'Hiding Duck Project:' A Kickstarter Crowdfilming Platform To Combat Human Rights Abuse
A Kickstarter project has been opened to provide a secure and free network of hardware and software for the over 500 citizen journalists in Syria, Egypt and Bahrain to record the acts of abuse to human rights.
The team, made up of former INTERPOL employees, specialise in public interest and computer security, and are members of the Public Initiative for Information Security (PubliSec). With their combined experience in software and hardware technology, along with knowledge of policy and IT infrastructure in these areas, they created a full Youtube-esque solution for civil journalists in the area, from the miniature camera to the uploading algorithms.
With this collected footage, it is the intention of the group, along with a few independent filmmakers, to put these pieces of footage together to form a documentary, titled 'The Hiding Duck.'
Through our combination of policy and technology expertise, we developed The Hiding Duck Project. This is a project to provide citizen journalists with a reliable, secure – and most importantly – a free technology platform to document the human rights abuses and violence they witness. We created an infrastructure to securely film and upload videos to empower ordinary citizens to tell their story, with the means to speak for themselves.
The camera reminds me of a filmmaker's version of the third gen iPod Shuffle, and comes with some impressive technology to ensure that all footage captured remains hidden and secure, in-case of capture. This is done through a custom firmware, which uses a modified file system to save videos onto the MicroSD card. No actual encryption is in place; but it requires a key file from their decoding software to access the files, or the card appears empty. Or if you require to divert anymore attention, you can upload a dummy video to the portion of the memory card that anyone can navigate.
After the footage is captured and transfered, they then have the option of either uploading to PubliSec's private YouTube channel or their own, utilising cloud based proxy servers to push the file upload through in places where the video site is blocked (Syria). After this, moderators server side make the appropriate modifications to the video (image stabilization, keywording, titling, etc) and it is uploaded publicly to YouTube.
It is a unique and thoroughly planned Kickstarter, that I implore you all to go take a look at via the source link below, for the future prevention of human rights abuse.
Source: Kickstarter
