Encryption keeps human rights group ahead of the military

By SUELETTE DREYFUS Dreyfus, Suelette

Page 1 Tuesday 01/12/1999Tuesday, 12 January 1999

Dodging hostile military patrols and trekking his way through steep
mountains in Guatemala, human rights worker Hugo Cabrera smuggled out
vital evidence of human rights abuses armed with only a laptop computer,
a good encryption program and solar panels.
This week, that evidence will be released to the world in a
groundbreaking report to be launched by encryption guru Phil Zimmermann,
author of Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP.
The Central American republic of Guatemala is a land of striking
contrasts; live volcanoes, plunging waterfalls and ancient Mayan cities
swathed in rainforest.
It is also a land of tragic history; a stream of ruthless military
regimes and a recently ended 36-year civil war responsible for the death
of more than 100,000 people, most of them indigenous Mayan Indians.
Fear kept people silent. Anyone openly discussing a relative who had
been tortured or "disappeared” might well find themselves the next
victim of a death squad.
Technology has played a vital role in the breaking the silence born from
years of terror.
The two human rights groups which produced State Violence in Guatemala,
1960-1996: A quantitative reflection were among the first to use
computer encryption, a secure method of scrambling data, for human
rights field work.
The Science and Human Rights Program at the American Association for the
Advancement of Science and the International Center for Human Rights
Research (CIIDH) began using PGP in 1994 to gather the more than 5000
individual testimonies of murder, rape and other crimes which are
included in the report.
Many witnesses only agreed to give evidence if their names were kept
secret, for fear of retribution.
Yet their co-operation was vital to gathering statistics and recording
events for the report for revealing the truth.
CIIDH human rights worker Cabrera said: "There is a big responsibility
to these people who gave testimonies. I promised that that information
would never, ever fall into the hands of the military."
With the technical support from AAAS deputy director Dr Patrick Ball,
Cabrera and other activists began using PGP, perhaps the world’s most
popular strong encryption program, in their field work.
CIIDH workers ventured into the countrys remote interior, where people
hid from the military, and gathered testimonies on paper database forms.

At the site, they then sorted the forms by violation, entered the
material into one of the groups eight laptops, encrypted it, and burned
the original papers.
ONE of the most frightening moments during the five-year project was
when one of the laptops mysteriously vanished.
“Fortunately, everything was encrypted,” Cabrera said.
Fighting dengue fever outbreaks, monsoon rains and a lack of
electricity, Cabrera and other CIIDH workers smuggled three solar panels
into the mountains, to power their Toshiba 486 SX laptops, each with 4Mb
of RAM and a 200Mb hard drive.
In a poor country such as Guatemala, where almost every car has a lock
on its petrol tank, these computers were cutting edge technology.
Cabrera and the others slept with their laptops on their pillows, ready
to flee.
Every few months, they carried the laptops by mule or foot for two days
to the nearest road, and returned to the capital to update the central
database.
They later e-mailed PGP-encrypted copies of the material overseas to a
safe back-up site.
At the report’s launch this Thursday in Guatemala city, Cabrera and
other human rights activists will finally meet the man who can only be
described as their hero - Phil Zimmermann, the original author of PGP. A
former peace activist, Zimmermann will also no doubt be pleased to see
his program used as he had hoped.
He said he originally wrote PGP largely as “a human rights project - I
did it to help people who were tortured”.
This Guatemalan report reflects a growing trend in human rights groups;
the use of encryption to protect witnesses.
Guatemala’s Truth Commission also uses encryption.
UN field workers in some countries also rely on encryption.
However, most groups don’t want to admit to using encryption.
Tipping off repressive governments that a computer screen of seemingly
random characters can be transformed into witness reports of secret
massacres makes their job harder.
Dr Ball, who also played a crucial role in developing database systems
for CIIDH and the truth commissions in South Africa, Guatemala and
Haiti, said: “A characteristic of dictatorship in the second half of the
20th century has been the big lie - to deny that human rights violations
happen.”
Technology such as encryption and sophisticated databases, is helping to
change that.
“People can recapture their own history,” he said.
“It enables people (to say) ‘This happened, it cannot be denied’.”
The report, State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: A quantitative
reflection, can be found at: hrdata.aaas.org/ciidh.
* Phil Zimmermann will be visiting Australia in early February for
network security company Network Associates.

CAPTION: Two photos: Phil Zimmerman;  Testimonials: With evidence of
human rights abuses, are CIIDH members (from left) Gustavo Ocampo,
Orlando Blanco, Marco Tulio Perez, Hugo Cabrera, Rolando Gutierrez with
Patrick Ball (second left), of AAS.

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