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Conference Agenda

Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view.

Agenda Overview

Session

CLOSING KEYNOTE PANEL

Time:

Wednesday, 22/Apr/2026:

3:00pm - 4:30pm

Session Chair: Basile Simon, Starling Lab for Data Integrity

Location: AUDITORIUM [-2]

Floor: -2 [Ground Floor | Main entrance]

Session Abstract

PANELISTS

Basile Simon, Starling Lab, Stanford / USC

Basile leads applied research in evidentiary and investigative standards and comes from a background in journalism and human rights documentation

Emily Tripp, Airwars

Emily is the executive director of Airwars, a leading human rights violations monitor and an early architect of remote, web-based documentation.

Marvin Milatz, Der Spiegel

Marvin works as a researcher at DER SPIEGEL’s fact-checking unit, specialising in “Open Source Intelligence” (OSINT) and digital forensics.

Friedhelm Weinberg, Mnemonic

Friedhelm oversees the programmatic work of Mnemonic, an organisation dedicated to archiving, preserving, and verifying open-source information as documentation of human rights violations and international crimes.

Presentations

Archiving for accountability: new frontiers in open source intelligence and digital evidence

Basile Simon¹, Emily Tripp², Marvin Milatz³, Friedhelm Weinberg⁴

¹Starling Lab; Stanford / USC; ²Airwars; ³Der Spiegel; ⁴Mnemonic

This panel convenes leading practitioners at the intersection of web archiving, open-source intelligence (OSINT), and human rights documentation to explore practices and use cases that are often under-represented at the IIPC. While traditional web archiving focuses on preserving cultural heritage, a growing community of investigators, journalists, and legal advocates utilizes web archiving as a critical tool for accountability. This panel will present the methodologies and challenges of this mature field, showcasing how web archives are used to document human rights abuses, investigate war crimes, and combat disinformation.

Our contribution advances the conference theme by broadening the definition of "web heritage" to include the ephemeral, dynamic, and often contentious digital content that serves as evidence of historical events. While discussions at previous conferences have at times centered on the technical and logistical challenges of large-scale crawls and collection development, our panel shifts the focus to the high-stakes application of web archives in legal and journalistic contexts. We will build upon prior work in areas like high-fidelity capture and consider the unique ethical and security challenges that arise when archiving evidence of state-sponsored violence or disinformation campaigns. By bridging the gap between the cultural heritage and accountability-focused communities, we aim to create a more holistic understanding of the web’s role as a primary source for future generations.

The impact of this panel on conference attendees will be threefold. First, archivists and librarians from traditional memory institutions will gain insight into a rapidly evolving use case for their skills and infrastructure, opening potential avenues for collaboration with human rights organizations and newsrooms. Second, tool developers and engineers will hear directly from practitioners in high-risk environments about their specific needs for verifiability, security, and ease of use, informing the next generation of web archiving technology. Finally, researchers and legal experts will be exposed to the practical realities and evidentiary standards required to bring web-archived material into judicial proceedings, fostering a richer dialogue between technologists and the legal community.

We aim to foster a discussion on similarities and differences in cultural heritage archiving and "accountability archiving" practices to share knowledge, identify common challenges, and explore opportunities for collaboration. By highlighting the needs of investigators and OSINT practitioners, we can collectively advance the development of tools and standards that serve a broader range of applications and strengthen the integrity of the web as a historical record.

Participating organisations (names and participants not included) will:

Moderate the panel, and share their experiences in developing and deploying end-to-end systems for authenticated capture, storage, and verification of digital evidence for legal, journalistic, and historical purposes.
Discuss their systematic approach to web preservation in the conflict contexts, and their work in building a searchable index of evidence for accountability.
Share insights on the journalism-specific workflows and idiosyncrasies of using web archives as supporting evidence in public-interest reporting.
Discuss how their suite of widely available open source high-fidelity web archiving tools can support this community of users, and how to balance the challenges and unique needs of users in high risk environments, such as verifiability of web archives, with broader web archiving needs.
Socialise their hands-on, practical research into legal framework and standards with regard to the production of web archiving material in judicial contexts.
Present what is perhaps the most complex (albeit impactful) use of third-party, web sources to derive actionable claims of attribution against military commanders.