Investigation is
Collaboration
Exposing the Invisible Together

Credits
Contributing authors
Di Luong, Tyler McBrien
Editors
Laura Ranca, Tyler McBrien
Designİpek Erdöl
Design supervision
Yiorgos Bagakis
Illustrations
Ann Kiernan, Yiorgos BagakisCommunication
Alexander Ockenden
Exposing the Invisible project team
Laura Ranca, Wael Eskandar, Christy Lange, Marek Tuszynski,
Carolina Soligo, Dominika Knoblochová.
Special Thanks
The content of this e-book would not have been possible
without the inspiring speakers at the “Investigation is Collaboration"
conference on 2-6 August 2021.
------This e-book is part of a series of events, resources and publications produced by
Exposing the Invisible during a one-year project (September 2020 - August 2021)
supported by the European Commission (DG CONNECT)

The content reflects the authors’ view and the Commission is not responsible
for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

2Overview
Investigators are everywhere. They are requesting information from theirlocal governments. They are using geolocation and satellite imagery to
document human rights abuses. They are interviewing patients at a nearby
hospital. They are holding up their cell phones in the face of police brutality.
All around us, people are digging deeply to tell stories, expose the invisible,and hold power to account.
Unfortunately, investigation can seem like an isolating prospect for some,
especially those living in countries where it’s safer to investigate under
the cover of darkness.
But we’d like to see this change in time.
In early August 2021, Tactical Tech’s “Exposing the Invisible” project
organised an online conference, which brought together civil society
investigators, journalists, artists, human rights researchers and manyothers to demonstrate the power of collaboration.
We called the conference “Investigation is Collaboration.” It’s a simple
yet powerful idea. There are so many kinds of collaboration, across skills,
regions, topics, professions and goals. Each have their merits, leading
to better coverage of topics, stronger safety, more diversity, happierinvestigators, wider audience reach, more substantial impact —the list goes on.
We heard from investigators at the forefront of the field who talked about:→ investigating 'in the open' and reaching out to humansources confidently→ making the best out of collaboration to enhancecross-border projects→ how to keep safe and aware by assessing risks like a pro→ overcoming data-phobia and getting started withdatasets to tell the stories hidden in the numbers→ investigative initiatives and new projects combining
documentation, reporting, tech and yes, collaboration→ best practices and tips on crowd-sourcing evidence
for investigations→ creative ways of telling investigative stories andreaching people where they are, not where we want them to be.
What follows is an invaluable list of resources and best practices that arosefrom those discussions, memorialized here for potential collaborators
to access whenever, wherever. We hope you’ll use them to keep theconversations and collaborations going. Get in touch if you wish to talkto us, ask us something or share ideas: eti@tacticaltech.org

3This e-book is a collection of articles providing snapshots from the inspiring sessions of
the conference “Investigation is Collaboration: Exposing the Invisible Together" organised by
Tactical Tech’s “Exposing the Invisible” Project on 2-6 August 2021.

Contents
PAGE 06“Killing one is easy, killing a network is impossible”:
The Power of Collaboration

PAGE 08

How do we know things? - The Investigator’s Dilemmaand Working with Absent Evidence

PAGE 12“It Takes a Crowd...”: Tips and examples ofusing crowdsourcing to collect information

PAGE 18“Stronger Together” - Creating a Plan for Collaboration

PAGE 22

How to Build a More Diverse Newsroom, for Real

PAGE 24

An Arena for Climate Collaboration:"My climate issue is your climate issue"

PAGE 28

How a Chance Collaboration Exposed
Secretive Government Actions in China

PAGE 30

The Archive as Activism: Lessons from Mnemonic
and the Syrian Archive

PAGE 34

Getting Creative with Geolocation

PAGE 38

The Savvy Investigator’s Toolkit

PAGE 42

Risk Assessment Is a Mindset, Not a Checklist

PAGE 46

Investigative Commons: A new era ofhuman rights investigation

PAGE 50

Communicating with a purpose:
Investigative Storytelling

“Killing one is easy,
killing a network is impossible”:
The Power of Collaboration
by Tyler McBrien"Ten years ago, collaborative journalism wassomething unusual, quite often weird –why to share my precious information withsomeone else? Fortunately, this has changed.
Collaborative stories are a new trend, because
they are powerful, they have impact andthey protect the journalists; because killing one
is easy, killing a network is impossible."6

Investigators want to make a splash. Deep
down, investigators hope their months or evenyears of meticulous research combing throughspreadsheets, scraping the internet for data andtracking down sources has not been in vain.
But, as Pavla Holcová, a regional editor andinvestigative journalist with the Organized Crime
and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), knows
all too well, a story’s impact isn’t something
you can plan out perfectly. Sometimes you see
the results of a story happen immediately, andsometimes you can feel its effects five years after
publication. A bombshell investigation could help
topple a regime in one country but have no effectin another country that was central to the story.
This is also unfortunately true with negative
impacts. As an investigator working on sensitive
topics, you could end up in jail or, in the mosttragic cases, dead.

ruling elite, looking at their hidden wealth andinfluence abroad. The Azerbaijani government
sought to silence Khadija (and other journalists)
and to put a stop to her investigations throughyears of harassment, arrests and subsequentimprisonment.
But the government had underestimated Khadija
Ismayilova and the power of collaboration. As
Pavla Holcová says, “Collaborative stories are a
new trend, because they are powerful, they have
impact and they protect journalists; because
killing one is easy, killing a network is impossible.”
Pavla and the team at OCCRP knew that the best
way to honor Khadija’s sacrifice would be tocontinue to expose the corruption and misdeedsof Azerbaijan’s ruling elite, and so she and hercolleagues did just that with a renewed sense of
purpose under the banner The Khadija Project.
“We will be Khadija x 100,” they promised.

Pavla Holcová puts it this way:
“Imagine you have the story of your life.
Sensitive material, classified documents,
exclusive testimonies. You are the one andonly journalist doing the story, the one andonly who has it all. And you are going to show
to all your competitors how powerful a story
you can deliver. And this is exactly what makes
you an easy target, this is what might get you
killed.”In other words, if you’re going at it alone, whatever
happens to you also happens to your story andeverything you were working toward. Fortunately,
there’s a powerful safeguard: collaboration.
As Pavla urges:“Collaboration can save your life. Not only
your life, but also your colleague’s life, the lifeof your story and its impact.”
One example from Pavla Holcová’s work illustrates
this point perfectly: Project Khadija.
In 2015, her close colleague, award-winningjournalist Khadija Ismayilova, was sentenced
to seven and a half years in prison on trumped
up charges in her home country of Azerbaijan.
Pavla and Khadija had collaborated on a series ofstories uncovering corruption among Azerbaijan’s

7

For months while Khadija was in prison, theteam at the Khadija Project continued to publish
groundbreaking investigations, with Khadija
Ismayilova as the byline. The Azerbaijani
government was furious. After each new story,
prison guards would search Ismayilova’s cell,convinced that she was somehow smuggling
information and articles out of the jail to publish.
The Khadija Project team and their investigations
were finalists for the 2017 Global Shining Light
Award from the Global Investigative Journalism
Network (GIJN), while their efforts achieved
something even more precious. Khadija wasset free in 2016, thanks to the tireless efforts ofjournalists and human rights activists, and forthe international attention gained through thiscollaborative project.
“Collaboration is a Lifesaver. Literally” says
Pavla Holcová.
Recommended further reading:"Investigation is Collaboration: How to Make It
Work", by Ankita Anand, in the Exposing theInvisible Kit. An extensive guide with advice,tips and resources on how to start and manage
collaborative investigations safely and ethically.

How do we know things? The Investigator’s Dilemma andWorking with Absent Evidence
by Di Luong“Do we know things? How do we know them?
Philosophers have been asking these questions
for thousands of years. But for investigators andresearchers, they have a particular resonance.
What do we do when we investigate? How do wederive meaning from data and the absence ofdata?” (Crofton Black*). - In this brief article welook at one investigative project that used creativemeans and plenty of collaboration to draw
meaning from absent information in order toexpose a global operation of rendition and secretdetentions conducted by the CIA.

