我们的科技进步会减缓司法公正吗?

War in 2022 is a far cry from the mid-1940s era of World War II, which itself is far removed from the trenches of Belgium and Northern France in the mid-1910s era of World War I. 然而,, 为了武器的进步, 也许最大的进步是我们有能力 轻松捕捉战争的破坏(和怪异).

Thinking back to World War I and the fabled 1914 圣诞节休战, 其中100多个,据说有000名士兵参加了演习, and it’s hard to imagine that this multiday event—with soldiers caroling together, 埋葬死者, 甚至踢一点足球也有, 据我所知, 没有捕捉到事件的电影片段. 像这样, it’s a story that has to be told and retold countless times over, 从早期目击者的描述一直到2005年 纽约时报 条款和a 2014年文章中 TIME commemorating the 100th anniversary of events that seem surreal to us today.

Jump forward to post-Nazi-era Germany in 1946 and the court proceedings addressing the horrific events in Auschwitz, 布痕瓦尔德, 还有其他集中营. 在纽伦堡审判中, 以关押他们的德国城市命名, not only were there eyewitnesses to war crimes that occurred between 1939 and 1945, but there were also photographs and grainy film reels—some recorded by Allied soldiers tasked with liberating the camps, others taken by Nazi “experimenters” in various “labs” at these camps for “scientific” reasons—that could be used as part of the trial proceedings. The introduction of this footage not only accelerated justice in the Nuremberg courtrooms but also created a tabula rasa baseline on which future generations could draw their own conclusions on guilt, 是清白的, 还有战争的恐怖.

从20世纪90年代到2010年代中期, 战争被电视转播, so the immediacy of content availability was realized in 24-hour cycles, and some of those news cycles captured war crimes—often as long as they occurred within the sightline of a broadcast camera, meaning near a hotel in which journalists were housed—leading to additional war-crime tribunals.

然而一件奇怪的事情开始发生了, 因为有线新闻的即时性, which first shortened the news cycles to half-day intervals, and the subsequent arrival of zero-interval news were powered by live-streaming applications that were probably designed by engineers who had no idea their creations would capture greater and greater horrors in war-torn areas.

远不是稀缺的内容, the integration of streaming into professional- and citizen-based news-gathering has generated such a monumental level of potential war-crime footage that every day sees an additional 10–100 documented cases of crimes against humanity. And this increased footage brings with it both greater accountability and a significantly higher backlog of cases that need to be tried.

如果我们, 作为一个公民社会, are to accurately and impartially adjudicate each of these potential war crimes—in any way close to how the Nuremberg Trials methodically explored each case—one of two things will have to happen over the next few years.

First, if the number of available courts—such as the ones in The Hague, the U.美国，美国.K., and various European locations—is not radically expanded, what we’ll face is a decade or more of war-crime tribunals trying to work their way through a massive backlog of cases. We might see cases in 2035 or beyond that stem from a span of just 9 months of war in 2022. 第二个, if the courts are radically expanded and hundreds of cases are tried in parallel, 我们可能会看到对这些罪行的更快判决. 然而，这也带来了自身的技术挑战.

我将在2023年的第一篇专栏文章中迎接这些挑战, calling on the industry to think about proper archival and chain-of-custody issues so there’s no bottleneck in bringing justice in time for victims to know it’s been properly meted out.