EIJC17 & Dataharvest

Get it right – all of it, all the time! The Swedish weekly investigative TV program Uppdrag Granskning (Mission Investigate) has strict rules for quality control and fact checking. The process starts at the very beginning with a Devil´s advocate examining the idea. At the end every fact needs to be questioned and verified – line by line. Selection of facts and basis for conclusions are scrutinized. The method has built trust, both in the audience and between journalists and sensitive sources. UG editor Nils Hanson, who with his team invented the quality control system, shares his methods.

Researching the internet means more than typing a search into Google and then clicking on the link to Wikipedia. Successful research does not begin at Google, it begins in your brain. First think about, who might know the answer or if there is a specific search-tool for your question. Major parts of the internet, the "deep web", are unreachable for search engines. Moreover, wide parts of the social web exclude them. So structure your research: what are you looking for, where are you looking, and which specific tools and methods exist. The more you know about the structure of the internet, the more effective your searches will be.

Digital strangers have access to your bedroom: Data protection and the right to privacy is under threat. In 2020, between 25 and 30 billion devices are going to be on the Internet – and many of them are of poor quality and easy to hack. Süddeutsche Zeitung proved how easy it was to get into people’s homes, to get unauthorized access to surveillance cameras in shops, pharmacies and play grounds. Conclusion: The Internet of Things is out of control. Vanessa Wormer, Jannis Brühl and Benedict Witzenberger discuss methods and ethical considerations in the project.

Threat modeling' is a way information security professionals think about how to protect systems against attacks. For everyday users however, it's more fruitful to think about what your goals are and what risks you take when using digital tools to achieve them. Over the course of the two sessions, Henrik Chulu will illustrate how a little infrastructural and computer literacy goes a long way in establishing a baseline of digital security and introduce a way of thinking about risk mitigation that is not dependent of certain tools, but rather on critical thinking and good digital hygiene.
Security begins with technical literacy. How do the things you use daily work? What risks are you facing in the digital world? What can you do to limit them?

Second session on “Threat modelling”. How to think about risk mitigation that is not dependent of certain tools, but rather on critical thinking and good digital hygiene. The session focuses on
• Hands-on Risk-assessment
• Mission-oriented, human-centered security culture
• Structured security review process with handouts
• Questions and (hopefully) answers.

Digital surveillance and data traffic – how does it work, and where can your data get snatched? Interactive session where we show how data is transmitted over the internet and who can see and access it on the way from A to B. Maximum participants 20 - please register on Sched (if many are interested, the session will be repeated)

The Sunday Times recently exposed dark net marketplaces, unmasking a government contractor selling high-tech auto-theft equipment and a major dealer of illegal steroids. Other users ranged from middle-class students to professional poker players. Louis Goddard gives a behind-the-scenes look at the story, showing how the team used open source techniques to extract key location and contact data – including email addresses and geotags – from several marketplace backups, going on to link this data to named individuals in the UK. He will also show how the same data might be used by journalists elsewhere in the world, e.g. in the Netherlands, where many of the dealers identified by the investigation source their products. The session will be followed by an informal networking meeting. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/dark-net-dealers-dragged-into-the-light-kx05bc3jd

Cool tools for your research. BBC’s research expert Paul Myers has found new tools to unveil information.

Making the datasets from an investigation public allows readers to verify the reported facts and scrutinize the conclusions. But it may also release enough facts to identify individuals in the data. Unfortunately, we are pretty unique - in the combination of our describing attributes (date of birth, sex, location, profession, etc) as well as in our observable behaviour (e.g. combinations of articles bought in an online shop or films watched on netflix). This uniqueness can make it easy to re-identify people in a dataset, even if names and other obvious identifiers have been removed. Data anonymization is about making us less unique, by removing/replacing just enough information so that people can no longer be identified – while still retaining enough information to make the dataset useful to others. It can be hard to strike the balance between privacy and utility (in fact, it is more or less an unsolved problem). In the first session Katharina Rasch gives an introduction to data anonymization, demonstrates different methods, and looks at examples of data anonymization gone wrong. The second session aims to bring people together with an interest in or experience in developing anonymization methods. Both sessions are aimed at journalists and data scientists alike, no previous experience in data analysis is required.

Paul Myers and Henk van Ess together face one of their biggest professional challenges: they must answer questions of the audience with a terrible twist.
For each challenge, a "Wheel of Misfortune" will start, crippling their arsenal of research techniques to a minimum. Possible handicaps are that
they can't use Google at all or should be able to answer the question only with punctuation and numbers. Will they survive "Messed up facts"?
And do you have some questions for them? Send them to henkandpaul@journalismfund.eu

Henk van Ess goes Fast and Furious with stuff that seems impossible to validate. In this anthology of his work with European media and Bellingcat, Henk will share the power of logical thinking. Who is behind the mysterious note of an IS-warrior? What is the full name of that completely anonymous Youtuber? That Egyptian missile launcher lying in the dump, is it real? What is the secret address of the CEO of Novartis? What is the telephone number of a guy that really doesn't want to be found? Experience some amazing Houdini-acts, inspired by harsh deadlines. When you're done with this Sunday morning session, you leave with 10 tips to validate stuff. Any stuff.