8

Welcome to the dilemma that investigators face day to day:
“Do we know things? How do we know them?” - Investigators
deal with imperfect knowledge, they build knowledge fromlittle bits of data and oftentimes, they build knowledge fromevidence gaps, from the invisible.
In 2010 writer and investigator Crofton Black started
working on uncovering operations of the CIA’s (USA Central
Intelligence Agency) Eastern European secret prison sites,
also called “black sites” due to the secrecy surrounding
them. This research took him and an large team - including
other investigators, human rights defenders, lawyers andjournalists - years of meticulous and creative work.
Extraordinary rendition programs are highly classified,extrajudicial operations, which involve governmentsponsored actions of abducting and relocating suspects
from their home countries to other regions for interrogation,
torture and secret detention.
The challenge the team faced seemed initially unresolvable.
Firstly, they were looking into a secret (by default) global
operation. Secondly, when they finally got documents that
could shine some light on the grievous issue they were
investigating - that is, the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program,its victims, methods and those involved - almost all theimportant information had been redacted, blacked out
literally. They addressed the challenge primarily throughseeking and finding evidence from the absence of data
and by combining various methods, skills and tools that
only a collaborative effort could have enabled. Their
years of investigation led to successful litigation at theEuropean Court of Human Rights and a comprehensive
report - CIA Torture Unredacted - on the history of the CIA's
extraordinary rendition program.

Snapshot by the author of an Extractfrom the Committee Study, with dates,
CIA officers and cable data redacted,
and with PSEUDONYMS for black sites
and contractors; page 24; “CIA Torture
Unredacted: An Investigation Into the
CIA Torture Programme;” Project by
The Rendition Project, The Bureau of
Investigative Journalism, University ofWestminster, The University of Sheffield,
2019; written by Sam Raphael, Crofton
Black and Ruth Blakeley.

9The team’s meticulous work produced perhaps
the most detailed public account of the entire
torture program led by the CIA in the time periodof the so-called “war on terror” between 2001 and2009. It is very important to read the entire reportby Sam Raphael, Crofton Black and Ruth Blakeley
to understand the scale, depth and extent of thisprogram, including detailed profiles of prisoners,
locations of secret sites, complex networks ofprivate companies involved in the program anda detailed overview of apparent complicity by anumber of key countries.
For a more complex review of this investigationand more insight into what visible and invisible
traces, signs and symbols can help reveal in an
investigation, read our Exposing the Invisible Kit
guide Signs, Symbols and Other Visual Clues.
Crofton Black shared some lessons from thisresearch process that took plenty of collaborative
work, creativity and patience to unravel.
At the heart of this investigation was a sense of
emptiness. Their team of researchers had to startwith what was still visible in the otherwise heavily
redacted documents in order to derive traces ofprison locations from many different sources ofincomplete data. This research could not include
testimonies from prisoners so they relied on
secondary sources from Amnesty International,
inquiries in archives, flight records, financial
documents gathered from Freedom Of Information Act(FOIA) requests and other sources.

Some lessons learned from this investigation:→ Learn the language and vocabulary ofthe ‘field’ you are researching - In this case,investigators learned to understand theoverall structure of the documents throughunderstanding communication protocols andacronyms used by those running the rendition
program activities.
→ Look for the gaps in data and make use ofthem when building your evidence - There
were also many gaps or holes in the data theteam had available. Prisoner testimonies
were detailed, but contained inaccuracies andgaps. However, investigators used this to theiradvantage by using the absence of information
as indicators. For example, investigators
deduced that gaps in flight information
represented prison transfers.
→ Connect the dots to meet a goal - Unlike
journalistic reporting, filing a lawsuit (which iswhat this research was also used for) needs toprove an argument and have a focused goal. In
other words, to clearly show a cause and effectfrom point ‘A’ to point ‘Z.’ Connecting between
two points of data, investigators were able tosee a pattern, and finally understood where aplane went from the flight data.
→ Believe what you see...but verify - Wheninvestigating, hypotheses don’t need to be trueor probable, but must be consistent with theobservations.

Among the challenges they encountered were:→ Heavily redacted governmental documents.
→ FOIA requests often depended on luck assome requests were successful and others
were unsuccessful.
→
Disparate documents that required
researchers to identify common themes - forexample, synthesising flight records into one
coherent flight pattern by connecting flightnumbers, dates, and travel invoice numbers.
None of these documents were machinereadable so this information had to be
manually entered to create a database.

→ Build a bigger picture, then break it down
to understand the parts - Investigators were“drowning in data” as they have collected 15
millions lines of transactions related to therendition flights and the companies contracted
to run the CIA operations across borders. It
took years to synthesise the data into coherent
information and ultimately into stories. It wasessential for the team to create a chronologyof records and find meaningful entry points
into this data as well as human stories that
could bring the data and the meanings behind
it to a wider audience. In philosophical terms,
investigators needed to understand the wholeby understanding the parts.

10

*Crofton Black is a writer and investigator. He is co-author of Negative Publicity:
Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition and CIA Torture Unredacted, and works ontechnology and security topics for The Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London.
Before this he was a history of philosophy academic, specialising in theories ofknowledge and interpretation. He has a PhD from the Warburg Institute, London and
was a Humboldt Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin.
More info at https://www.crofton.black/11

“It Takes a Crowd...”: Tips andexamples of using crowdsourcing
to collect information
by Di Luong

Crowdsourcing is increasingly used by journalists,
activists, researchers and citizen investigators
to collect information, verify it and build a bodyof evidence that can help expose issues affecting
communities everywhere. What are the main needs,
methods and considerations to be aware of whensetting up and managing a crowdsourcing effort?

12

What is crowdsourcing and when to use it?
Crowdsourcing is the practice of asking large numbersof people to contribute feedback or information on a
specific topic, incident, problem, etc. News organisations,NGOs, researchers and journalists are increasingly using
crowdsourcing as a form of information collection in orderto engage with communities and activate people by asking
them to think about a subject, report issues or explore
solutions.
The term crowdsourcing was first coined by Jeff How in a2006 “Wired” magazine article where he defined it as a new
way of sourcing labor enabled by the Internet. Different
types of commercial and non-commercial crowdsourcing
emerged since.
→ For instance, Wikipedia, is the best example ofcollective knowledge sourcing, while Ushahidi is a
popular platform for crowdmapping information.
→ Bellingcat is an organisation focused on online
citizen investigations and often uses crowdsourcing
on social media to gather information, document
and verify events as part of its stories and reports.
For instance, one of their flagship investigations
into the downing of the Malaysia Airlines 17 (MH17)passenger airplane in Ukraine in 2014 relied heavily on
crowdsourcing.
→ Another example is a 2017 collaboration between
Amnesty International and Airwars’ in a joint
investigation into the bombing of Raqqa, Syria, which
involved over 138 thousand volunteer contributors
from 124 countries.
What to consider in crowdsourcing-based projects?
Tetyana Bohdanova - who researches the impact oftechnology on democracy, specialising in elections
monitoring and civil society engagement - proposesa framework for developing and implementing
crowdsourcing initiatives. This framework can be applied
to any crowdsourcing-driven project, from collecting
information from the public as part of investigations ormonitoring ongoing events (like demonstrations, natural
disasters) to mapping specific problems in an area or
seeking answers to a question:
1. Define the purpose of your initiative
2. Consider ethics, legality, and safety
3. Define audience, format, and duration
4. Identify the best method
5. Effectively engage contributors
6. Identify the right tools
7. Set up a data verification process
8. Analyse data and present findings

13

Image: Pros and Cons of using crowdsourcing in your investigation or research project. Courtesy of a presentation
by Tetyana Bohdanova - see full presentation on the topic of “Beyond DOs and DON'Ts: Main considerations forcrowdsourcing evidence.”

1. Define the purpose of your initiative
Why do you want/need to crowdsource? It could be that you want to gather data
and build evidence for a story, to support other organisations in their research
and advocacy, to raise awareness about a problem, or to mobilise people aroundan important issue, event, etc.
Whichever the purpose, it’s important to remember that when setting up
a crowdsourcing effort, you need to weigh the risks because data could bemanipulated or corrupted by opposing entities. This method does not need to be
the primary source of data collection for your project, it can be used in parallelwith other sources like field research, satellite imagery research, or verificationof other media sources to ensure data accuracy.
2. Consider ethics, legality, and safety
To ensure that “crowds” indeed have access to submit information to you, youneed to make an effort to provide widely accessible tools and platforms forthat to happen. This means using tools that are inclusive. For instance, don’t
employ crowdsourcing platforms and tools that only work with strong internet
connectivity or with laptops in a context when none of these may be easily
accessible to the majority of people. In addition, when managing crowdsourcing
projects, you are also responsible for raising awareness to and mitigating
the risks of those involved, thus being transparent about the safety issues
contributors may face.
3. Define audience, format, and duration
Consider who are the beneficiaries. Beneficiaries may be different thancontributors.

