News
Author: Tom Longley
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Our updated database shows the 9,771 times the U.S. trained foreign military units between Oct 2019 and Sept 2020
The U.S. Department of State has just published the Foreign Military Training and DOD Engagement Activities of Interest report for the 2020-2021 fiscal year. We've liberating it from the PDFs they published, adding 9,771 new training interventions to our database, which now contains a total of 237,603 trainings covering the two decades from 2000 to September 2020.
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New research paper from Security Force Monitor: using Natural Language Processing to extract knowledge graphs about police and army units and their commanders
Security Force Monitor has published a technical working paper on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and our research into abuses by police and armies. It shows how a NLP system can be deployed to extract information from sources on security force units and their related personnel. This is a practical contribution into the ongoing conversation about the tactical use of AI in human rights work.
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WhoWasInCommand is now available in Arabic
WhoWasInCommand.com can now be used in Arabic, as well as English, French and Spanish.
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A French translation of WhoWasInCommand, an overhauled Research Handbook, and other updates
WhoWasInCommand can now be used in French. We've also updated our Research Handbook. Read on...
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Collaboratively mapping the official websites and social media of the world’s security forces
We're making a big list of all the official websites and social media accounts of police, military and other security forces around the world. Here's how to help...
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Here’s 11,904 rows of new data from the US Department of State’s 2018-2019 Foreign Military Training Report
This weekend, security and human rights wonks received an early Christmas present from the U.S. Department of State: the Foreign Military Training and DoD Engagement Activities of Interest, 2018-2019. We turned it into data you can use.
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Unlocking the Department of State’s foreign military training data for good this time
Security Force Monitor has crunched 5,600 pages of State Department PDFs to create new version of the U.S. foreign military training data. Today we release a tool to explore these 200,000 rows of data.
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WhoWasInCommand shows you all the sources that evidence every piece of data – but you probably missed the way it does this
Here's how to see all the sources our researchers used to evidence every single piece of data on WhoWasInCommand.
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OpenStreetMap is (sometimes) a handy database of military and police locations – here’s how to see them
OpenStreetMap is a useful tool for getting an impression of a security force's bases and physical infrastructure. How do we do this?
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Not all snapshots are created equal – a time-saving Wayback Machine technique
Image: Clipping from 8 February 2004 Wayback Machine snapshot of SEDENA army commanders page. How do we get all the data out of that and 50 other captures of the same page? We’re going to write about our...