Conservation in Practice

Civilian technologists should assist the state during the COVID-19 pandemic

This article was published in India in Transition (a policy blog run by the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania) on the 6th of April 2020, and is available at this link: https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/iit/shashanksrinivasan2020

In December 2019, the Government of India enacted the Citizenship Amendment Bill, which sparked widespread protests and counter-protests. Over the next few weeks, large crowds gathered in towns and cities across India, where police and paramilitary armed forces were deployed in large numbers. Violence erupted at some of the protest sites and people were injured and killed in the process. While questions remain as to which factions initiated the violence, it is unquestionable that in some cases, state forces were brutal in their approach and harmed Indian citizens. Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic-linked lockdown across India and its accompanying enforcement by the state have resulted in numerous well-documented instances of police violence. Videos of shoppers, shopkeepers, and vendors being beaten by police forces are easy to find on social media, and reports have emerged of a man in Bengal who was beaten to death by the police for stepping out of his house to buy milk. The state may have the monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its territory, but the violence on display, both in Kashmir and the North-East in the past few decades, as well as across India in the past few months, is illegitimate, violates human rights, and is against the values embodied in the Indian Constitution. In this context, it seems obvious to suggest that civilian technologists should not be helping the state amplify its capacity to harm its own citizens.

In response to the pandemic, individuals, informal consortia, start-ups, and established companies in the Indian technology sector are attempting to use tools at their disposal to assist the state with its response. Some of these actors, however, seem unaware as to the effects their well-intentioned actions may have on the fabric of the country. It is one thing to design 3D-printable valves for ventilators or to retool production lines toward mask production, and quite another to design a quarantine-enforcing geo-fencing app or to deploy drones for lockdown surveillance purposes. Take drones in particular; during the initial violence from December onwards, they were being deployed by unknown actors on behalf of the state to monitor the protests in Delhi, along with numerous uniform-wearing police officials carrying cameras. Subsequently, the Home Minister announced that facial recognition tools were being used to identify individual protestors from video collected during the protests. In the last few weeks, mostly concealed by news of the pandemic, there have been published reports of individuals in North-East Delhi who have been picked up by the police. It is highly probable that drone footage was used to identify them, and whether or not their actions were legitimate, it is certain that drones were used as another tool in the state’s arsenal to suppress dissent.

Today, quarantine regulations have been implemented across India, where people are allowed to leave their homes only for essential services. In practice, these rules mean that people are only able to leave their houses when driven to do so by necessity, as defined by the state, and under fear of illegal assault by state forces. There have been calls to use drones to assist with the enforcement of quarantine regulations by conducting mass surveillance of public spaces, alerting the police when people are gathering and enabling them to “take action.” As this action most often takes the form of coercion with the implied threat of violence, the deployment of drones for this purpose does not qualify as a “drones-for-good” operation.

Similarly, mobile-phones are being utilized to assist the state in tracking quarantined patients. They require the quarantined person to install an app on their phone and provide it with requisite permissions, which is then used to ensure that the person can be located at any point in time. There are no guarantees as to the security of the data, or that the information will even be kept confidential. For example, the Karnataka Health Department has released district-wide lists with the exact addresses of every person under fourteen-day home quarantine in the state, purportedly to allow community enforcement of the quarantine rule. The intentional release of such information beggars belief, and until India’s Personal Data Protection Bill comprehensively protects personal data, building surveillance applications for the government must cease. To present an alternative, South Korea has also developed and deployed a quarantine-enforcing phone app, but it is not mandatory; those quarantined are permitted to opt out of using this system. However, even with South Korea’s more liberal approach to technology deployment, concerns have been raised about the privacy of the individuals being tracked.

In the name of the public good, we are witnessing the creation of state surveillance infrastructure on a massive scale, both in India and across the world. Drones, facial recognition tools, and mandatory geolocation apps are just some of the shinier technologies that are being deployed today. Other more insidious ones, such as those that allow for pattern matching across databases, can be equally deadly to a secular democracy. Such systems will require only a little alteration before they can be combined with other state databases to identify and locate individuals or communities by caste, religion, income bracket, or place of origin. If these are put into place before the proper safeguards are implemented, it is only a matter of time before the least India’s marginalized groups need to fear is being beaten by the police. The onus lies on civilian technologists to ensure that the work they conduct for the state is used for the good of the nation, and not to oppress its people.

