The New York City Police Department has the ability to track people in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx by running images from 15,280 surveillance cameras into invasive and discriminatory facial recognition software, a new Amnesty International investigation reveals. Here’s how thousands of volunteers from around the world participated in the investigation.
The criminal blueprint and its elements need to be understood to efficiently follow the money and stop criminals from doing business as usual. Criminals, both the ones just starting out as well as those who are already well established, have regional and global infrastructure that is continuously built and maintained by what the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) team calls the “criminal services industry.” Here’s OCCRP’s Paul Radu on how it works and how to untangle it.
With more sophisticated AI technologies emerging, researchers warn that “deepfake geography” could become a growing problem. As a result, a team of researchers that set out to identify new ways of detecting fake satellite photos warn of the dangers of falsified geospatial data and call for a system of geographic fact-checking.
Colombian media outlet Cerosetenta joined the international collective of journalists and researchers Bellingcat and research agency Forensic Architecture to map police violence during ongoing protests in Colombia and, in a second step, to reconstruct crimes committed in this context.
Over the past 18 months, The New Humanitarian and the Thomson Reuters Foundation interviewed more than 70 women who said aid workers offered them work in exchange for sex during the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The reporters were asked by other groups why they haven’t shared the women’s details yet. But, writes Paisley Dodds, The New Humanitarian’s investigations and features editor, that isn’t part of a journalist’s job.
Data journalism can show trends, maps, and patterns, highlighting whether violence has gone up or down in a region, where conflict is located, and how this relates to conditions on the ground that impacts civilians, such as migration or refugees. Here’s more on how you can use it in your next investigation.
One little-recognized, unlisted casualty of the struggle for newsroom survival is the impact on an irreplaceable resource that citizens across America rely on: the public record of their communities as recorded by their local newspaper, radio or TV station, online newsroom or other news outlet.
The search of a journalist’s phone in detention exemplifies the threat digital forensics technologies pose to privacy and press freedom around the world. In Botswana, journalists recount the frightening state of government surveillance, powered by international technology companies.
Four news outlets teamed up to reveal that police dogs bite and maim thousands of people a year, an investigation that was one of five finalists for the 2021 Goldsmith Prize. Here the journalists involved explain how they overcame some of the biggest challenges in reporting the series, and give tips for journalists creating databases for their own investigations.
The Internet Archive is a nonprofit library that is best known for the Wayback Machine, a staple for investigative journalists around the world. Launched 20 years ago, the Wayback Machine now archives much of the public web at the rate of more than 1 billion archived URLs per day.
