Governance, Infrastructure, Information (DIIS Talking Points 5)
Copenhagen, 17 September 2024
This research note on governance and infrastructure is the fifth in a series on evidence controls and digital technologies. The series summarises points raised at the Danish Institute for International Studies, and of research now part of a larger project on information and communications technology.
Evidence is a multidisciplinary set of issues, and both analogue and digital forms of it will continue to shape the research landscape. Importantly, conflict zones are competitive research environments, where actors undertake research organized around differing purposes, competencies, and ethical and legal considerations: journalists, academics, intelligence officers, police investigators, development sector consultants, and so on. Have all of them adopted forensic or any other sort of methodologically sound standards or codes of practice? I think it’s unlikely. As ever, the truth is probably a mixed bag. There is nonetheless a view that forensic standards and expectations should be the norm. Whether or not they have been democratized, there is greater pressure to adopt them to deal with the commonly occurring legal issues that overlap other research interests. This raises problems.
Some initial points:
Governance frameworks: There is an urgent need for frameworks that balance digital innovation with accountability. As warfare becomes more networked, the challenge lies not just in leveraging digital tools effectively, but in ensuring that they serve justice, historical and regulatory integrity, and the protection of civilians. There will need to be greater scrutiny than ever and clear, reliable governance, to handle three sets of issues: the use of battlefield intelligence for purposes other than its predictive military utility, the increasingly fuzzy lines between closed-source and open-source intelligence, and the challenges that these points raise for evidence controls and the rule of law.
Infrastructure begets information. There is no message without a medium, and there is no medium that exists in the absence of a real, physically present broadcast or communications infrastructure. To put it another way, there has to be infrastructure to begin with - a set of material resources and capabilities, in other words - for information and evidence, digital or otherwise, to be generated.
Evidence covets infrastructure. There must be a material scaffold or housing available for a range of activities to be possible: sensing, sorting, indexing, preservation, storage, conversion (such as digitization of non-digital to digitally usable formats), exploitation - all to ensure its viability across domains, including as court-admissible evidence. The alternative is a memory hole - an infrastructural nullity where the utility and accessibility of unscaffolded information collapses under the weight of indifference or malign intent.
Data processing standards. Garbage in, as they say, is still garbage out. The viability of evidence depends on multiple forms of technical expertise and rigorous handling to strict specifications. This reinforces a compelling argument for adaptable multidisciplinary evidence controls and standards. The basics involve data and evidence processing - dead boring, unsexy, labour intensive, and often enough, a wilfully neglected or ignored set of activities. I’ve observed practitioners woefully regret the consequences of their wilful disregard for such fundamentals. Occasionally, one is directly exposed to the benefits of basic but effective data processing and management, undergoes the proverbial conversion on the road to Damascus, and thereafter refuses to sacrifice this at the altar of expensive, flashy “advanced analytics” or the like. Evidence now is multimedia and digital, and tends to be collected in vast quantities. Without due attention to the fundamentals of effective triage, sorting, organising, and review, collection successes will inevitably represent analytical failures and missed opportunities.
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Author Bio: Dr. Michael A. Innes is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, where he founded and directs the Conflict Records Unit. He maintains an active consultancy portfolio as managing director and lead consultant at Craighead Kellas SAAR.
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Dr. Matthew Ford at the Swedish Defence University, Dr. Jethro Norman at the Danish Institute for International Studies, and Professor Myrjam de Brujn at Leiden University. Their publications and arguments on Ukraine, Mali, and digital technology impacts directly inform corresponding elements of this research note.
Author Declaration: This research note summarises unfunded research conducted independently by the author. A variety of tools including generative AI were used to track references, collate notes, summarise findings, and suggest an overall report structure. The author manually drafted this research note in its entirety.