Intelligence for Human Rights? Private Intelligence Structures in Human Rights Affairs

The violation of human rights is a serious crime. Information about it are difficult to obtain and to verify. State intelli­ gence agencies deal with this task only according to instructions of their government and therefore they often ignore or tolerate this breach of international law. Non­state actors, however, can search and document without regard to nation­states. At the present time it appears that most of the necessary information can be acquired by private researchers: Satellite photos, videos about the conflicts, databases, sources on the ground: Private actors can use them for litigable documentary and short campaigns. Commercial private intelligence firms offer more: They can monitor the communication of suspects and track their financial trans­ actions. Today it seems that the necessary information about human rights violations can be obtained and analyzed by private actors – independent from politics.


Introduction
S ince the end of the Cold War, intelligence services worldwide had to search for new opportunities to justify their existence and the enormous amounts of money demanded from their governments. 1 Old enemies -e.g. the KGB, leftwing groups in South America and Africa or the tanks of the Warzaw Pact -dissapeared and only a few new risks appeared at the horizon of risk perception: organized crime and since September 11 all aspects of islamist terrorism.
Connected are other problems such as the spread of weapons of mass destruction, further linked to criminal and terrorist activities. In addition, we have socalled "illegal" migration of poor people into the rich countries. Concerning this last point, one could ask whether or not the intelligence community has an interest in human rights issues as these issues present a reason for people to migrate. This does not appear to be so. There seems to be only one concern, expressed in the following statement: "The poor human rights records of a liaison partner, which may lead to a setback in the relationship." 2 Otherwise, human rights issues do not present a real scruple as current history shows. Asked about the relevance of human rights issues in their work and analysis, not one press officer of any intelligence agency gave any comment to the requests of the author. Yet, as others state, this is worth to be discussed, especially in the ongoing intelligence "war on terror" and its nexus to human rights issues. 3 * Stephan Blancke studied administrative science and political science. His Stephan Blancke studied administrative science and political science. His main research is on cyber security, the tracing and mapping of intelligence and subintelligence networks, East Asian security structures, and private in telligence. For further information visit http://stephan.blancke.de. 1 There is an ongoing discussion about definition and theorization of intelli There is an ongoing discussion about definition and theorization of intelli gence, which cannot be discussed in this essay. Subject of this essay is the question, whether or not intelligence agencies can play a role in detecting and observing human rights violations. Do they have special information, sources and capabilities of monitoring, unlike nonstate actors? Is their information part of a wellconsidered and responsible reaction to emerging human rights violations? Or can the information which governments, the media and civil society need to be able to act, be delivered by nonstate actors? 4

Human rights and intelligence
In an older compilation of essays about the "the role of intelligence in times of peace", not one author is mentioning the term "human rights" or its possible relevance. 5 This seems to be representative for the lacking concern about how important observations by state intelligence angencies of human rights violations are. Even in the light of the "war on terror" and its sometimes shady intelligenceled operations, the role of intelligence in detecting human rights violations are not a significant part of the discussion: "While popular leftist literature and journalism has taken the intelligence establishment to task for its controversial practices, it remains poorly integrated into contemporary debates over human rights and legal order." The permanent discussion shows that it still seems impossible to say something definite about what should be regarded as human right and what not, despite the legal concept given in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This declaration can be consulted as a first source, independent from political discussions about human rights. Reading e.g. only Article 5 ("No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment"), it is obvious that many states and political systems ignore this claim. While one could assume that it is easy to comprehend, official publications of an intelligence agency offer nearly no comment on it. Of course, one can read about results of human rights violations by governments or private actors, of which migration is one of. For example, "Migration can become a serious threat for public order and state security."7 It shows that instead of discussing "new threats", human rights violations and the possible mass migration are perceived as a risk for national security, not as tragedy for the individual and not as responsibility for governments to act.
