Creating Human Records that Stand the Test of Time

Preserving digital evidence for the long term using ledgers

This article was originally published in the FFDW DWeb Digest Issue #1, and is excerpted below. Don’t miss the whole publication, as well as the foreword from the editor, Mike Masnick.
We are ever so grateful to the Foundation for their continued support of our work, and their nudging us to talk about it more 😉

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As business rivalries go, the story of Suen-nada and Ennum-Ashur was pretty routine. They both claimed ownership of valuable intellectual property, wrestled over control of accounts, and accused each other of theft.

Their case went to court. Witnesses were present. Testimony was delivered and became crucial evidence.

A fire burned down their Assyrian colony in 1836 B.C., but a record of their testimony survived and is now available for review at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

We know about the trial because, thousands of years ago, the world’s most advanced technologists figured out how to use a crude implement to etch markings into stone and clay. This data storage breakthrough would be used to record crop yields, trades, weddings, births, deaths, wars, legends, and other data that was critical to evolving human civilization.

While they are museum pieces today, at the time there was a logic to using hard materials for persistence. Even back then, this method wasn’t the fastest way to record information (papyrus was invented at least a millennium before) but it would last and, most importantly, be difficult to alter. Modern technologists still find this approach important — and the efficiency tradeoffs familiar.

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Evidence has always needed to stand the test of time and the test of scrutiny. Long-established concepts can still help, including decentralization and cryptography (which was likely around even in the days of Suen-nada and Ennum-Ashur). A related modern concept can also help: blockchains.

In the spring of 2022, Russian artillery shells ripped through the walls of several schools in Kharkiv, Ukraine. The whole region was under heavy fire from advancing Russian armed forces, but an intentional attack on civilian targets is a war crime. The United Nations specifically defines education as a human right. Turning sanctuaries of learning into a battlefield creates a vicious cycle of illiteracy and poverty.

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Starling Lab set out to authenticate and preserve these vulnerable assets. (…)

Our investigators made web archives of social media posts from Kharkiv, verified using state-of-the-art OSINT techniques. Decentralized storage deals preserve the collection on thousands of servers around the world, and the redundant recording of hashes and cryptographic signatures permit trustless inspection of the items and their audit log.

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Open source intelligence (like social media posts) may still be questioned, so Starling arranged for photographers to visit two of the schools. They used the context-rich capture app ProofMode, from the Guardian Project, to include corroborating metadata (including time, GPS coordinates, surrounding cell network, phone locale, etc.). These bundles were cryptographically sealed with the images and their integrity proofs registered to several blockchains for safekeeping.

Starling Lab has since made a pair of submissions to the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, including an analysis of how these methodologies can establish credibility of the evidence.

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The same approach – using our Starling Framework of Capture/Store/Verify – has helped us to preserve testimonies of Holocaust survivors, store thousands of examples of Russian misinformation, document living conditions for the homeless in California, record promises by politicians about government surveillance, and save examples of climate change impacts in the Amazon.

Cryptography, decentralization, and blockchains are the tools we used to preserve these important records in humanity’s collective memory. These projects have created immutable records to stand up against challenges from the wide-scale adoption of generative AI, sophisticated disinformation campaigns, and changing digital custody practices.

Today’s courts and other civic institutions must confront similar challenges that undermine trust in their own critical records. By embracing similar innovations, there’s a chance for digital evidence to become as resilient as ever – the modern equivalent of being etched in stone.