14

4. Identify the best method
There are various methods and formats to crowdsource information, such as
structured, unstructured, or a mixed approach - and they all depend on the goal,
context, beneficiaries, among others:
When an investigation is fishing for tips, don’t limit the format. People
contributing should be able to submit this data in an unstructured format that iseasiest for them, e.g., email, text, or photo, etc.
In a scenario that involves a humanitarian response for instance, every piece of
information should be submitted in a structured format - such as location andtime - to be able to quickly analyze data and act upon it.
In case of a mixed method, investigators are aware that in the heat of the processpeople can’t provide data in one preferred format so allowing more flexibility
might be necessary.
5. Effectively engage contributors
You may choose a great topic, collaborate with other organisations, use the righttools, but if the audience does not contribute, there is no crowdsourcing. Get toknow your audience and think about the benefits and risks associated with thisengagement. Audiences are inspired to participate when the benefits are clear,
the process is transparent and the results can be quickly demonstrated.
6. Choose appropriate tech tools
Identify the right tools by considering the technology environment like theinternet connectivity or high/low access to specific devices. Consider the habitsof the audience involved as they may be slow to accept new technology. Also,
how much security do you really need from the tech you use in crowdsourcing?
It’s worth evaluating the tech tools and software you will use based on yourneeds and context. Start by reading some helpful introductory materials like the“Safety First!” guide in the Exposing the Invisible Kit and the article “Technology
Is Stupid: How to choose tech for remote working” by Marek Tuszynski.
7. Set up a data verification process
Establish when data is considered verified or has been deemed readyfor publication. An example of data verification may include comparing
crowdsourced data with media reports. For more tips and methods ofverification, check valuable resources such as the “Verification Handbook: A
Definitive Guide To Verifying Digital Content For Emergency Coverage” and the“Verification Handbook For Disinformation And Media Manipulation.”
8. Analyse data and present findings
When presenting the collected data, it’s indicated to describe the method
or methodology of the crowdsourcing process and the public’s engagement.
Showing how results or conclusions have been derived could bolster thecredibility of your findings and of the stories or reports you publish. It is also
highly important to express gratitude and give credit to collaborators, teammembers, tool developers, etc.

15

Example: CrowdNewsroom - “It needs the crowd to get the bigger story”
The independent investigative non-profit CORRECTIV designed CrowdNewsroom
as a platform for investigators to create and conduct collaborative projects with thehelp of communities. Justus von Daniels, Editor-in-Chief of CORRECTIV and oneof the initiators of CrowdNewsroom, notes that while crowdsourcing is a powerful
way to engage the community, databases of information collected from people via
this process may raise various considerations related to validity of data, safety
risks to people providing the data as well as the security of data storage and sharing
by the project organizers themselves. Databases with crowdsurced information
contain sensitive information, including personal data such as locations of people
contributing - many of them being possibly at risk in their own contexts. Theserisks need to be made transparent to everyone participating. Therefore, whilerunning such projects may seem like an easy of way of gathering information, it
requires a major investment of time, communication, skills and funding to ensure
contributors’ and data safety, data validity and transparency as well as a desired
impact of the findings and resulting stories.
CORRECTIV spearheaded Who owns Hamburg?, an ongoing crowdsourcing
project, asking the public for information related to ownership conditions in theirlocal residential real-estate market of the German city of Hamburg.The reason
for starting this project was that there is no open and transparent database ofresidential property owners in German cities and nobody really knows who are the
big real-estate owners controlling the local housing prices market.
With “Who owns Hamburg?”, data security and accountability were essential forestablishing and maintaining trust with people contributing information to theproject. Most of them were local tenants providing sensitive information about
who owns the houses they rented. Security measures were crucial because sucha crowdsourced project may be targeted by those being investigated or by anyone
else opposing such an investigative initiative.
From the CrowdNewsroom’s experience, these are some questions that the public
may initially ask to organisers of a crowdsourced project:→ Who is running the server where my information is submitted/collected?
→ Where is server located? (It is essential for investigators carrying out
crowdsourcing efforts to invest a lot in data security to increase trust.)→ Who has access to database?
→ Who are your partners?
→ How trustworthy are your partners?
In addition to prioritising risk assessment and risk mitigation in such a collaborative
effort, there is the need to motivate and engage contributors in order to havean effective and ultimately successfully crowdsourcing project. This includes
understanding their political and social conditions and what drives them to wantto contribute. People are more likely to participate when they are inspired by theinvestigation and clearly see the benefits of the investigation to address the issues
and topics they care about or are affected by. A crowdsourcing-based investigationneeds to strike a balance between demonstrating results quickly so as to inspire
more contributors while also considering the long term safety and well-being ofcontributors.

16

*Tetyana Bohdanova is an elections and civil society development specialist and a
researcher of technology’s impact on democracy. She has over a decade of field-based
experience in citizen engagement and electoral transparency work across Eastern
Europe and Eurasia, including the implementation of crowdsourcing projects in
restrictive environments.
*Justus von Daniels is Editor-in-Chief of the german non-profit newsroom CORRECTIV.
He joined CORRECTIV in 2015 as an investigative reporter. In 2018 he led the project"Who owns the city", a crowd-based investigation with 10000 participants and sevenmedia partners. The project and individual publications won several awards. Justus isa trained lawyer and obtained a PhD before joining journalism.

17

“Stronger Together” Creating a Plan for
Collaboration
by Di Luong"In an increasingly complex social, political andeconomic environment, and in times of lurking
crises, from Covid-19 to the climate emergency,
we need to collaborate if we are to investigate suchcomplex phenomena. However, depending on
how you go about it, being part of a collaborative
investigation can be one of the most rewarding or
one of the most stressful projects you participate in(or, most likely, both things at the same time)."(Jose Miguel Calatayud)18

In May 2021, a team of over 25 investigative and data journalists and visualisation
experts from 16 European countries launched Cities for Rent: Investigating Corporate
Landlords Across Europe, a collaborative effort looking at the critical housing issues
affecting many European cities where people can no longer find affordable anddecent places to live. This cross-border investigation found that since the 2007/2008
financial crisis international investment funds and housing corporations have been
buying homes across European cities, driving the purchase as well as the rental
prices sky high. In addition to making housing inaccessible to many of the these cities
inhabitants, stories have emerged of abusive practices by ‘corporate landlords’, thecompanies that buy and rent out housing for profit.
The Cities for Rent team, coordinated by the international non-profit Arena for
Journalism in Europe worked for over seven months to collect, analyse and visualisedata to address several crucial questions: Where is all that money coming from? Who
are the companies and investors buying so much housing across Europe? How does
this phenomenon affect people’s lives and homes in European cities?
We all know that such a collaboration across border and skills (remember it took ateam of over 25 people in 16 countries) does not happen by itself and is by no means
an easy enterprise. It requires communication, time, skills, money, access to data,collaboration, and most important of all - coordination, and someone to do it. This iswhere freelance journalist Jose Miguel Calatayud*’s work, experience and resilience
was key. As the co-initiator and coordinator of the The Cities for Rent team and project(and of many other collaborative projects before that), Jose shares the essentialconsiderations to keep in mind when managing a collaborative investigation at any
scale:
1. Maintain and coordinate a realistic workload
2. Clearly define goals and expectations
3. Facilitate communication and promotetransparency between all partners
4. Plan, plan, plan

Cities for Rent: Investigation Corporate Landlords Across Europe
Snapshot from video
trailer of The Cities for
Rent project. Source:
Arena for Journalism inEurope YouTube page19

1. Maintain and coordinate a realistic workload
Collaboration is an opportunity to bring together a diverse team, and it can increase
the richness and impact of what is published. Make an honest assessment of your ororganization’s capacity and resources like time, expertise, and funding.
What type of collaboration is the best fit or aligns with your goals? It could be as simple
as sharing contacts, amplifying each other’s work, exchanging skills and expertise.
For example a potential collaborator may speak a language you do not speak.
2. Clearly define goals and expectations
Collaborators should have a shared vision. One tip to make sure everyone is on thesame page is to share the group’s mission with the public. Collaborations often occur
when individuals are seeking each other’s experiences. Expertise is helpful, but trust
is just as important.
One question to consider when defining expectations and goals is who does what.
Also consider how the team makes decisions: should it be a quorum, majority vote, oranother avenue to obtain consensus? A memorandum of understanding (MOU) could
potentially ensure accountability.
Here is a checklist of potential tasks to delegate:→ Securing external funding or support is needed→ Managing the data
→ Documenting the project→ Promoting outcomes of the investigation→ ‘Post-mortem’ analysis (lessons learned after the investigation wraps up)
3. Facilitate communication and promote transparency between all partners
Journalists and others who investigate use phrasing and jargon or “technicallanguage” that are different than what developers, activists or policy experts would
use. Collaborators need to make an extra effort with individuals across different
sectors or from other professional backgrounds. We may say the same thing, but do wemean the same thing?
Differences are not barriers. A mutual understanding of these divides will help you
build bridges early in your collaborative efforts. Here is an example checklist:→ Different visions - are we informing the public or changing the world?
→ Different pace of work - can we agree on the calendar? What is the timelineof the project? For example, the process for publishing in a newspaper or online
media is often much shorter than for an academic journal.
→ Different publication standards - can we publish each other’s work? For
example, a piece may be considered by some publications to be an op-ed when theauthor considers it to be non-fiction.
→ Different norms and standards - what constitutes independent research? What
does transparent reporting mean? How do you evaluate you have enough evidence
to publish?
4. Plan, plan, planJose’s mantra is: plan, plan, plan. Plan for expected and unexpected activities andbudgets, plan for the worse, plan to get stressed, plan for failure and success, plan tocare for your and your team’s well-being. And plan all these together with your teamand all throughout the project. Planning should never stop .

