analyzing

Topography of the Information Warfare

Vladan Joler (RS)

Governments, political actors and companies are now experimenting with more sophisticated ways (harder to detect and document) of exerting internet control and disturbance in the information flow. The aim of this analysis was to explore (and visualize) some of the forms and methods of interventions that various political actors or power structures have been using to control and conquer various online spheres. Here we mostly focused on hidden, indirect actions, interventions by unknown actors, companies without visible ties to government officials, political troll armies and troll lords and “artificial” entities. This map is based on a 5-year internet monitoring process and over 400 different cases of violations documented and analyzed by the Share Foundation. Though different methods represented in this map are observed in our local context, we believe that they are also being used worldwide in similar forms. This map is an attempt to interconnect most of those issues into one map, one possible narrative, one possible reading of those processes.

VFRAME: Visual Forensics and Metadata Extraction

Adam Harvey (US), Josh Labouve (US)

In conflict zones around the world, serious human rights violations repeatedly occur through the use of illegal munitions. VFRAME shows how surveillance technologies can be used to document such violations – for example in the Syrian conflict. A visual search engine was trained to analyze video data sets from battle zones to spot such weapons. In order to train the neural network of the search engine to recognize them even in low-resolution recordings, 3D models were created and fed into the object detection software.