The following chart shows the traditional way of information processing by state intelligence agencies, which are perceiving migration as a risk for national security. Observing political entities as crime or potential for civil unrest and being influenced at the same time by public opinion or thinktanks with a more conservative view on security issues, the results of this process often tend to be fixed from the beginning, as various examples show: Migration as a danger for national security, but not as a warning signal for the government or a chance to change policy.
Unfortunately, the "mainstream debate still centers on traditional national security issues. Here, compared with the relative stability and calculability of relative capacities for "mutually assured destruction" in the Cold War, is now a different calculus of risk." 8 Traditional intelligence perception cannot always fit with those new risks. In restructuring processes of the intelligence agencies of the former East Bloca few attempts of a restart can be observed, ending the often harsh operations of their spies. From the beginning this was related to the persons assuming political positions, who brought -in this time -some kind of idealism and the feeling of a "new beginning" into bureaucracy. E.g. until today one can read on their websites, that the Security Information Service of the Czech Republic (BIS) "consistently observes human rights and freedoms…". 9 Thinking about today´s scandals, this has to be attended to in any case.
The term "human rights" is not easy to find in intelligence publications and it is mostly connected with types of threatening imagination of uncontrollable movements, which are observed with distrust and fear. To deal with future threats in the context of human rights violations, U.S. intelligence tried to estimate e.g. indigenous protest movements and came to the conclusion that "such movements will increase, facilitated by transnational networks of indigenous rights activists and supported by wellfunded international human rights and environmental groups."10 In numerous states, NGOs, observing human rights violations, are just forbidden, labeled as state enemies and prevented from getting inside. And of course, there is a long tradition in observing and infiltrating human rights groups by intelligence services -not only in repressive states but in the West too. While this subject still has to be analyzed, most publications address the violation of human rights by intelligence agencies. Today the "war on terror" and the outsourcing of intelligencerelated functions, as for example the tracking of suspects or their interrogation, produces new cases of malpractice and violation of prisoners and their human rights nearly every week.

2.1
Intelligence against human rights?
Since governments are confronted with the concept of human rights in practical politics, they try to use and exploit it for their own interests -independent from the political system. It is assumed that intelligence agencies -especially today -are well informed about the situation in a country of interest. There can be unsureness in naming a function owner or a special location in a foreign country, but never in the identification of small or massive violation of human rights. Today the intelligence community can resort to satellite images with very high resolution, 11 or they can use Twitter and any other form of mobile communication. And even in very repressive states, seperated and nearly not connected by wire with the outer world, like North Korea, Myanmar, Sudan etc., there is a growing and useful network of underground communication, defectors and informants. It is possible to get smuggled videofiles, showing state crimes, executions and starvation. And furthermore it is possible to ask activists from NGOs, working directly -often under risky conditions -in those countries.
This means that there is no plausible reason and no excuse for a government or an intelligence agency to be clueless or uninformed. Additionally, informal contacts between those organizations, e.g. the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and Amnesty International or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Human Rights Watch, are dealt with discretion by both sides.
From the past until today, there are many cases where intelligence agencies watched massive human rights violations, the beginning of them or just the planning period of responsible persons. In many cases their governments decided not to act or to behave in an opportunist matter. It seems to be a double accountability:Western states create e.g. African states, but during their failure they ignore the signals of crimes and internal violence. "In part because the nation state is a Western construct imposed on Africa, life in postcolonial times has often been characterized by the oppression of one ethnic group by another: first Hutu by Tutsi, then the reverse, first native Liberians by AmericoLiberians, then the reverse, and so on." 12 In case of violation that means no intervention, or only very cautious interventions, if it is an important political or economic partner that is committing such crimes. On the other side, we find aggressive public relations and sometimes covert or overt operations against special states, which are "the bad ones", for whatever reason. For example, Russia is a powerful state, which has many important economic ties with nearly every region in the world. But it is violating human rights in Chechnya. Nevertheless it has an efficient lobby avoiding severe sanctions or insistent inquiries. Cuba is a poor country, a hangover from the communist age, connected with only a few others more or less noninfluential states. It is violating human rights, e.g. by arresting people because of their political attitudes. This is resulting in harsh sanctions since many years as well as boycotts on the political and economic level.