20

*Jose Miguel Calatayud is a freelance journalist based in Berlin, currently focusing on
collaborative investigative journalism in Europe, and most recently he coordinatedthe Cities for Rent investigation. Jose also works with Arena for Journalism in Europe,a non-profit foundation that promotes cross-border collaborative journalism andwhere he lead the Housing Project, and has collaborated with Tactical Tech's Exposing
the Invisible project on training emerging investigators and developing resources
for collaborative investigations. Jose also contributes to AlgorithmWatch andEticas Foundation about algorithmic accountability reporting. More info at https://josemcalatayud.net/in-english.

21

How to Build
a More Diverse Newsroom,
for Real
by Tyler McBrien

This brief article gathers tips on cross-bordercollaboration as learned from Editor-in-Chief
Tina Lee and the team behind "Unbias the News",
a publication striving to make journalism more
inclusive and diverse.

22Editors and journalists almost uniformly agree
that diversity is important, and for good reason.
Different perspectives and lived experiences lead
to better stories, more thorough fact-checking,fewer blind spots, and more innovative solutions.
But as Editor-in-Chief Tina Lee and her teamat Hostwriter, an open network that helps
journalists to easily collaborate across borders,and its publishing platform Unbias the News haveexperienced it, most newsrooms and other media
organizations are still fortresses of privilege. By
and large, they lack meaningful diversity, whichneeds to include different skillsets, languages andlife experience, as well as race, ethnicity, sexual
orientation and gender.
In her efforts to foster cross-border journalisticcollaboration, Tina Lee observes the same tired
arguments against assembling a more diverse
team again and again. Here are just a few of thesemyths that she constantly debunks:→ Tragic or traumatic life experiences
make you biased. - On the contrary, such
experiences enlarge your perspective, making
you alive to new ideas and considerations.
→ It’s easier to work with people I know, or
people in my immediate network. - While
it may seem easier, people in your network
are often substantially similar to you, whichnarrows your story and the range of ideas
brought to the table.
→ It takes longer to work with a diverse team,and I’m under deadline. - Someone with adeep local context of the story you’re coveringmight know shortcuts or more efficient paths
to get the information you seek.
→ I can only trust someone with bylines inmainstream/big media. - These bylines only
show that others trusted the author, but tomake a full assessment you should read thework on your own. Prestige bylines could be abetter indicator of access and privilege than of
the talent or work ethics one might have.
→ A journalist working in a country with acorrupt government is likely also corrupt.
- Often the very opposite is true. Journalists
working in such difficult settings need to be
more creative and resourceful to achieve thesame results.

23

Once you have worked through these assumptions
and prejudices, how do you then foster diverse
collaboration? Lee has tips for that too:
→ Base your judgments on the work, noton a CV or resumé. - For the purposes ofyour investigation, specific local expertise
may be far more important than a big-namepublication or university.
→ Pay everyone the same (period). - Thismay be controversial in the field of journalism
because the costs of standards of living differ
between countries. However, equal pay sets amore even power dynamic and expectation of
the same quality work from everyone.
→ Adopt a mentor/mentee approach. - Behonest about what you know and don’t know,
and be ready to be flexible about when you’rethe mentor and when you’re the mentee.
→ Don’t be a jerk. - Working in journalism ishard enough, and bullying is one of the main
reasons people drop out of the media or nonprofit field. People produce better work when
they feel welcome.
→ Give yourself more time than you think. For many journalists or editors, internet
blackouts, theft of equipment, political
upheaval and canceled visas are all reasons to
not go on collaborating with someone in thatrisky situation - until it happens to them. Be
empathetic and realistic about the challenges
people face across different contexts.
“Reaching outside of your network, working
with people you've never met, and making a
respectful and inviting collaboration is not amatter of politeness or political correctness,it’s about getting the context and perspectives
essential to making your investigation relevant
to stakeholders.” (Tina Lee)*Tina Lee is Editor-in-Chief of Unbias the News, ananti-racist and feminist cross-border newsroom
started by journalism network Hostwriter.
Originally from the USA, she writes, researches
and podcasts about migration, human rights,
and the far-right and has previously worked for
Human Rights Watch and the Balkan Investigative
Reporting Network.

An Arena for Climate Collaboration:"My climate issue is
your climate issue"
by Tyler McBrien“Is there a link between your local river drying up
and European policies on climate and energy? Do
you know which international energy companies
are active in your country or region and what
their track record on environmental protection
is?” (Jelena Prtorić) The Arena Climate Network is
an initiative that aims to promote and support “across-border mindset when investigating climate
issues and develop the tools that would enable
journalists, researchers and concerned citizens tocollaborate across borders on climate stories.”24

In 2019, investigative journalist Jelena Prtorić saw this photo of the construction of a liquified
natural gas terminal on the northern tip of the Croatian island of Krk in the Adriatic Sea.

Image: “The site of a new LNG terminal on the northern tip of the Croatian island of Krk.” Photo credit:
BIRN / downloaded from: https://balkaninsight.com/2020/01/17/energy-independence-criticsturn-up-heat-on-croatian-lng-plan/

The government called the project a gamechanger, something to help Croatia achieve energy
independence over previous reliance on Russian
oil and gas.

to explore them. She simply did not know whereto find a community of these experts, local journalists, and others conducting impactful climate
investigations.

But she was skeptical. As she dug into the story
and interviewed dozens of people, she began topaint a picture countering the official narrative.
Environmentalists and locals warned of marine
life destruction. Energy experts said the project
didn’t make sense, and economists doubted its
fiscal viability.

“What I needed was a network,” sheremembers. “Stories don’t stop at borders,journalism shouldn’t either.”Jelena Prtorić published the story, “Energy
Independence: Critics Turn Up Heat on Croatian
LNG Plan,” but she felt as though she could
have done so much more. - “It would have beenvery helpful to me to have had a cross-borderperspective.”
Jelena knew there were several European andeven global angles to explore, given the interconnected nature of climate and energy policy, but
at the time she lacked the network and resources

25

A while after, working with Arena for Journalism
in Europe - a foundation with the mission to
support collaborative cross-border investigative
journalism - Jelena saw an opportunity in laying
the foundations of a collaborative community
focused on climate related investigations,
support and knowledge sharing among reporters.
Since early 2021 she has been developing
and coordinating the Arena Climate Network,
a community of journalists and researchers
working on climate-related topics, based on theprinciple of networking and the idea that every
story is cross-border. She envisions a networkthat is topical, cross-border and community-led.
With colleagues and collaborators, the Networkhas launched discussion groups, a twitter account (@Arena__Climate), andplans to create secure collaborative spaces and provide training for climate
investigations.
Like all great collaborations, Arena Climate Network is a work in progress,
and Jelena Prtorić is transparent about both the challenges and opportunities
ahead.
Common collaboration challenges:→ How to engage people (and keep the community engaged);→ How to define or limit the topic of climate (Is it the environment?
Energy? Something else?);→ How to bridge differences between climate coverage and interests inthese topics between EU countries;→ How to create a sense of community online, and how to maintain it;→ How to keep growing as a network;→ How to make a local story global, and how to make a cross-border story
local.
Opportunities that such a network will bring:→ Deepening networking, learning and exchanging among members;→ Teaming up: knowing where to find trusted collaborators by skill, location, language or expertise;→ One-on-one climate mentorship;→ ‘Learning by doing’ climate training;
And, most importantly, “having a community also keeps us sane!” says
Jelena Prtorić.

26

*Jelena Prtorić is a freelance journalist who has reported for a wide variety of publications in English, French, Italian, and her native Croatian. Her work has focused mainly
on gender and human rights, migration, the environment and climate, culture andsocial movements. She also works with non-profit Arena for Journalism in Europe as
the coordinator of the Arena Climate Network and its Climate Network Forum. She isan occasional podcaster and translator of graphic novels.

27

How a Chance Collaboration
Exposed Secretive Government
Actions in China
by Tyler McBrien

This is an example that proves how, with curiosity,
hard work and an openness to collaboration, you
can expose human rights abuses committed by themost secretive governments, in places you can’teven access.

