Syria, let's
say, that has been photographed or video-ed

by many users. We are able
to reconstruct it. In fact this is one of

the techniques we use in order to identify
the gas attack on Khan Sheikhun in

Syria by the regime forces. Reconstructing
precisely, to the millimeter, the shape of

the crater. And we were able to reconstruct
from it the level of explosives etc, and

that they were fitting only that
particular rocket. We don't really work

together with companies, we try to take
existing softwares and kind of

adjust them to our aim. But
initially, what I want to leave you with, is

the question of why architecture is really

important here. In a situation when you
don't have only like two images of the

scene, let's say police brutality or an
attack on a city etc, but you have 70,000

and you need to cross-reference them and
you need to place them within a space, the

only way to do it is in architectural
models. Architecture is like the optical

device that allows us to sync up and
locate, you know, those cameras that are

in space and moving in space. So, it is
really the necessity of work

of architects, filmmakers, and coders is
fundamental, because space replaces the

kind of modernist montage as a relation to
images. Montage is the edits in film, that

is kind of, you know, the basic of cinema,
of political cinema, the dialectic montage,

if you like. You splice film and put it
together.

That makes no sense for us, because we
need to move within space, pick up one

film, not to cut it, we never cut the
films that we have, we just leave them

within the model in the full duration, but
the investigator can move and navigate in

space and time between them, and as I
showed you in a Mexico case, you know,

these are like tens and tens of thousands
of data points that create kind of

intersections, between data image and
architecture, where the story starts

to unfold at all. So yeah.
Herald: More questions. Microphone 3.

3: When you publish the videos and the time
and place from which they were taken,

how do you ensure that you're not putting in
danger the people who took the video.

Eyal: Yeah, this is a really good
question. We..., the work to sync up those

70,000 images from Gaza, where... took us
a year. Think about it, a year... we're

working a year on one day. That's about the
right kind of ratio in forensic time that

we are operating within it. What
protects people during war, during when

they will do it, we'll never place their
location, but months after the conflict it

was deemed by our partners in Palestine
and by our partners in Amnesty, that this

is safe to do without going back to each
source and in fact asking them. We would

never do it in real time, though.
Herald: Microphone 4

4: Yes, the work you do strikes me as very
similar to what bellingcat do, so can you

comment on how forensic architecture
compares to bellingcat?

Eyal: No, we work a lot with bellingcat
and Elliot, I mean some some of our

projects are together, I guess that
our... the difference is not, we engage

more in sort of big environment and kind
of like data analysis, from many sort of

data points, where architecture, or
architectural models, are kind of the arena

that holds and cross-reference all those
images together. The overlap in our work,

really, is a kind of image identification:
What do we see, where the image is located

etc, and on these issues we work with them
together. We tend to work more against

states', western states', militaries, holding
them to account, we feel, is that these

techniques are actually much more useful
directed at the British, American, Israeli

militaries and that we are able also to
draw responses that are effective in these

fields and I guess bellingcat has
slightly different sort of field in which

they work.
Herald: Okay, I think with that, that

would be our last question. So again, a
big round of applause to Eyal for a great

talk.
Eyal: Thank you.

Herald: Thank you very much.

Applause

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