Bridging Journalism and Justice at IJF Perugia
I was back in Perugia this April for the International Journalism Festival, this time as part of a small group co-hosting a closed-door side event called Bridging Journalism and Justice. Starling Lab co-organised it alongside Airwars, IrpiMedia, Paper Trail Media, and Videre.
The room gathered journalists, investigators, and lawyers. The question we came in with was narrow and practical: what does it actually take for documentation of atrocity crimes to survive contact with a legal proceeding? Is that something folks aspire to?
What I argued
My contribution tried to reframe what “good” looks like when digital evidence meets a courtroom, and to push back against the instinct to reach for new tools as the answer.
In fact, courts assessing digital material care about three things. Can you establish that this content is what you say it is, traceable to a real source? Has it been altered, and can you prove it hasn’t? And can you account for everywhere it’s been and everyone who’s touched it? These are the questions of authenticity, integrity, and chain of custody. Material can fail on any one of them even when the other two are solid.
What I find underappreciated is how many of these failures happen before anything reaches a legal team. Missing timestamps, unrecorded file transfers, compression applied without logging ā none of these look like problems at the time. They become problems when someone needs to reconstruct the history of a file months later and the record simply isn’t there.
The tool conversation
OK, so we did talk about tools as well. There are genuinely good ones now: Capture applications that bake metadata in at the moment of documentation, archiving infrastructure to survive platform takedowns, emerging standards that carry provenance information with a file across its whole lifecycle, including evidx.de, which I’m building with this in mind.
But from my perspective, the most interesting part of that conversation was where participants felt the gap most acutely: It wasn’t lack of software, but rather the absence of simple, shared, consistent practice. Folks seemed to ask: what’s an investigation plan people actually follow? Do we need for how files get named and stored?
The Starling Lab dispatch has the full write-up, including what the group is working on next.