28

In 2016, Megha Rajagopalan, now a senior correspondent at BuzzFeed News, wasworking as a reporter in Beijing when she heard whispers about a deepening crisis
between the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Uighurs, a Muslim
ethnic minority group living in a region of China called Xinjiang. She also heardthat the CCP was detaining Uighurs and “reeducating” them, but it was nearly
impossible to travel to Xinjiang and investigate that without raising the suspicionsof the Chinese authorities.
Through her network, she tracked down a former detainee in neighbouring Turkey,
who told her about the Uighur detention center in his hometown of Kashgar, China.
Megha traveled by car and foot to corroborate the former detainee’s account. Afterconfirming its existence as a Uighur detention center, she published the story, only
to have her journalist visa summarily revoked by the Chinese government.
Curiosity and hard work had pushed her to pursue the story, but she hit a roadblock
after the loss of her visa and, consequently, access to Xinjiang to further document
the scale of the Chinese government’s campaign of persecution.
Fortunately, a chance meeting with her future collaborator Alison Killing, at an
investigations residence organised by Exposing the Invisible in 2018, pushed
Megha Rajagopalan’s investigation into high gear. Alison Killing, a licensed architectwith expertise in geospatial analysis but also a ‘citizen’ investigator herself, hadexactly the skillset Megha needed to investigate and document abuses in a place
where physical access had become impossible. Killing came up with an idea to use
satellite imagery and 3D modeling to locate the existence of unknown camps andthe forced-labor activities happening there, as well as to confirm the existence ofsuspected camps.
Through this combination of skills and a long-term collaboration, Megha
Rajagopalan, Alison Killing and programmer Christo Buschek uncovered a vast
network of prisons throughout Xinjiang, capable of incarcerating up to 1 million
Uighurs. In June 2021 they were awarded the Pulitzer Prize in international
reporting as recognition of their reporting.

29

The Archive as Activism:
Lessons from Mnemonic and
the Syrian Archiveby Tyler McBrien

Mnemonic, the non-profit that runs Syrian
Archive, Yemeni Archive and Sudanese Archive
uses its position as a cross-sectoral, crossdisciplinary organisation to provide the tools
and methodologies that enable human rights
defenders to use digital information in the fightfor justice and demand for accountability. This
short article emphasises some of Mnemonic’s
methodologies and key considerations that its
team needs to navigate within the humanrights investigative space.

30

“Collecting and analysing data is somethingthat states and corporations have been able to
do for a long time,” says Jeff Deutch, director ofoperations and research at Mnemonic, co-founderof the Syrian Archive, and Tactical Tech alumnus.
“What’s different now is the potential for using thistype of content has opened up to regular people, inorder to hold those in power to account.”
In 2014, Hadi Al Khatib and Jeff Deutch co-founded
the Syrian Archive in close collaboration with
reporters and human rights groups as a rapid
response project to preserve digital informationof the Syrian conflict: images, videos, and otherpostings that are invaluable historical artifacts
and potential evidence of human rights abuses.

1. Important content is constantly lost
Anyone documenting human rights abuses
knows that their recording and storage devices
are constantly at risk of damage or seizure in theoften-hostile environments they find themselvesin. Conflict zones and border checkpoints are
high-risk areas where investigators are liable tolose precious hard drives or cameras.

These pieces of digital information largely fallunder the umbrella of open-source intelligence,or OSINT for short. As the name suggests, OSINT
refers to any publicly available information,
including news content, maps, and social media.
Anything collected through covert surveillance or
spying is excluded.

But even when content makes it out of a conflictzone and onto a website, it’s still not safe. Targeted,
repeated cyberattacks or take-down requests canimperil any content published on media platforms
and social networks, especially those that use
automated removals such as YouTube, Facebook
or Twitter.

→ Recently, OSINT methods have gonemainstream. The New York Times’ visual
investigations look into different humanrights abuses, as well as the BBC’s online
investigations. Outside of the media landscape,human rights groups also deploy OSINT tools,
including Amnesty International’s Digital
Verification Corps and Human Rights Watch’s
reports. Even the International Criminal Court
cited evidence from Facebook in a recent
arrest warrant.

2. Content is often unverified
With so much user-uploaded content on social
media, it can be difficult to sort through what’s
real and what’s fake. And with the rise of deep
fakes, the threat posed by disinformation andmisinformation will only continue to grow.

→ Be sure to also check out our guide in The
ETI Kit, “OSINT – Diving into an ‘Ocean’ ofInformation.”“Mnemonic grew out of the recognition that
Syrian Archive’s workflows could be adapted toother locations where human rights violations
must be documented and preserved but theecosystems to do so are underdeveloped,” says
Deutch. Mnemonic is and NGO dedicated toarchiving, investigating and memorialising digital
information documenting human rights violations
and international crimes.

31

Why create an archive?
Here are some reasons why a resource like the
Syrian Archive and other archives that Mnemonicis currently supporting to develop are crucial
to collecting, preserving and building a body ofevidence that can ultimately serve as proof ofpower abuses and human rights violations:

3. Content can be unsearchable
For human rights researchers or any investigators
hoping to use user-uploaded digital content forjustice and accountability, it can be difficult to siftthrough massive amounts of content distributed
across disparate platforms. Rich information
stored in the metadata is also lost when files are
uploaded to social media websites. Even reportsby journalists or human rights groups are notoften publicly available or provided in accessible
formats, which creates additional barriers toaccessing and processing data.
How does the Syrian Archive work?
There are now more hours of user-generated
content about the Syrian conflict than there havebeen hours in the conflict itself. A recent data
audit of the Syrian Archive found that it would
take 40 years to watch all of the footage currently
collected.

Image source Syrian Archive: https://syrianarchive.org/en/about/methods-tools

Using a variety of mostly free software, the teamat the Syrian Archive uses the above process
to build its base of evidence. Through analysis
and investigations of chemical attacks andother human rights abuses, the Syrian Archive
has helped to file criminal complaints, identify
perpetrators’ intent, and clarify command
structures within conflicts.
With the Syrian Archive, Yemeni Archive andSudanese Archive, Mnemonic scrapes andpreserves information online, while also adding
context and making it searchable, reliable anduseful. The organisation also trains humanrights defenders to maximise impact of digital
information, and builds and supports thedevelopment of open-source tools and methods.
Given the graphic nature of the content, Deutchsays that Mnemonic and all of the archives try
to incorporate several techniques to minimize
exposure and trauma for the people working withthis content. Simple methods include turning off
the sound when it’s not needed to verify a video, or
focusing on the non-graphic content (e.g., a street
sign, or timestamp). They are also developing
methods to blur faces and other graphic elements,
and they organize regular therapy sessions forteam members who need it.
For more on methods to deal with such trauma,
visit Amnesty International’s “The hidden victimsof repression – how activists and reporters canprotect themselves from secondary trauma.”

Lessons learned
1. Building an archive can be tediousAs Deutch well knows, behind all of this work
there’s a lot of non-glamorous infrastructuredevelopment and maintenance. Tools and hard
drives break, and social media companies
continually change their sites and remove content.
This means impact is not easily quantifiable, andif the archive continues to work and make content
available to investigators and researchers, that’s a
win in itself.
2. Stress collaboration over innovation
There are hundreds of apps and tools to help withhuman rights documentation, but many aren’t
used widely and none of them are perfect. Deutch
points out that some of their most impactful work
was done using only spreadsheets, a 50-year-old
technology. One thing that always works, however,is collaboration.
3. Not all work is high impact
In certain investigations, Deutch and Mnemonic
have seen far-reaching impacts, but virtually nonein others. Still, he says it’s important to work on or
file criminal complaints even if they don’t result in
convictions or victories.There’s never a guaranteethat prosecutors will take up the complaints,
nor is there a guarantee that they’ll use thedocumentation in the archive.
4. This work is long termWith a lack of adequate international accountability
mechanisms globally, Mnemonic and its archives
will likely be holding onto content for years, if not
decades. This work goes beyond any grant period,so sustainability and collaboration to maintain it
should be a focus.

32*Jeff Deutch is director of operations and research at Mnemonic and co-founderof Syrian Archive. With more than 10 years of experience in the human rights andnonprofit sector, Jeff previously worked with Tactical Tech where he engaged
in research concerning the risk and barriers activist communities face in using
technology for transparency and accountability. Jeff has a doctorate from Humboldt
University in Berlin, Masters in Public Policy from Hertie School of Governance, anda Bachelor of Arts from Hampshire College. He is also a fellow and member of thesteering committee at the Centre for Internet and Human Rights.

33

Getting Creative with
Geolocation
by Di Luong

Take a dive into the world of geolocation, visual
analysis, and the importance of creativity inimage based investigations. This brief article
presents the basics as well as introduces someinnovative solutions from practical cases.

