Starling Explores What Blockchain Can Do for Democracy

A new report about the role of blockchain technology in strengthening democracies was published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank known for its work on foreign policy and national security. In it, CSIS highlights contributions of Starling Lab’s Law program and Project Dokaz to address the current challenges of trust in digital media.

Basile Simon, the Lab’s director of the Law program and special projects, contributed opening remarks to a roundtable discussion in Washington D.C. ahead of the release. He emphasized decentralized ledger technology (DLT)’s potential to strengthen the rule of law and court proceedings, as well as its availability to civil society and human rights documenters in their quest for accountability.

The report, authored by CSIS senior fellow and Project on Prosperity and Development director Noam Unger, research assistant Austin Hardman, and intern Ilya Timtchenko, highlights several Starling contributions:

• Countering new threats from deepfakes by putting forward more trustworthy digital assets, whose details, origin, and metadata are not only more comprehensive but also corroborated by independent third parties acting as notaries ;

• Trust in news content, notably through the pioneering use of cryptographic authentication built into a professional Canon camera for use by Reuters photojournalists, which both protects the photographs from claims of tampering but also permits the surfacing of rich metadata straight from the camera to the audience ;

• Designing of next-generation digital evidence lockers – notably by combining tamper-evident data structures, blockchains as notaries, and long-term decentralized storage technologies – with the aim to support courts, government, and all seeking accountability in proceedings potentially lasting years (if not decades, in the case of transitional justice) ;

• Work on the ground with war crime documenters to support their capture of vital digital media by ensuring it is properly preserved and has probative weight. Data collected this way –  be it images, photogrammetric models of scenes, or rich testimony – draws on all the points above and is supported by affidavits from the Lab, attributable and verifiable attestations of the investigators, and evident chain of custody.

The report, as well as remarks from Noam Unger, can be downloaded from the CSIS website.