Vo.4-Moshirnia-Final

2013 / Valuing Speech and OSINT in the Face of Judicial Deference 450
for eyewitness reports. 354 The resulting list of killings and disappearances
populate a live Crisis Map of Syria. 355
4. Libya
Perhaps the most celebrated deployment of Crisis Mapping in the
security context was the Libya Crisis Map. The Libya crisis began as a series
of peaceful protests in February 2011 that quickly spread into a civil war,
with rebels seeking to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi. The United Nations
responded rapidly, authorizing member states to establish a no-fly zone over
Libya. The Libyan military response, with collective reprisals and
indiscriminate attacks, created an immense humanitarian crisis. There were
few if any formal networks reporting on this crisis; the United Nations had
not been a presence in Libya for several years and therefore had no
Information Management Officers on the ground, and there were no
independent media to speak of in Libya. 356 However, information was
making its way out of the country through social media. The United Nations
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), realizing
that it faced a dearth of situational awareness, sent out a call for assistance
to several crisis mapping groups. 357 One such group that mobilized in
response was the Standby Volunteer Task Force for Live Mapping
(SBTF). 358 The end product of this humanitarian UN collaboration was the
Libya Crisis Map. 359
SBTF ran the Libya Crisis map for twenty-three days before
handing it over to OCHA. 360 In that time, relying on verifiable reports, the
group mapped 1430 reports, many including pictures or embedded video. 361
354 Patrick Meier, Crisis Mapping Syria: Automated Data Mining and Crowdsourced Human
Intelligence, IREVOLUTION, Mar. 25, 2012, http://irevolution.net/2012/03/25/crisismapping-syria/.
355 Id.
356 Libya Crisis Map Deployment: Standby Volunteer Task Force & UN OCHA March-April 2011, 9
(Sept. 2011), available at https://docs.google.com/file/d/0By08EjY3-
T3RR0FqV1lzRldveE0/edit.
357 Id. at 8–9.
358 Id. at 8.
359 Eight major humanitarian NGOs and agencies formally requested access to the
password protected Libya Crisis Map: UNHCR, WFP, Save the Children, IOM, IRC,
SAARA, ICRC, American Red Cross. Id. at 10.
360 Id. at 9–10.
361 Id. at 10.