34

Geolocation means finding the real world locationof an object, such as the place where a photograph
was taken. This process is rarely straightforward
but there are various methods - some morecreative than others - of doing so. You don’t always
get enough clues from an image’s metadata(data about data, or exif data) and most images
won’t typically show a famous landmark in the
background to help you locate the area, town oreven country.
More often than not images are fuzzy and unclear
or lack sufficient elements to help you geolocate
them with little effort. Over the years, investigator
Robin Taylor from the Tibet Research Project
team has honed the skills to deconstruct an image
as if it were a puzzle waiting to be solved. Robinrecommends a combination of curious, nevergive-up like mindset, creativity and all the Open
Source Intelligence (OSINT) tools one can get theirhands on in order to approximate the geolocationof an image. Robin also shares his favorite
methodology for “reducing an area of interest”:
Methodology: reducing your area of interest

As an example, while searching for a missing
person, an image of a banana leaf led investigators
to research where banana production exists in theworld. Any piece of information, no matter how
minor it may appear, could give an image more
context.

Screenshot from Bellingcat article “John Doe 29: Image

From FBI Child Exploitation Case Geolocated toTurkey”

Image analysis
Analyze an image for its landscape or terrain likea road, frozen river, or steep hill. Look for uniquefeatures like vegetation, specific trees, windows,
architectural details like light-posts, balconies orrooftops. In one particular case, airplane contrails(‘condensation trails’ - the white tracks planes
leave in the sky) in the sky became the basis formapping flight patterns and geolocating an image.
Platforms like Yandex, Baidu, Google, TinEye ortools like InVid and others can also be used forreverse image searches to trace if and where animage has been uploaded and used before.

Context
Identifying the time, date, location of an image
are part of understanding the context of an image.
Other important questions to ask are:Map markings: Sun, Sand, Trees...
Orienting an image on a map provides valuable
insights. Local mapping platforms or data sets witha specific themes could provide information thattraditional mapping platforms cannot provide.
Robin shared a few unique sources like Weather
Underground to check historical weather data tocorroborate image dates with weather at various
locations, WolframAlpha to establish a time frame
based on rainfall or London Street Trees to locatea particular type of tree across the city. SunCalc is
another useful resource to identify a particularlocation using the sun’s direction and shadow in
an image.

→ Who posted the image? Can we trace theoriginal source?
→ Where was it posted initially ?

Crowdsourcing from online communities could
garner participation from individuals with highly
specialized knowledge. During a Bellingcat

Image from presentation by Robin Taylor

35

investigation to geolocate an image of mass executions in or near Benghazi, a Twitteruser noticed the color of the sand was grey compared to other areas of Benghazi, where colorsof the sand are more orange or yellow. This tip helped investigators identify the location to bein the southwest area of Benghazi. Furthermore, this was the first instance when (in August2017) the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued its first ever arrest warrant solely based onevidence gathered via social media.
Trial and error
Sometimes you need to revisit previous assumptions. Look at the image below:
Image from presentation
by Robin Taylor→ there is clearly a beer brand visible and that could give you some hints. But maybe notquite. Perhaps the beer is sold in other countries?
→
could the horizon line tell you something? Is there an island or other geographic
elements somewhere out of view and you just need to look ‘side-ways’?
When you experience tunnel vision or feel like giving up, go back repeatedly and revisit yourassumptions, check if any possible suspicion or guess may be correct or not. Try to look forwhat is not in an image. Even when an image shows no clear horizon, the lack of a horizon could
become just as useful to reduce your area of interest.
Creativity
Leonardo da Vinci’s map of Imola was perhaps the first ichnographic map, and it looks like asatellite map before the invention of satellites. Leonardo created this image with a tool similar
to a compass and other equipment from that era. Similarly, Open Source Intelligence (OSNIT)based investigations done by citizen investigators, journalists and others from the civil society
are often not well resourced, sometimes not even funded at all. However, working with limited
resources could potentially lead to ingenuity and spark creative solutions.
Leonardo da Vinci’s map of Imola, Italy (1502), source: https://commons.

wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leonardo_da_Vinci_Map_of_Imola.jpg

36

*Robin Taylor is a leading investigator on the Tibet Research Project. He is currently
completing a research master’s in criminology with a focus on visual evidence andcitizen investigations at Erasmus University Rotterdam & University of Kent.

37

The Savvy
Investigator’s Toolkit
by Tyler McBrien

The Global Investigative Journalism Network(GIJN) has been developing a massive list of
online resources about investigation methods,
tools and cases - and they are open to everyone,
not just journalists. This article explores some of
GIJN's learning and collaboration resources andexpert tips that are essential for anyone looking
to expand their knowledge and connect withother investigators around the world.

38

As a reporter for the Global Investigative
Journalism Network, an international associationof investigative reporting organizations and a
resource hub for investigators of all stripes, Rowan
Philp has an enviable job.

2. Search smarter, not harder“Sometimes, the best stuff is the stuff right in frontof us, the Google search bar or Twitter advanced
search,” Philp says. “You just have to know how to
use it.”“I go around to the world’s best investigative
journalists, twist their arms to get them to tell me
how they pulled off their major stories, and identify
which techniques are transferable to reporters inother countries,” Philp explains. In other words,
he investigates the investigators and reports on
the reporters, and, in the process, unearths someof the most innovative tricks of the trade.

Many people think too literally when querying
search engines. For example, when searching
DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo, Google or other searchengines for a particular map, many people will
include the word “map” in their search, eventhough that word usually doesn’t appear in the
results. Instead, try “scale,” or something thatwould actually appear on a map.

With countless muckraking methods and digital
tools emerging every week, it can be difficult tokeep up for new investigators. But after speaking
to reporters from Peru to Russia over the past few
years, Rowan Philp recommends the following tips
and methods, which are often low-tech or no-techat all.

For more on this, check out GIJN’s Online Advanced
Search resource page and this “Search Smarter by
Dorking” guide in the Exposing the Invisible Kit.

1. To grab a sources’s attention, bring a folder orphone a friend overseas
Getting “cold” sources (i.e. people who don’t
expect you showing up or calling) to speak to you
is a common challenge for even the most seasoned
investigators. But a conversation with The New
York Times’s Ross Buettner tipped Philp off to asimple trick: carry a thick folder (binder) under
your arm. On a subconscious level, the sight of a
voluminous file under a reporter’s arm implies
that the reporter knows most of the facts alreadyand is only seeking verification or an extra fact or
two. This often gives the impression that the story
is not really about the subject whom the reporteris hoping to interview. And the folder... should
contain serious research on the topic not random
papers.
Philp has also heard investigators have luckgetting nervous officials or elusive interviewees totalk by asking a foreign colleague to call them. For
some reason, officials often respond to overseas
investigators more readily than domestic ones.
Another tip is to question an official’s decisionthat is not in question. “Righteous indignation candraw even bad actors to the interview.”

39

3. Use that camera“For better or worse, it’s increasingly clear thatvideo has an outsized impact in getting yourinvestigation in front of eyeballs and moving theneedle in terms of accountability,” admits Philp.
When Russian opposition politician and activist
Alexei Navalny was arrested by the governmentand his group, the Anti-Corruption Foundation,
was banned, his collaborators released a video
documentary on YouTube that quickly amassed
over 118 million views. The bottom line: video
sharing is a powerful platform, and the era of
impact through text may be waning, at least in
situations when urgent actual and reaction isneeded.
4. Master the master tools
Today’s investigators have an impressive suite oftools at their disposal. Some are open-source andfree to use, while others cost money to subscribe
to. Some reporters don’t think twice about using
certain tools, while ethically questionable toothers. But whatever the task, chances are there’s
a piece of software or investigative method to get
the job done.
Check GIJN’s series “My Favorite Tools” where
investigators from around the world provide tips
and insights into their preferred and most effective
tools and software that help them get their work
done. For a more comprehensive library, andhow-to guides, check out GIJN’s Resource Center.

GIJN has also published a toolkit for citizen
investigators - https://gijn.org/citizen-investigation-guide/ - which aims to help
non-journalists investigate even more. The
toolkit details the techniques and tools usedby investigative journalists.

