The Berkeley Protocol

The United Nations and the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, have laid out the principles for using open-source information to investigate human rights violations and humanitarian law.

The manual intends to inform those who research major crimes. It differentiates official court-appointed investigators from nongovernmental ones. It explains the differences and details the importance of maintaining standards to ensure the admissibility of any evidence gathered.

These principles are:

• Preserving digital material in a way that maintains its authenticity.
• Documenting the chain of custody.
• Identifying the type of investigation and its end goal, for example, criminal proceedings, civil litigation, transitional justice process or other forms of litigation.
• Upholding an individual’s right to privacy.

The manual recognizes that digital security must be maintained to guarantee the quality of the outcome. These standards are:

• Anonymity of investigators and sources unless it is necessary to disclose this information in a legal proceeding.
• The expectation that OSINT investigations may be monitored.
• Diversification of digital sources to decrease the risk of third-party monitoring and analysis.
• Avoidance of identifiable or predictable patterns of behavior, which might help a third party’s identification of the objectives of an investigation.

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Other standards include:

• Investigators should keep their professional work separate from personal online activities.
• Investigators conducting multiple investigations should not mix their investigations.
• The hardware should be designed to be minimally affected by hostile or malicious software.

The publication also explains how targets of an investigation may attack to disrupt or destroy the work against it by using methods from phishing to social engineering and suggests investigators plan for incidents of this nature.

Despite news from a series of actors conducting OSINT investigations in Ukraine to expose Russian human rights violations, when these findings are brought to court, they may only be acceptable if the principles listed by the Berkeley Protocol are observed.

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