Working on our Unusual Solution: The Ethics of Drone Use

For the last few months, we’ve been working on something very different from the other projects we’ve done so far. We are trying to put together a process for the creation of implementable, inclusive and contextualised ethical guidelines for the use of drones.

Panoramic drone view of rural India

Like many new technologies, drones have come into use before the regulations for their use are in place. They have the potential to implement impactful and interesting work but are also capable of being gravely misused. While there are legal regulations in place for the use of drones in India, ethical safeguards have not been considered in these regulations. Drones have already begun to be used without consideration for consent or privacy. Their unethical use can greatly exacerbate existing power imbalances. In our own work, we often face ethical dilemmas when working on projects that involve the use of drones, or the data generated by them. However, considering that some estimates indicate that there are over 6,00,000 civilian drones in India, when we say no to a project, someone else will say yes. A longer-term solution is necessary.

We want to fill this gap. We are currently working on a solution through the Unusual Solvers Grant competition; we’re calling this project EDUCATE (Ethical Drone Use through Community Awareness and Tactical Engagement). Our Theory of Change targets major donors, investors and other funding agencies to convince them of the need to have an ethical framework for any project involving drones. We can use their buy-in as leverage to inculcate ethical frameworks in the various work flows of drone manufacture and use.

We intend to create engagement material to use at various levels of the drone industry that ensure that ethical considerations are incorporated in the processes of drone hardware and software manufacturing, as well as in the implementation of drone projects. This material will be aimed at facilitating an understanding of ethical frameworks, equipping teams with tools to draft best practice guidelines within their specific context. While we will create the process for drafting such a framework, the actual guidelines for implementation will be collaboratively drafted with the communities potentially impacted by the drone project.

Showing community members what drones are capable of

To crystallize our Theory of Change, we have been undertaking three kinds of activities. Firstly, we spoke with members of a rural community who have been impacted by drone use. In their area, drones have been deployed without their consultation, and been used to create an atmosphere of fear. They did not feel legal recourse was a realistic option for them and they adapted their behaviour in response to drone deployment in the area. Their experiences helped us understand the ground level realities of the use of drones, validating the need for ethical frameworks. Secondly, we conducted interviews with relevant stakeholders and field experts. Through this process, we attempted to obtain insight into the workings of the drone industry, and made sense of the various points at which we could engage with it. Finally, we’ve conducted an extensive review of relevant literature to better understand the previous work done in this field.

( At the time of writing this blogpost, we were still in the process of conducting our field visits and our interviews. The rest of this post will focus on our review of the literature. -Editor)

Over the course of our literature review, some of the topics we’ve studied are:

  • Ethical frameworks for other emergent technologies

  • Uses and concerns of using drones in conservation and development projects

  • Tools to gauge public perception, especially around new technologies

  • Governance Theories around making ethical frameworks effective

  • Post-normal Science

  • Democratization of science

While the reading material has been varied and dense, this process has been extremely helpful for our project, and has also been personally gratifying.  Looking at the intersecting disciplines and theories that may be applicable to this project has been an exciting process for me.  While we are yet to create our engagement material itself, we have a sense of the shape of the process we wish to create. Many ethical frameworks for emergent technologies already exist. We do not want to create another one.  Instead, we would like to make existing frameworks more implementable by cohesively presenting them in formats that those implementing projects can use in their work.

As a theoretical backbone, we are using Technologies of Humility (Jasanoff, 2005) to help assess and manage emergent technologies with many unknowns. The framework outlined here for the ethical evaluation of new technologies highlights four pillars:

  • Framing

  • Vulnerability

  • Distribution

  • Learning

In addition to this, we are also imbibing her recommendation to make work more applicable by moving beyond academic peer review to include inputs from relevant stakeholders.

 

We’re certain that we want to incorporate reflexivity within the process we’re outlining; i.e. the creation of structured pathways to incorporate checks that allow for adaptation over the course of a project. This is especially important when working with emerging technologies such as drones, both for the community whose understanding and perception of the technology may shift as the project progresses, as well as for those implementing the project, giving them the flexibility required to make their project successful.

