Scatter and Keep Working
Human rights workers and everyday citizens are asking: how do we deal with the evolving and very real threats we are facing?
Part Two of Our Three Part “Gathering the Data” Series. Read part one.
As a statistician, I spend most of my days working at a computer.
Because I work with data about human rights violations, I go to places where I can document evidence of crimes—like disappearances, killings, and torture. So while I may just be working at a computer, those computers can be in places where there is still the potential for violence to emerge.
Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about how to work in countries emerging from conflict. Those lessons seem especially applicable today, as the world faces new and changing dangers. More human rights workers and even everyday citizens are asking: how do we deal with the evolving and very real threats we are facing?
In 1992, I worked with the non-governmental Human Rights Commission (the Spanish acronym was “CDHES”) in El Salvador. I was building a database to catalogue, as accurately as possible, the human rights violations that occurred during the country’s 12 year civil war. My job was building the structure of the database, guiding a small data entry team, and then designing queries and rudimentary programs that would allow us to gain insights into the violence—and paint a true history of what happened.
A few months into the project, the CDHES leadership began receiving anonymous calls threatening to kill our staff if we continued to create "defamation from computers." This was new to me, but not at all to my colleagues at CDHES. Previously, CDHES staff members had been killed and once their office had even been blown up. Before that violence, there had been threats just like the ones we were receiving. The CDHES leadership had developed a playbook over the years for dealing with these threats, and they used it now: scatter the work and keep going.
I moved to a safe house. It wasn't much, just an unoccupied apartment in los cuatrocientos, a development of four-story cinderblock buildings in San Salvador's working-class Zacamil neighborhood, but it had a bathroom, a dining room table for our computers, and beds on the floor. Moving wasn't easy because laser printers and computers were heavy in the early 1990s. We lugged the steel box that held the PC, plus an awkward, low-resolution monitor, and a crummy keyboard. No computer in El Salvador at the time could function without a 50 pound Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS). Much of the country's electrical grid had been repaired since the civil war formally ended in January of that year, but the electricity still went down dozens of times each day.
In the apartment, I focused on building the databases and reports that would later be used to prosecute the egregious human rights violations committed against the Salvadoran people. My work also helped bring clarity and offer a true accounting of the past—one of the most important aspects of the scientific work we continue to do at HRDAG.
The approach of human rights workers in El Salvador for responding to threats of violence feels as applicable today as at any other moment in my career:
First, scatter.
To safeguard documents and important files, it is vital to decentralize them so there is no single point of failure—no single office to raid or destroy or lose in a natural disaster. Computer security experts always emphasize the importance of creating backups in secure locations, and that lesson matters even more when dealing with sensitive human rights data in conflict zones. For the dozens of terabytes of data about human rights violations that HRDAG currently hosts, this means we have created secure backups and moved them to multiple locations in multiple jurisdictions. Though a time consuming task, this helps ensure that, if any of these files are ever taken or destroyed, we will still have another secure copy.
The concept of decentralization applies not only to important files but to people as well. In El Salvador, I moved to a safer location and my colleagues went to different locations, ensuring there was no single location that would be vulnerable to an attack.
Then, keep working.
This may be the most important lesson I learned in El Salvador. My colleagues who were working night and day to document human rights violations and seek justice did not pause their work out of fear of personal risk. Instead, they kept working, as did I.
The act of engaging in human rights work in the face of potential violence can be seen as an act of bravery and selflessness—and it is certainly both of those things—but it is ultimately about a commitment to the work and the hope that the research and scientific analysis we create will contribute to justice.
Plus, it is the role of scientists to seek out the truth. If uncovering that truth requires traveling into dangerous and volatile situations, then that is the price we pay for practicing our craft. If we stop working just because we face threats, those who threaten violence will succeed in their efforts to silence us.
Working to document the evidence of human rights violations has always carried some risks. But today, I hear from more people working at human rights organizations and partner groups that feel themselves under acute threat. Those threats can come in many forms—financial, legal, and even physical safety threats. There is a lot of uncertainty about how to move forward with purpose while fulfilling the core mission of our work.
Faced with uncertainty and danger, I return to these early lessons from El Salvador: scatter the work and then, most importantly, keep working.
-PB
This article was written by Patrick Ball, Director of Research for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), a nonprofit organization using scientific data analysis to shed light on human rights violations. You can also follow us on Bluesky, Mastodon, and LinkedIn.
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