5. Pretend you’re not living in an autocracy
Where it’s safe to do so, investigators in autocracies should report as if institutions ofjustice and accountability in their country work. This has an effect on both reporters andtheir subjects. “This pretense prevents self-censorship, embarrasses corrupt officials,
and reminds repressed audiences that they deserve better,” says Philp.
Or, as editor Nic Dawes puts it: “One of the ways you keep the democratic imagination
alive . . . is to act as if it’s a democracy.”
For more on this, check out GIJN’s “Why Journalists in Autocracies Should Report as if
They’re in a Democracy.”
6. Make Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, even abroad
As many journalists know, Freedom of Information (FOI) laws allow citizens to request
information from their governments. But what many journalists don’t know is that they
can often make these requests to governments other than their own.
For more on this, check out GIJN’s Unlocking Laws to Set Information Free: GIJN’s Global
Guide to FOI and RTI.
Investigators are awesome!
In addition to these masterful tools and methods, the one thing that Philp has learned
above all is: “Investigative journalists are awesome!” He’s heard from editors of the INKCenter for Investigative Journalism in Botswana who took a severe pay cut to pay for
one satellite image proving government corruption. He’s learned from investigators at
Bellingcat and The Insider who took just three months to identify the people responsible
for the chemical weapons attack on a senior Russian opposition politician - when not asingle law enforcement agency in the world dared to do so.
“At the end of the day, anyone who can responsibly and ethically collect strong evidence
should be given the same kind of respect as big newsrooms,” says GIJN Program Director
Anne Koch.

40

*Anne Koch is the Program Director of the Global Investigative Journalism Network(GIJN). She worked as a broadcast journalist and executive for more than 20 years,
mostly for the BBC, before becoming a director at anti-corruption NGO Transparency
International (TI), overseeing nearly 50 independent TI chapters in Europe andCentral Asia. During her award-winning career in BBC journalism Anne was deputy
director of the English World Service, executive editor of the BBC’s flagship radio news
and current affairs programs and editor of the World Tonight. She has produced oredited over a hundred documentaries and worked as a producer on BBC Radio 4’s
investigative journalism program File on Four.
*Rowan Philp is a reporter for GIJN. He was formerly chief reporter for South Africa’s
Sunday Times. As a foreign correspondent, he has reported on news, politics, corruption, and conflict from more than two dozen countries around the world.

41

Risk Assessment
Is a Mindset,
Not a Checklist
by Di Luong

Conducting investigations is risky. Unfortunately,individual investigators rarely have the resourcesand guidance to comprehensively assess andmitigate their risks, especially if they work
independently, as freelancers or in small groups
that don’t benefit from the constant support andresources of a newsroom or organisation. This
article provides a brief introduction to the conceptof risk and presents a practical method to help
individuals or small teams manage the risks of
their investigation.

42

Investigators face a great deal of risks that affect not only themselves but also
their sources, collaborators, close ones as well as the information they work with.
Unfortunately, individual investigators rarely have the resources and guidance
to comprehensively assess and mitigate their risks. Freelance investigator
Léopold Salzenstein, a journalist focusing on climate change and societal safety,
suggests a practical method to help individuals or small teams assess andmanage risk in their investigations.
Salzenstein recommends using our investigative mindset to better understandrisks associated with an investigation since risk assessment is more of a mindset
than a checklist.
One definition of risk is the answer to three questions:→ What can happen?
→ How likely is it?
→ What will the consequences be?
What can happen?
It is helpful to first define what the objective of your investigation is, and whata success scenario — when everything goes as planned — would look like. Once
this baseline is set, you can start imagining all scenarios that deviate from it.
This helps you to consider the potential risks that may arise during each stageof the investigation. It’s important to find a balance between the worst (credible)
scenario and the most likely scenario. It is useful to consider the worst to help
you prepare.
Example:Image source: presentation by Leopold Salzenstein.

43

After you have considered the likelihood and consequences of possible threats, you can plot out
those threats on a risk matrix. A risk matrix is a representation of different risk levels, and it
can help to visualize the lowest to highest risks you may encounter during an investigation. Thismatrix gives you insights into the scenarios with the highest risk and enables you to prioritise
where and when to allocate time, skills, money and other resources.
Risk Matrix:

Image source: presentation by Leopold Salzenstein.

Risk perception
Risk assessment is more than considering the likelihood and consequences of scenarios. Risk
perception is subjective, influenced by people’s values, culture, knowledge, experience, fears,
and biases. While you may be aware of certain threats there are also threats you might neglect
to recognise or fail to take into account because of how you perceive the world. The humanbrain tricks us into thinking that something is more or less risky than it actually is.
An effective risk mitigation strategy encompasses steps you can undertake in order to reduce,
eliminate, or modify certain scenarios you may encounter during an investigation. You may
even consider not pursuing an investigation based on your risk assessment.
Example:Image source: presentation by Leopold Salzenstein.

44

Risk and collaboration
An investigation often includes other individuals such as sources, collaborators, subjects of theinvestigation, bystanders, etc. Remember that you are not dealing with risks in a vacuum andby yourself. Even if there are no leaks, simply including other people in the process require you
to consider how your own risk level increases the risk of someone else, and vice-versa. Thismeans that risk is inherited- namely, if you and your collaborators carry little to no risk (e.g.,
living and working in a safe area), but you are interviewing a person experiencing high risk(e.g., living in a dangerous area or working on controversial issues), you inherit that risk. Yourrisk level will be higher for a period of time before and after the interview. (Read more about
this in the Safety First article of the Exposing the Invisible Kit.
A group of collaborating investigators should carry out a risk assessment together, notindividually. Including others in your risk assessment helps to widen your (and the others’)risk perception, and helps you develop a stronger risk mitigation plan. Doing this exercise withother individuals is a good way to identify blind spots and find new ideas to mitigate risks.
During collaborations perceptions of risk include more points of view and open communication
with your team is essential to risk management.
Planning and questioning what you have planned as well as questioning what you haven’t
thought of is essential to addressing risks that may come your way. Questioning your plan is partof an iterative mindset, this mindset will help when encountering risks you haven’t preparedfor.
Resources→ Holistic Security is a strategy manual to help human rights defenders maintain theirwell-being in action. The holistic approach integrates self-care, well-being, digital security,and information security into traditional security management practices.
→ Security in a box covers basic digital safety methods, principles and tools. It offers
step-by-step instructions to help you install, configure and use essential digital-security
software and services. Security in a Box is jointly developed by Front Line Defenders andTactical Tech, along with a global network of activists, trainers and digital security experts.
→ Electronic Frontier Front (EFF) defends civil liberties in the digital world since 1990
with a focus on online privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation,
policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. Check out Surveillance
Self-Defense, EFF’s basics on how surveillance works, tips, tools and tutorials for safer
online communications.
→ Front Line Defenders aims to protect human rights defenders and other civil society
groups at risk (HRDs). Check its Guide to Secure Group Chat and Conferencing Tools, among
other resources.
→
Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent, nonprofit organization that
promotes press freedom worldwide and defends the right of journalists to report safely.
Check CPJ’s safety resources.
→ Rory Peck Trust is dedicated to the support, safety and welfare of freelance news
gatherers around the world. See their resources.

*Léopold Salzenstein is a freelance investigative journalist focusing on climate change andsocietal safety. His work has been published in various online media, such as Mongabay,
Carbon Tracker and The Local. He is currently working with The New Humanitarian. Leopold
graduated from the University of Lund in 2021 with a Master’s degree in Disaster Risk
Management and Climate Change Adaptation. He is also a fellow with the Solutions Journalism
Network, where he is learning to use data in solution reporting.

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Investigative Commons:
A new era ofhuman rights investigation
by Di Luong

The Investigative Commons was launched asa collaboration between the European Centerfor Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR),
Forensic Architecture and FORENSIS in responseto an era, in which facts and truth have become
battlefields, and racist and nationalist tendencies
occupy our discourse spaces.

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Litigation against human rights violations is notalways pursued by lawyers and human rights
defenders because a case is likely to win in court.
Sometimes it is about raising awareness, informing the public and giving people and communities
a platform to bring issues forward. Legal casesof human rights violations are brought forward
because victims and survivors deserve the same
opportunity to present their case on equal grounds
as their perpetrators in court.
Anne Schroeter from the European Center for
Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) saysthat governments and other entities with theauthority and resources to collect evidence are
increasingly the ones on trial for human rights
violations, thus cannot be trusted to be an independent body. More needs to be done to ensure abalanced process of evidence collection as well as
to increase public awareness on such issues.
While evidence of human rights violations is usually presented in court, such evidence can also be
communicated and disseminated in other fora,
including through public advocacy, media reports,
as well as art and cultural projects. The aim is todeepen the public’s understanding and awarenessof wrongdoings in the world through channels andformats that resonate with people across multiple contexts. Social change does not need to takeplace in a courtroom, it can take place at the ballot box, through an art exhibition, or a plethora ofother avenues.
In 2021, an interdisciplinary collaborative effort
to investigate and share evidence of human rights
violations to wider audiences launched in Berlinas the Investigative Commons. Through collaborative investigations with like-minded journalists,
investigators, reporters, artists, lawyers, activists,architects, scientists, and cultural institutions and47

their respective methodologies, the Investigative
Commons strives towards accountability forhuman rights violations across multiple forums
including courts, cultural institutions, citizens’
tribunals, and media platforms. Initiated by the
ECCHR, Forensic Architecture and FORENSIS(a new NGO set up by Forensic Architecture in
Berlin), Investigative Commons includes a rangeof other organizations like Haus der Kulturen derWelt, Mnemonic, Bellingcat, Laura Poitras/Praxis
Films and it aims towards a growing network ofindividual practitioners, NGOs and cultural institutions to foster public discourse on human rights
issues.
Investigative Commons is a testing ground fornew methodologies. Projects are identified inareas where the partners and other collaborators
overlap and could make the greatest impact wheneach organization’s methods are combined. Eachinvestigation is unique by a combination of skills,
creativity and expertise. For instance, inspiration was recently drawn from experts with backgrounds in machine learning, augmented reality,and gaming.
There are plans in the future for Investigative
Commons to host residencies, and involve members of the human rights community for workshops
and fireside talks to learn from their experiencesin the field. The work carried out within this space
may lead to litigation depending on the evidencecollected. For now, Investigative Commons views
all mediums as inherently and equally valuable in
the pursuit of justice.
Over the past decade, ECCHR and Forensic
Architecture have cooperated on exposing humanrights crimes worldwide, such as working conditions in Pakistan, torture in Syria, and Spanish
push-backs in Melilla.