Uzbekistan is another still ongoing example. Its media is under strict government control, the state agencies are using torture, restriction of civil rights such as free association, religious acitivities etc. In the Freedom House 2009 report entitled "The Worst of the Worst: The World´s Most Repressive Societies", Uzebekistan -among others -is judged "to have the worst human rights records". 13  governments allowed the delivering of surveillance technology to Uzbekistan, e.g. Siemens in Germany. 14 Even though there are definitely massive and brutal violations of human rightsand Western governments must be informed about thisthere are actually deepened relations between Uzbekistan and countries like Germany or Russia. Therefore two reasons must be mentioned: Uzbekistan is rich of gas, which can be exploited by Gazprom, and the war in Afghanistan, where Western allies need Uzbekistan for their military operations.
Since 2002 Germany has a military base in Termes. Related to the "war on terror" are widespread speculations about to the so called "Islamic Jihad Union", a group which the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, and others called a fake organization, which is controlled and maybe established by the Uzbek government, serving as reason to keep on oppressing the opposition in Uzebkistan 15 . Building up pseudoorganizations, conducted by intelligence services, are sometimes called black or sting operations. Furthermore, concerning the economic ties to Uzbekistan, Western intelligence agencies must be informed about the situation in the country due to the highly interwoven connections between the Uzbek foreign trade and their security services. This is based amongst others on a strong nepotism. 1 Especially in this area of the world, Western intelligence agencies take a close look at local business people, because of their links to the drug trade in Central Asia. In contrast to this, it seemed crude to invite Rustam Inoyatov, the head of the National Security Service of Uzbekistan, who flew to Germany on October 23, 2008, "the same day that an Uzbek court sentenced a prominent human rights activist to 10 years in prison on politically motivated charges." 17 His visit was organized by the German BND, although they were well informed that Inoyatov was one of the persons responsible for the murder and torture of hundreds of innocent people. Employees of the German federal police, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), went to Uzbekistan interrogating the prisoner Scherali Asisow, who seemed to have informations about a few terror suspects in Germany. This happened even though "the interrogation of witnesses by German investigators in such states is a human rights abuse.

Information gathering by intelligence agencies
There are a few methods of intelligence agencies to collect information and different levels of that information. First of all, most of the information -something about 80 % or more -are There are sometimes very specialized journals, grey literature, websites on hidden or encoded servers, etc., but this should be no problem for an expert in this area of interest. Other kinds of OSINT can consist of interviews with experts from academia or people travelling in regions of concern. OSINT can become classified information simply by the decision of an intelligence officer to pad out his interview -sometimes just an internal hype to gain in importance. Furthermore, OSINT can sometimes be costeffective and easy to get, but this is not the standard. "For policy-makers, OSINT has the great advantage that it does not need to be kept secretly: it can be used in discussions and negotiations." 21 It was a logical consequence by the U.S. intelligence community to build up the Open Source Center in 2005, housing the Open Source Academy, "which trains intelligence professionals from throughout the U.S. Intelligence Community in cuttingedge tradecraft and reackback capacity to support their homeagencies and units." 22 In Germany the BND has the "Abteilung Unterstützende Fachdienste (UF)", which is a rather new unit, trying to compete with many other highprofile nonstate OSINT experts.
The interpretation of information is more difficult. To be precise, this means that we first talk about raw data, which via processing has to become information of value -generating at least knowledge. Behind this stand, near, intermediate or longterm political demands, producing pressure to succeed in giving advice for making decisions.
The other part of information gathering is "real espionage" and there are many paraphrases used: surveillance and bugging persons, listening to their intimate talks, taking pictures of their social network, observing their meetings, blackmailing someone to get informations about the other one, etc. There is a technical and a human factor, which means that an agency has the possibilities to scan e.g. the internet traffic or the telephone calls of one or more persons. They can use satellites to take closed pictures and to follow the movement of people or vehicles as well as detecting ecological changes on the ground. Relating to the conditions on the ground, an agency can place a mole inside an organization, to get a direct contact or overview about the plans, named human intelligence (HUMINT).