 

A large component of our work will also be to effectively engage communities in the process of drafting and overseeing the implementation of the drone projects they may be impacted by. As per our research, informed consent alone seems inadequate (Van de Poel, 2016) as a tool for making ethical guidelines inclusive. As part of our project, we will evaluate other methodologies of engagement, such as deliberative polling (Ahmad et. Al 2006). We will compare and contrast these, as well as various other methods and tools for community engagement and will be developing communication material accordingly.

 

Finally, we intend for accountability to be built into the framework and implementation of drone use. Testing the principles of the democratisation of science, we want to establish the pathways by which communities impacted by drones will be able to hold implementers and funders accountable for their actions and investments respectively. One example or possible manifestation of this could be contractual, where the project contract could include a clause stating that the power to renew the contract or permission to implement different phases of a project was with the impacted community.

 

We’ll be at the WeRobotics Unusual Solutions Pitch event in Nairobi, Kenya, next week where we’ll be competing with the other eight finalists for a grant to make our solution a reality! More on this once the event’s done; for more information, follow us on Twitter/Instagram or reach out to us via the contact form on our website.

Report: The Role of Technology in Conservation in India | SCCS-Bangalore 2019

On the 16th October 2019, Technology for Wildlife (TfW) organised a panel discussion on the ‘Role of Technology in Conservation” at the Student Conference on Conservation Science, Bengaluru. The format of the panel discussion was 15-20 minute presentations by each panelist, followed by a few questions from the audience for that panelist; once all the panelists spoke, there was time for questions at the end.

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The panelists were Prithvi from Appiko, Abhi from Wildly, Jose from the Wildlife Trust of India, and Shashank from TfW. Unfortunately, this had to be an all-male panel; though we had invited four women working in this space to participate, none of them were able to make it.

The panel began with Prithvi from Appiko, who walked us through the range of Appiko’s products, with an emphasis on their sensors that allow regular cameras to be used as camera traps. I found their explanation to why they had chosen to build camera traps interesting since there are already off-the-shelf camera traps available. In Prithvi’s opinion, even camera traps used for tiger estimation, which are perhaps one of the most abundantly used technological devices in Indian conservation, were origninally developed to optimize hunting and are not always conducive for wildlife surveys. This is indicative of the current relationship between technology and conservation even for a well-funded issue such as tiger conservation, where there is limited funding for innovation; technological needs are met through ‘jugaad’ of existing technologies meant for other applications. My favourite take-away from Prithvi’s presentation was his outlook on the role of technology in conservation: “Technology is just a tool for conservation, but with the right tool, you can do a lot more.” 


The next speaker, Abhi from Wildly, was also focused on developing hardware for conservation. Their company is currently building acoustic devices to detect illegal activities in protected areas. Later in the conference, I had a chance to listen to them demonstrate their work during another workshop on Machine and Deep Learning, and it was really interesting to learn what applying these techniques in the current Indian conservation context entails. My most valuable take away from Abhi’s presentations was that their technology was created and developed out of a current conservation need. This, coupled with the fact that they are trying to be open-source and affordable makes them a very interesting organisation, who’s work we will be following.

The third presentation, by Jose from the Wildlife Trust of India, was on his work with Wildlife Crime Prevention. It was a very engaging talk and differed from the others in that he focused on the sustainability of technology more than on sustainable technology. He discussed various technological interventions that have been developed for his work, such as HAWK, and on how his team’s vision and working relationship proved to be more important in ensuring effective technological interventions more than the nature of the technologies themselves.

The final presentation was by Shashank from TfW. Multiple people communicated that they enjoyed his talk and that his enthusiasm was communicated in the presentation. It was the only non-hardware technology business in the group and I think his presentation on our work communicated the varied uses of technology in conservation.

Overall, the panel was interesting and unique. In future iterations of this panel, it may also be useful to invite panelists working in areas related to conservation ecology, such as mainstream ecologists or technologists working outside of conservation. This would help add different perspectives and provide an understanding of the larger picture.