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2013 / Valuing Speech and OSINT in the Face of Judicial Deference 440
V. Crisis Mapping: Concrete Results from Data Mining Rich Open Source
Intelligence
There is a well-understood rights-based argument that all individuals
suffer when policies chill speech. But these policies will also severely impair
our ability to explore and develop crucial new technologies in the field of
human rights and humanitarian intervention. This is important not just
because of OSINT and information we might capture from these new
approaches, but also because it impedes our ability to more effectively deal
with global crises. These crises, of course, relate to rises in terrorist activity,
violence, and the radicalization of marginalized groups. As this Article has
sought to demonstrate, there are robust security reasons for safeguarding the
marketplace of ideas—content-rich analysis provides valuable intelligence in
the war on terror. While previous models of the intelligence cycle assumed
that data collection and analysis would occur primarily at the government
level, in an age of social media and horizontal information sharing,
actionable intelligence is being gathered and disseminated by civilian actors.
Recent efforts by programmers and activists leverage SMS messaging and
Google Maps (and corresponding application programming interfaces or
APIs) as well as social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in
order to create useful intelligence to aid humanitarian efforts.
One of the most striking examples of the utilization of modern
OSINT to create an empowered citizenry is Crisis Mapping. Crisis
Mapping crowd sources the datamining of OSINT to visualize real-life
crises. This Section explains Crisis Mapping, provides two case studies of
the impact of Crisis Mapping on humanitarian responses to world events,
and explores the possible effects of HLP on Crisis Mapping.
A. Crisis Mapping: Information Sourcing, Visualization, and Analysis
Crisis Mapping is the live mapping of crises. 289 Crises may take the
form of sudden disasters or long-term events. 290 While the subject matter of
289Monica Hesse, Crisis Mapping Brings Online Tool to Haitian Disaster Relief Effort, THE
WASHINGTON POST, Jan. 16, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2010/01/15/AR2010011502650.html?hpid=topnews.