So what kind of information is gathered by the intelligence agencies that private actors are not able to get?

Possibilities of private actors
There are a few similar ways in which private actors like journalists or NGOs can choose to get the information they want: they can buy information or try to get them by themselves. The more autonomous in compiling their files, the more independent from outsiders they are. This is the reason for the sporadic claim of the United Nations (UN) for an own intelligence unit independent from the national intelligence agencies of their member states.
A main problem is about money. A wellfunded editorial office is able to pay high traveling expenses and essential technical infrastructure for a researcher: a rugged laptop, a few satellite phones, camera equipment, a portable water treatment plant, a generator, maybe a car and a driver, bribe for the locals, stringers and highranking people in the government, etc. More and more external specialists offer those services to newspapers and TV stations, due to the trend of outsourcing expensive investigative journalism. This can be critizised but has to be seen as a matter of fact. Large NGOs sometimes authorize researchers to detect illegal shipments of waste or find proof for illegal dealings with diamonds. Of course, those jobs are not riskless. At least due to the costs of those appointments on the ground they are an exception, especially for smaller organizations.
More realistic are political as well as legal risk assessments and background checks, which can be mostly done at the desk. They will be enriched with information from sources on the ground and intensive monitoring of the local official and -if existent -alternative media. Also in this part of the work, highly skilled people and the right technology are essential. "Implementing information monitoring projects is not easy and requires the consideration of many internal and external factors. It also requires management skills and an extensive knowledge of all the steps necessary for structuring the project." 23 Only a few firms which are specialised in this area exist. Some of them are working for chambers, which are active in the penalty of human rights violation, e.g. related to the U.S.prison camp Guantanamo. Others are researching the worldwide illegal flights of the CIA rendition program. But they seem to be distrusted by the traditional commercial intelligence companies: "These companies use precisely the same methods as a traditional corporate intelligence firm (surveillance, use 23  of open sources, interviews and the like). But their fees are far lower and their investigators tend to be exmilitants rather than former intelligence officials who moved over to the private sector." 24 In contrast to the staff of those more alternative intelligence firms, this claim can be disputed.
Hiring firms that belong to the traditional corporate sector can be very expensive. Currently, a few of the big ones try to make a mark as firms engaged in projects with a social background -e.g. the well known Hakluyt Ltd. with their new project "Corporate for Crisis (CfC)". Some of them reckon on the Pentagon, which seems to combine military and civil operations in the future. Military action accompanied by development aid becomes an interesting marketing concept for private security firms such as International Resources Group, L3 Services Group or Hart. 25 But most of their customers still belong to the industry which is interested to avoid problems with native people or local environmentalists, producing bad PR in the context of delicate projects.
The following chart shows a few common intelligence gathering categories, coming into operation when human rights violations in a country take place. Both -state and non state actors -have the capacities to compete in this field. 2

Easy information?
The most common practice for organizations working in detecting human rights violations is similar to those of government: OSINT.  background. The conclusion is that in a crisis or during operations its departments are forced to cooperate with state intelligence as well as NGOs. Such cooperation should be based on a joint interest, but it is in the nature of state intelligence agencies to represent the position and wishes of their national governments. NGOs, however, can rely on their network in the field and their ability to communicate their knowledge fast and in an unbureaucratic manner, unimpaired by the interests of a national government. Yet, also here manipulation, dominance and ineffective paperwork can be present.
Presenting a case of human rights violation in country A, the following chart shows the conventional procedure of state actors -observing the steps of the wellknown intelligence cycle (IC) -compared to a nonstate actor's possibilities of replacing them in an effective way.
