Can we trust our digital records?

It’s an important question—-particularly in the age of disinformation—and one that’s being tackled by The Starling Lab, an R&D lab co-founded by Stanford and USC focusing on how web3 can help establish trust in digital records pertaining to journalism, law and history.

The organization uses decentralized storage to preserve over 56,000 testimonies—video or audio—from people who survived the Holocaust and other atrocities, which helps combat denialism. According to Adam Rose, chief operating officer of Starling Lab, decentralized storage systems like Filecoin and others are allowing these archives to be preserved across the globe on thousands of servers, minimizing the threat of their contents being lost. 

As the media landscape becomes more infiltrated with disinformation and “fake news,” the proof of authenticity for “truth” will be increasingly important.

“We’ve looked at how we can use cryptography and decentralized storage to preserve evidence of war crimes,” Rose said to me in a recent conversation. “We’ve made submissions to the International Criminal Court where we’ve presented evidence from Ukraine of potential Russian war crimes.”

The idea is to use phones that are hashing and signing images as they’re captured, and then have those assets stored throughout multiple decentralized systems to ensure their preservation.

Adam Rose

“From an intelligence perspective, evidence disappears,” Rose said. “Many of these social media posts of schools being bombed were on Telegram, a company which is run by a Russian national. While he does his best to be independent—at the end of the day—there are different rules that Russia may play by, and it may cause certain very tough life decisions for someone who may have their family in Russia. So there’s a risk of certain things disappearing, which might be evidence here on social media.”

To prevent link rot—the phenomenon of widely circulated hyperlinks that fail to connect to their original file or source over time—Starling used a tool called Webrecorder to store authenticated web recordings across decentralized systems. The lab then takes the authenticity data, hashes and signs it, and puts those registrations on multiple blockchains.

“Even if one blockchain were to collapse in ten or twenty years, realistically, one of the blockchains will carry through,” Rose said. “We don’t know what evidentiary standards are going to look like in 30 years, but the idea is we’ve started to embed this authenticity information in the gathering process of the evidence itself.”

Starling views its process as a capture, store and verify framework—called the Starling Framework—though those steps are not necessarily sequential.

“We’ve had people on the ground in Ukraine go to these same locations [as shown in social media posts] with phones that have apps on them—like Guardian Project’s ProofMode—and take authenticated photos, videos and other assets to help establish these are the real scenes,” Rose said.

As schools and other public buildings are rebuilt, the importance of authenticating the scenes may help during their rebuilding process—as they measure holes in the walls and the trajectory of munitions—hypothetically linking back the attack on civilians to someone who was a commander authorizing the strikes.

“It’s important that we preserve that evidence in an authenticated way,” Rose said. “Whether war bombing tears down the building or reconstruction tears down the building, we have it preserved.”

Starling Lab is also able to apply its resources in the art world.

“One of the things we did was a 3-D capture of a bombed out building in Kiev where a muralist—Christian Guémy aka C215—had created renderings of Ukrainian heroes,” Rose said. “The building is eventually going to be torn down and rebuilt. It’s ephemeral art, and the artist makes the art knowing it’s ephemeral.”

By digitally preserving what will eventually be lost to the physical world, Starling is helping digitize our physical reality with an eye toward the future of preservation.

“It’s also about provenance,” Rose said. “How do we trace something back to its origins? With fact checking, we try to go to the point of origin and create some sort of authenticity layer where we can add metadata and registrations that can help authenticate it.”

But how does Starling Lab know the point of origin for images and information are the unadulterated points of origin?

“There are camera manufacturers that are installing ways to sign-on-device, some that are part of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) initiative and the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), which was announced by Adobe in 2019,” Rose said.

With C2PA being the standard, Starling is using camera software signatures, firmware signatures, hardware signatures and embedding signals in the signal itself—all to prove authenticity.

“There’s always some point where you need to rely on a human, so one of the really important things for us is attestations, an example being the Rolling Stone story that’s up for an interactive media Emmy in a couple of weeks,” Rose said.

The fundamental root of The DJ and the War Crimes is a photograph from 30 years ago in Bosnia, which has been subject to misinformation and disinformation for decades.

“American photographer Ron Haviv took the photo, which shows a soldier from behind casually flicking a cigarette as he’s kicking a dying woman,” Rose said. “The general who ran the unit back then denied the photo was real, and the photo resurfaced on blogs when Russia invaded Crimea.”

According to Rose, the 90s-era photo was doctored and used by people who were captioning it as “Ukrainian soldiers kicking civilians in Crimea” in 2014.

“What we wanted to do was go back to the original photographer [Haviv] and use some of our systems to scan his images with him in the room,” Rose said. “He put the original film slides in Bellows and we captured the metadata around that with his attestations. Obviously we don’t have the GPS coordinates from a piece of film from 1992, but we were able to create a human layer to this.”

Another consideration amongst data authenticators is the ability for users to ask for it versus a universal standard.

“As we move forward, it’s important we address the questions of opting-in, making it voluntary and not allowing it to be something where governments dictate that everything has to have certain data,” Rose said. “If people think nothing is real without authenticity data, that’s not fair either because there could be real data that doesn’t have the authenticity data—so we have to figure out how to balance both.”

The hope is that by combining decentralized imaging and information storage along with human attestations, Starling Lab is establishing a new precedent for preserving the truths of world events in human history.

“At a certain point, we’re either ceding our understanding of technology or we’re putting our trust in humans,” Rose said. “Throughout this whole process of trust, we try to make all of that as transparent as possible.”