Public Records and Human Rights Conference Track

IPFS Camp 2024

This past July, Starling Lab organized and participated in the Public Records and Human Rights  track at IPFS Camp 2024 in Brussels, Belgium.

The conference brought together a community of builders, operators, researchers, and more to talk about applications on the the peer-to-peer, content-addressed data access network and protocol IPFS. For our focused track, Starling Lab invited Numbers Protocol, Hala Systems, Ceramic Network, and the Guardian Project to come and share their important work (see videos in the presentation playlist) related to distributed data availability, open-source software, and what applications they were building to address data provenance, data accessibility, open source, and more.

Authenticated Attributes Demo

A highlight of this track was a demo unveiling of Starling Integrity Backend v2, our data processing pipeline, along with the command line interface (CLI)  tool built by developer Cole Anthony Capilongo. It’s our latest delivery of a prototype workflow that involves multiple tools and software libraries to solve problems around data integrity and preservation. 

A major feature of this new CLI tool is Authenticated Attributes, which is a cryptographically signed and timestamped database with a flexible schema that has the ability to show relationships between different data points (including assets like digital media files). In our work over the past several years, Starling Lab has encountered many challenges related to processing and preserving different types of data and metadata across separate systems. This new feature set enables the Lab to have the flexibility to capture, preserve, and update authenticity data about digital media while maintaining the integrity of the information.

The lab works with several processes and software: from capture with different applications, to the various strategies we use to hash and assign content identifiers, to preserving and distributing data on decentralized systems, to presenting verifiable data. We needed an easy to use tool to streamline the process of putting together modular authentication workflows.

Since the workflows we prototype deal with a variety of different inputs, we needed the ability to process them in different ways. We also perform different operations on this data, such as encrypting certain data fields, adding C2PA manifests, adding signatures, and placing data in decentralized systems such as IPFS, Hypercore, Filecoin, and – of course – registering hashed ‘fingerprints’ of data on various distributed ledgers. The CLI tool makes it possible to pick and choose which kinds of attributes we want to modify and add to our data store.

See the presentation to learn more about the different tools we use, and how they are brought together with the Starling Integrity Backend v2.

Authenticity Tools in Action

Securing Taiwan’s Election Integrity with Blockchain Technology

In this talk, Natalie Wang from Numbers Protocol shared their work on preserving images of historical and social significance, including the Mom I See War and the Taiwan Elections projects, as well as updates about their suite of authenticity tools designed for journalists. Challenges are heightened in an election year, fraught with threats of mis- and dis- information from bad actors and AI generated content. Numbers has been working with Taiwanese journalists and news organizations to develop a camera app, SDK, and dashboard that enables them to A) assign identities and identifiers to registered photographs, and B) secure the provenance of these artifacts on-chain. In a year when more than half of the world’s population has the opportunity to vote in a high-stakes election, Numbers and Starling Lab are working together to combat mis- and disinformation that could sway the course of history.

IPFS in Action: Conflict Zone Use-case 

Begoña Sesé de Lucio joined us from Hala Systems, which develops data-driven technological solutions to protect conflict-affected populations and strengthen accountability for international crimes. In the presentation, Begoñia shared the work they have been doing documenting the destruction of schools in the Ukraine-Russian conflict, as well as shared how they are using decentralized technology in developing ways to aid international investigators to collect data – with integrity and a provable chain of custody – that can be handed off to prosecutors. 

Hala Systems has created a product focused on human rights observation that includes a user interface for file upload and registration that allows users to easily upload and interact with the registration information. Users can ensure, with this interface, that steps have been taken to curate and store information for the long term, generate assets with integrity metadata, and register asset bundles to create an immutable chains of custody so that the valuable witness evidence being preserved can be useful, now and in the future.

Humanitarian App Distribution & Demo

Internet outages and blockages are becoming a more common tactic of authoritarian regimes. Paul Mayero from the Guardian Project explained that the internet “is now a basic human right.”  that needs to be protected. He is an expert in developing applications to help those who don’t have free and open access to data and digital information. Oftentimes, the places where humanitarian apps that give communities the tools they need to access information and services aren’t available because of internet blockages, or simply because of the fact that apps aren’t available on Apple or Google Play stores. 

FDriod is an alternative source to download apps – and can publish apps on the peer-to-peer IPFS network to provide access to those who might otherwise not have it. This makes it possible to bypass internet shutdowns - including downloading apps from behind such a blockage, that make it possible to gain access to data and communication tools once internet has been walled or cut off.

Peer-to-peer systems offer a valuable, resilient, and censorship-resistant solution to make digital information available in places where suppression of free speech can block access to basic necessities: services, resources, applications, and data that many of us take for granted.

The set of talks from this track present compelling evidence for the need for continued support for IPFS technology, and show the resilient types of solutions that can be engineered with decentralized technologies like these.