Henrietta Wilson, a PhD candidate at King's College London with a background in freelance OSINT research, joined the latest episode of From the Source, the Blackdot podcast. In this episode, she discusses the challenges of verification in arms control, the importance of high-quality information in decision-making, the potential role of AI in arms control, and her work editing a book on open source investigations and their impact on human security. You can read her insights below or listen to the full episode here.
Henrietta Wilson doesn’t consider herself an OSINTer in the typical sense. Her open source research focuses on addressing and understanding policy and technical challenges facing the global regulation of weapons of mass destruction. This includes looking at parliamentary accounts, newspaper records, budgets or developments in weapons labs and more to identify what policymakers are deciding on.
‘I'm looking at the Biological Weapons Convention, which entered into force 50 years ago and bans an entire category of weapons of mass destruction and yet does not have any formal ways to verify that everybody's complying with the treaty,’ she explains.
For her PhD, she is exploring what people understand by verification and whether it might be possible to do something to address what's recognised as a formal gap.
“The States Parties have tried many times to add verification and haven't managed it,” she begins. “They're negotiating a new set of measures or trying to address different aspects of the treaty. So my research is going to the UN website, looking at the States Parties, meetings, papers. There are loads of them. They're all public access. I've downloaded over 6,000 and I'm going through them using various automated processes to pick out what people have said at different times.”
When it came to analysing the data, Henrietta began with a manual process, but compared the process to turning 10 pages of a book and realising you can’t remember what happened.
‘I started off thinking I need to go through the statements line by line,’ she said. ‘I very quickly realised I was just missing lots of combinations.’
She went on to write a Python code to harvest them from the internet, drop them in a folder and build an Excel spreadsheet that will capture different data points like the date, author and any unique identifiers. Then, she used a second set of Python codes to go through the documents and extract the ones that mentioned some variation of the word ‘verification’.
Henrietta’s career began after she completed a Physics degree and began working for The Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex University for a world-leader in chemical and biological weapons disarmament.
‘I found this intense interest and fascination with the fact that people have tried to ban these weapons globally. There are many taboos against using poison in warfare and yet it's quite hard to define them, write agreements that people can sign up to and then to ensure those agreements are adequately fulfilled,’ she says.
Her scientific background enabled her to ask a different set of questions, particularly about the provenance of sources.
“Most of the people I worked with were social scientists,” she begins. “When they heard about my background, they wondered if I could invent a technology that would make it easy to distinguish between natural and unnatural disease to find a use of biological warfare.”
While Henrietta believes technology is great, she doesn’t think it’s a silver bullet in this instance. In biological warfare disarmament, identifying the deliberate misuse can be difficult, whether it’s a natural entity or a commonplace pharmaceutical.
‘The technologies help,’ says Henrietta. ‘But they won’t do everything for you.’
‘Whatever your personal beliefs are, whatever your politics, whether you're for or against weapons or for or against disarmament, the best decisions need strong information,’ says Henrietta. ‘You need to know the nature of the thing that you're trying to ban. You need to know where the proliferation risks are.’
She adds that to minimise the risk of someone accidentally releasing a nuclear weapon, countries must be confident that nobody else is going to use a nuclear weapon against them first. Throughout the Cold War, for example, there were information exchange systems, such as hotlines, set up between the USA and the USSR.
“Now we're living in such a complicated information ecosystem that it's very hard to distinguish between the real information and the disinformation,’ Henrietta says. This can lead to unnecessary escalation.
An example of this is early on in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when there was some nuclear sabre rattling from Putin's Russia. Non-governmental OSINTers found no changes to the deployment of the nuclear forces, so concluded it was just posturing.
For Henrietta, artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t currently helping with her work on the Biological Weapons Convention and biological weapons challenges to disarmament because there's not enough high-quality data for AI to draw on yet. She adds that the overlap between legitimate and harmful uses make it hard to find unambiguous identifiers that AI could help identify, and that there is also the risk of inadvertently creating data that proliferators could draw on.
In the nuclear context, while there are still dual use overlaps, there are some identifiers that are much more focused on illicit proliferators.
‘I'm an optimist about technologies generally, but I do think there are some issues the black box situations and analysts being able to say where they got their results from. I think it could undermine trust in open source work if people aren't careful,’ Henrietta says. She adds that the scientific method of checking hypotheses and being transparent about your methods so other people can reproduce your results is how to build trust in knowledge.
Henrietta was the lead editor for a book called Open Source Investigations in the Age of Google. She worked with Dan Plesh and Ola Samuel, who put the proposal together, and collected chapters from different practitioners using open source research to investigate threats to human security.
Authors include Christian Trebert from the New York Times, Aric Toler from Bellingcat, Alexa Koenig and Lindsay Freeman, who discuss the creation of the Berkeley Protocol, Ben Strick on his expert open source investigations, Jeffrey Duke, a practitioner from South Sudan, and Idris Ahmed, discussing how open source investigators can achieve better results than traditional journalists.
You can access the book here.
Listen to OSINT, arms control and the Biological Weapons Convention with Henrietta Wilson in full and stay tuned for even more OSINT insight on Blackdot’s next podcast episode.