→ ECCHR’s and Forensic Architecture’s collaborative efforts also
led to another joint project together with Bellingcat and Yemeni
Archive: European Arms In The Bombing Of Yemen. The platformpresents information that aims to support both international anddomestic prosecution authorities in investigating the criminal
responsibilities of European corporations and governments inpotentially enabling war crimes carried out by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. The platform also serves as a tool for civil society tobetter understand the role of the European arms trade in the war in
Yemen.
Investigative Commons hosted an exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der
Welt in Berlin in June-August 2021 and plans a conference on 9 October 2021 at the same location.

Forensic Architecture - Investigative Commons, Exhibition view. © Miguel Brusch/HKW. Image
source: https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2021/investigative_commons/start.php

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*Anne Schroeter holds a LLM in international law from Glasgow University and a BA inpolitical science from Universität Potsdam with a minor in public law. She has worked
with Case Matrix Network, Syrian Archive and other NGOs in analytical and legal positions on accountability for international crimes, evidentiary analysis and transitional
justice. Between 2018 and 2019 she worked with the Syria team in the International
Crimes and Accountability program of the European Center for Constitutional and
Human Rights (ECCHR). She has been the coordinator of ECCHR’s Investigative
Commons project since July 2020.

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Communicating witha purpose:
Investigative Storytelling
by Di Luong

An exploration of multiple investigative
storytelling approaches and tips for choosing anapproach that works best for your investigation.

50

“Anyone of us could be an investigator as we are
essentially people who tell people about what
happens to people,” says Nuria Tesón as she
describes how we are all natural communicatorsand storytellers. But investigations are labor
intensive, and often carried out under difficult
circumstances. For those reasons, and to increase
their impact and reach, investigators need to aim
beyond the journalistic bubble and include a wider
community by involving skills and approaches
specific to anthropologists, artists, technologists
and other fields of practice.

Identify your audience

Nuria
Tesón
outlines
severalpractical
recommendations that can help you to adopt an
investigative storytelling approach that is uniqueto your context and to the audiences you aim toreach.

Use many formats to tell the same story

Define your goal
What what do you want to achieve?
Having a goal in mind will help you select a
communication and storytelling style that bestaligns with the actions you need to perform inorder to reach your goal.
Goal(s) could be to inform, raise awareness or
expose a wrongdoing, to advocate to built a legal
case or pass legislation, to raise funds for victims
of wrongdoing, to raise support to continue an
investigation, to make information available
to other investigators, to hold wrongdoers
accountable, or to counter a prevalent narrative,
among many others.

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The goal in combination with knowing theaudience you aim to reach help determine theappropriate format and method of communicating
and storytelling. If the audience you are trying toreach may be illiterate or lack electricity, consider
organizing a drama or theatre play to reach a wider
community. If you are an artist or can collaborate
with an artist, consider adapting your findings to
be exhibited at a museum for a broader and morediverse audience reach.

The format does not need to be a classical, written
format. As seen above, some audience may noteven benefit from that at all. It could be formulated
as an alternative narrative: an exhibition, aworkshop, a performance in the street, or anotherapproach that relates to how you plan to interact
with the audience. Ideally, you could combine
multiple formats and channels of communication
for a wider impact. When you share your narrative
online, someone else can use the information
to develop their campaign or expand it byinvestigating further. Using a variety of tools andtactics would only benefit your investigation.
Create new narratives

Nuria considers that the role of a journalist is not
to mobilize or campaign like an activists. However,journalists have the responsibility to inform
people within a society so that others could use
the evidence to actively engage in the social andpolitical process. Key questions to keep in mind
for staying objective in cases where it’s difficult
to find the middle ground when setting your goalsare:

In cases of long-term conflicts, the communities
involved may potentially become forgotten by
the media and fade away from public attention.
It is particularly important to find new nuances
to what is happening in order to keep the publicattention active on those situations. Most
investigations need time and huge personal
investment as investigators work to imagine
different pathways to communicating a story
from different angles in an accessible way. Whendeveloping your own investigation and creating
its narrative, look at how similar stories havebeen traditionally communicated, add your own
questions and angles and infuse those stories withnew perspectives.

→ What type of evidence do I need to gather?
→ What do I need in order to communicate
and share this evidence further?

→ For instance, Nuria Tesón and her collaborator, photographer Miguel Ángel Sánchez,
used fine art photography to reveal issues

that nobody was looking at in the aftermath of the November 2012 confrontation
between Israel and the Hamas government in Gaza: “Operation Pillar of Defense”.
After covering the war, they decided to go back and portray the people they met
during the conflict in order to find new ways to engage and inform far-away audiences who had been saturated with the conflict news and reporting provided bymainstream media. The resulted project - a fine art photography series accompanied by personal stories and events documented by the portrayed people themselves - emerged from their “will to portray Gaza when no one is looking at her but
also an exploration on how siege and daily conflict affect human beings psychologically. The portraits are and intimate approach to the subjects that verge on themadness and obscurity that lays in the different layers of their consciousness, likea continuous nightmare that they face fearless but disturbed.”
Consider therefore how your investigation could connect, engage, or reach different
audiences and collaborators. Choosing an alternative storytelling approach may help
your investigation engage with a new or a wider audience, keep the public’s attention
active for longer, bypass censorship more easily, and empower individuals to share
their stories in their own style.
Take Nuria’s advice on this: “Whatever information we have or get involved with, any
type of investigation is like a piece of wood. We can make an ashtray or a beautiful
sculpture.”52

* Nuria Tesón is an independent multimedia journalist and writer, co-founder ofthe MásTesón collective. She is based in the Middle East where she covered the most
newsworthy events of the region for the past 12 years. She has investigated among
others: the trail of mercenaries in Libya during the war, the activities of fighters being
trained by the Libyan militias in the following years as well as the Al Qaeda infiltrationin the East of Libya; the connections between terrorist attackers of the March 2004
Madrid train bombings with Spanish foreign fighters in Syria; fracking; politicalcorruption in Spain and Romania; the destruction of native rainforest in Brazil's
Amazon basin and its impact on the local communities. Her work has been featured
in Time, CNN, Al Jazeera, AJ+, The New York Times, France 24, El País, and Le Mondeamong others, and exhibited on several continents. She collaborates with universities,
institutions and private entities creating content for seminars, workshops, exhibitions
and performances around journalism, conflict zone coverage, the use of Art andJournalism to achieve structural changes, media and conflict, coverages with a gender
perspective. Since 2018 she is an 'Aspen Young European Leaders' Fellow.

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EXPOSING THE INVISIBLE
Exposing the Invisible (ETI) is a Tactical Tech project that actively
experiments with ways to promote investigation as one of the mostimportant forms of public engagement. Through a series of films,
interviews, guides and resources, ETI looks at different techniques,
tools and methods along with the individual practices of thoseworking at the new frontiers of investigation.
• exposingtheinvisible.org• eti@tacticaltech.org (GPG Key fingerprint:
BD30 C622 D030 FCF1 38EC C26D DD04 627E 1411 0C02)
Tactical Tech is an international NGO that engages with citizens
and civil-society organisations to explore and mitigate the impactsof technology on society.
• tacticaltech.org• ttc@tacticaltech.org (GPG Key fingerprint:
9B71 46F9 8165 4FBE E17A 0CAA F6B0 4791 9EC6 096D)• @info_activism• facebook.com/tactical.tech----------------------------------Licensing
CC BY-SA 4.0
This e-book is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionShareAlike 4.0 International license
Tactical Tech 2021

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