The most important prestage to be mentioned is the longsome, often intransparent, external and internal political debate before concrete steps are taken by state actors. 30 As noted above this shows an ideal situation, but experiences with huge bureaucracies -as most state intelligence agencies are -give an impression about the difficulties or the political motivated unwillingness of state actors to react fast and effectively in cases of human rights violations.
30 Of course the chart shows an ideal situation -in bad and good regards. Of course the chart shows an ideal situation -in bad and good regards. Motivations to get into action are discussed openly and emotionalally. Duties are carried out often voluntarily.
Collection of data, related to the official request for information.
Often imprecise and randomly. Nebulous final aim.
For adhoc collections experts of country A must be contracted; some will not be found. Collection from country A is not always possible.
A network of various experts, insiders, journalists, members of the opposition, former prisoners -staying inside or outside of country A -can be used to get informations. Processing of the collected data, converting them into a working format.
How to process huge masses of data when it is not known that it must be sought for ? How to process data from rural societies?
Data cannot be processed because analysts are not skilled in contextualizing them.
A permanent process of discussion and external assessment by experts leads to a continuous processing of data. Production of socalled "finished intelligence", understandable for the customer.
Finished intelligence can be a political problem; different customers want to read different results Without contextualizing, finished intelligence will be incoherent. The final paper will only show a vague alternative.
Finished intelligence is understandable for everybody, because its aim is to influence the public opinion and to build up political pressure. Dissemination of intelligence results to the customer.
Some customers never get the information, others will.
Positive conclusions will not reach relevant people; it remains without effects for victims and delinquents in country A.
Most information is open, files can be downloaded on a website or are free to order.

Conclusion and next steps
The described possibilities of nonstate actors show that most methods of information gathering can be done by organizations investigating human rights violations. Provided that motivation and ressources exist, there is a chance for a professional NGO to compete with a state bureaucracy. Instead of state intelligence operations, "NGO intelligence operations have tended to be less formal and hierarchical, lacking the typical command and control chains of bureaucracy common to state intelligence organizations." 37 In the past, the CIA tried to analyze such situations in comparing two different teams: A and B, one of them stood for external experts, working with only OSINT and competing with the other team, coming from the inside of the agency. Instead of an opening of the CIA, this was a step to further privatization measures, but it showed that state intelligence accepted the challenge of OSINT and external experts -even if the results of the first B team were apparently wrong. 38 Relationships between state intelligence agencies and most of the private intelligence firms on the one side and non state actors on the other side will remain difficult, also due to distrust. There seem to be a few reasons to doubt the new role for intelligence agencies such as the new "peacemakers" in today´s international relations. 39 And as one practitioner stated: "National intelligence may have instinctive resistance to this new role; so too may those who do not want international organizations corrupted by backdoorintelligence contacts." 40 This more general problem should find a solution, i.e. it should be reduced to a common, small denominator. Both sides have an interest in forecasting and analyzing human rights violations, even if one side accepts or causes them from time to time. And both sides rely on information, which "at best will always be in some part fragmentary, obsolete, and ambiguous." 41 So it is not a corollary to think about ways of cooperation?
It is mainly important to build up a state and nonstate intelligence network interface. This could be an organization, where various data coming in is evaluated by a team of experts.
The processing and assessment of information, delivered by state and nonstate actors, would be most important. Of course there would be attempts of influence and manipulation. But there should always be a doubleblind peerreview process, which could afford the highest standard of reliability. External advice and permanent monitoring by science could lead to more confidence in this sensitive field of international relations. One could think about a rotating staff of this external advisary unit. An ideal solution in this case would be a fusion center, maybe residing near the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). It is certainly unrealistic to expect this kind of cooperation in the next time, not only because of political tensions. Both sides, state and nonstate actors, will keep on distrusting the other one, trying to get information without any valuable equivalent. Here especially the discussed field of human rights violations is a highly moral thing. "It may seem strange, when writing on a topic in the usually hardheaded field of national security studies, to discuss moral issues explicitly." 42 Maybe this statement will be come into discussion about possible future cooperations between state intelligence and the nonstate sector.