House of World Cultures: “Investigative Commons” in Berlin – Culture

There is physical violence, there is psychological violence, and there is digital violence. How this works when it is used as a weapon by the state was explained on Saturday evening in Berlin by dissidents and journalists who have fallen victim to the Pegasus spyware: “It’s as if someone were sitting in your brain,” said lawyer Mazen Masri. “Our privacy and our intimacy have been destroyed,” said the prominent Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui. And the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, like most of the others connected by video, warned urgently of the impending “spying society” and of the erosion of democracy.

Not only Aristegui and her colleagues, but also their underage son, Pegasus was played on the cell phone by state organs. The software not only allows all of the victim’s data to be accessed unnoticed and all of their communications to be tracked, but also to monitor them with a camera and microphone on their own device, even to make calls and send messages under their name – and the links, with which then all in the network of the person concerned become infected.

Pegasus was developed by the Israeli software company NSO Group and sold to countries such as Saudi Arabia, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates, but also Spain. The software protects the world from terrorists, asserts the company. But more and more autocratic rulers use them to attack and intimidate dissidents, activists and journalists. Journalists who have reported critically about the NSO Group and the corporate network in which it is woven have also fallen victim.

So far, only individual cases have been known. There was a report here, a little investigation there. What the Canadian research team Citizen Lab and the London investigative collective Forensic Architecture presented together with Amnesty International on Saturday was the very big panorama, one “Map of the landscape of all known attacks”, as the human rights lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck – his best known client is Edward Snowden – put it.

A map of the attacks

The data on this “map” can be displayed as a gloomy animation, on which blue, red and yellow dots and ellipses pop up in a timeline, each accompanied by ominously technoid digital signals (the “sonification” comes from Brian Eno). You can also search for countries, people, years and events. This reveals patterns and strategies, and it also becomes clear that Pegasus has become a preferred method of persecuting critics of the regime in exile. And that digital attacks often happen in tandem with attacks in the physical world: first the cell phone is spied on, then the apartment. The worst case so far is that of Jamal Khashoggi, who was the target of a Pegasus attack before he was murdered in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul.

It is no coincidence that this new investigation, although it involves cases around the world, was presented in Berlin. The city has long been developing into a European hub for the work of human rights initiatives, lawyers, activist groups and, of course, for researchers and data scientists. This is also the reason that Forensic Architecture, which uses publicly available information to prove state crimes, is now opening an office in Berlin.

Since the architect Eyal Weizman founded the group at London’s Goldsmiths College in 2011, it has lived in two worlds. She worked with NGOs and activist groups, but mostly made her research known in the art world. Your investigation into the murder of Halit Yozgat by the NSU was one of the most prominent works in the last Documenta. The presentation of the NSO research on Saturday took place in the House of World Cultures (HKW), where one of two Berlin exhibitions on the subject is currently on view. But for Weizman, who is also an advisor to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, it is time to take the work to a new level, he says. That is why Forensic Architecture has teamed up with Kaleck’s European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) for the Berlin location,.

On the spacious floor of a former soap factory in Kreuzberg, one floor above the offices of ECCHR, tables, computers and screens have been installed for a long time, but Dimitria Andritsou, an architect from Greece and an employee of Forensic-Architecture, looks after the house alone. Weizman and most of the twelve employees he wants to bring from London to Berlin are not allowed to enter because of the Delta variant. If it weren’t for the library with books from prisoners right at the entrance, if it weren’t for the room at the very back called “The Fridge”, the refrigerator, and from which electronic devices of all kinds are banned, this could also be the rooms of some event agency .

Berlin: city of refuge

Forensic Architecture researchers and ECCHR lawyers have worked together many times. At times, Kaleck commissioned the former to research his cases. Sometimes the lawyers got in after seeing Forensic Architecture’s research. Some of the projects are shown in the exhibition at HKW, such as the fire in the textile factory in Pakistan, in which the German cheap chain Kik had clothes made and in which 260 workers died in 2012.

Weizman and Kaleck want to bring the publicity and prosecution of human rights violations to a new level in Berlin. “Up until now, established NGOs like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty had a kind of monopoly,” Weizman said. “We’re going a different way, we don’t just want to be another polite human rights initiative.” Kaleck is similarly belligerent: “We are proceeding very self-confidently,” he says. “We have expert knowledge that normally only people with power and money have access to.”

In order to expand this knowledge and develop their methods further, they keep a few desks in the new office free for “residents” from other organizations. Everyone should benefit from each other, hence the name “Investigative Commons”. The well-known research group Bellingcat and the Berlin initiative Mnemonic, which specializes in the documentation and archiving of human rights violations in Syria, Yemen and Sudan, among others, are already on board, as is HKW. Weizman envisions an “ecosystem of researchers and lawyers”, as it has already proven itself in a project on the civil war in Yemen. The Syrian journalist Hadi al Khatib from Mnemonic provided videos of air strikes, Forensic Architecture arranged them in terms of time and space with their software. And the lawyers from ECCHR took action against the western manufacturers, some of whom the ammunition came from.

And something else spoke in favor of Berlin, according to Kaleck: Great Britain and the USA, he says, have “at least partially lost their liberalism”, “every kind of civil society opposition there is blowing a much harder wind in the face.” Berlin, on the other hand, is increasingly becoming a “city of refuge”, be it for Turkish opposition members, for hackers – or for someone like Laura Poitras, who is also a supporter of Investigative Commons. The documentary filmmaker, who was one of the two journalists to whom Snowden passed his data, and who shot her Oscar-winning film “Citizenfour” about him, lived in Berlin for several years because, after working on the US occupation in Iraq, she was on the American Terror watchlist was kept.

Poitras, who was there on Saturday from New York, shot a short documentary about the NSO research, which will be shown as part of the omnibus project “The Year of the Everlasting Storm” in Cannes and is already on at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein see is. Between the statements of the Pegasus victims, she has cut scenes of Black Lives Matter protests in New York and of sometimes frightening, sometimes puzzling actions by the police – images that show the deep-seated uncertainty that Poitras and many others now have belong to life.

Investigative Commons. House of World Cultures, Berlin. Laura Poitras: Circle. New Berlin Art Association. Both through August 8th.