The world of the US versus the Soviets is long gone, but there are still old nuclear warheads and radioactive materials stored in locations around the globe. The US State Department wants to make sure that weapons of mass destruction don’t fall into the hands of terrorists. And they want to use the public to generate data to help make sure this never happens.

In March, Under Secretary Rose Gottemoeller—who heads the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance (AVC) and is the American senior arms control negotiator—appeared for the first time at South by Southwest to give a talk. In state diplomatic fashion, she came to build a bridge between the verification and tech communities. The talk was called "Mobilizing Ingenuity to Strengthen Global Security."

“I’m looking for what the possibilities are, where things are going, what’s out there,” she said. She asked the audience for help developing the future of arms control, regarding apps for inspectors and ways to utilize the crowd.

To Gottemoeller, this request wasn’t that much of a leap. Public surveillance and reporting has already taken hold in other areas, such as the environment, citizen science, natural disasters, and human rights issues (i.e. the local monitoring of the BP oil spill). These areas wrestle with similar problems collecting data from dispersed networks and using it for predictions or reports. She explained that it was the right time to collaborate on these challenges because there is a younger generation “bursting at the seams to try new ideas” and create. “There’s been a feedback effect on us who have been working in the policy arena for decades,” she said.

Having people participate in the tracking of warheads and other aspects of treaties may seem counterintuitive, especially to our “top-down” perceptions of a government policy created during the Cold War. However, public involvement in this area can be extremely powerful and save treaty experts a lot of headaches in a world that moves at the speed of the Internet.

The trouble with treaties

Weapons treaties between countries, whether dealing with chemical warfare, nuclear missiles, tanks, or radioactive material, have been traditionally difficult to negotiate. They typically take years to ratify. With advances in technology, the process has sped up considerably, leading to increased transparency. At this point, the US has made agreements with other governments (for example, Russia) under which they can fly over each other’s territories to survey and report on weapons (called The Treaty on Open Skies). Non-proliferation treaties between countries are usually reviewed every few years, and issues involving the treaty are discussed. During this process, the governments involved use it as a confidence-building event and an opportunity to tackle how the landscape and technologies have changed. However, technology usually changes faster than treaties do, and agreements are always trying to catch up. So with the citizens of each country reporting on compliance, the countries can work out quicker agreements.

During her presentation, Gottemoeller mentioned a few ways that public verification could be employed, such as using mobile phones for nuclear explosion detection.

The treaties don’t only regulate how governments handle weapons or engage with each other, they also put limits on the number of different weapons, deployed or idle. With the New START Treaty signed under President Obama, the focus has shifted to limiting the number of nuclear warheads in an attempt to get on “the road to zero” (aka a nuclear-free world). Doing so is a much larger task than tracking deployable missiles, and they are much easier to hide. Having people track wherever a warhead goes can help international monitoring regimes determine where a weapon might end up when it’s not where it’s supposed to be.

Today there is a gap in the technology that governments use to verify weapons. Nuclear missiles fitted with warheads that sit on runways could easily be seen with 1950s-style satellites. Outside of that, there are radiation detectors at ports around the world that scan cargo, but many reported cases have been false alarms. Mundane cargo items (such as bananas) can also give off radiation and still be completely harmless.

...and some solutions on the table

During her presentation, Gottemoeller mentioned a few ways that public verification could be employed, such as using mobile phones for nuclear explosion detection. Accelerometers (the sensors that flip the screen’s orientation when it’s tilted) pick up vibrations and can be used to track earthquake tremors. Another example was illustrated by one of the audience members at the event. He helped develop the Gamma Pix App, a smartphone app that looks for gamma ray artifacts, and is currently working on sensor aggregation for Improvised Explosive Device detection in Afghanistan.

Gottemoeller’s push for interest in public treaty verification began last year when she travelled to universities in the US and the former Soviet Union. During the trip, she hoped to open up discussion about open source technologies used in treaty compliance. She said that she started to pursue the idea when she learned that treaty inspectors couldn’t use Google Earth during inspections. Instead, they had to use a set of official procedures—inspectors even had to learn how to cross-country ski to circumnavigate the Russian facilities to see if there were any secret entrances from where people could shuttle a warhead in and out. Other inspirations for Gottemoeller included watching the data mining of social networks during the Arab Spring and the radiation detectors near Fukushima. “The neighborhood gaze is a powerful tool,” Gottemoeller remarked during her speech at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.

There are many benefits for social verification. Many of the tasks that inspectors do during arms inspections are tedious. They also can’t be in all places at all times. And today, the data available to the average citizen is astronomical compared to what it used to be. To make inspectors' jobs easier, they can have crowdsourced data at their fingertips, allowing them to focus on what they think is important. This type of verification aims to keep governments honest and build confidence internationally and among their own people, because if your own citizens can report when you are breaking a treaty, it can make governments think twice before overstepping treaty lines. The transparency works both ways. It helps citizens become more involved in government treaties and informed on the facts about the process.

The debate and methods of inspection and verification have not changed much since the Cold War, but the idea of societal verification was born much earlier than one may think. Josef Rotblat, a scientist working in Britain after WWII and one of the key figures to foster scientific collaboration between the West and the Soviets, was the first to formulate the need for societal verification. In the late 1950s in America, Seymour Melman, a professor at Columbia, wrote about this idea as well, but as America got deeper into the Cold War, these ideas disappeared from discussion.

There are different methods to treaty-gathering intelligence, but the most important terms involved are “National Technical Means” and “Public Technical Means.” These are umbrella terms for the sensory systems or procedures employed by the state or by the public to verify weapons treaties. Much of the public verification data will deal with GeoInt (intelligence based on geographic location), such as images or video with the accompanying GPS coordinates. However, the public can transmit and make use of other sensory data as well, such as radiation detection. In this light, the government would like to use the public for verification in two ways. The first would be to create new points of information, whether from apps on their mobile phones or surfing the Internet on their laptops. The second is helping to find patterns in the existing data.

Public verification can also take advantage of the “Internet of Things,” or the link between everyday objects or spaces and the flow of information on the Internet. Most people think of the Internet of Things as QR codes or sprinklers that are programmable through the cloud. But the term can also be applied to verification as well. Connecting objects through the Internet and making them interactive enhances the quality and speed of the data. Sensors in and around a weapons facility could be linked to the cloud, and inspectors could check for things that are out of place. Areas that aren’t filled with classified data could be crowdsourced to some of the country’s citizens to do routine checks.

Technologies used in verification tend to have multiple uses as well, including citizen science and disaster relief efforts. Seismic stations searching for earthquakes can test for nuclear explosions. Radio-nuclei sensors, aerial cameras, satellite images, and radiation detectors are not confined to one task and are usually run by both government and non-government personnel. This partnership increases the amount and quality of the data. Gottemoeller stressed in her speech at SXSW that both first citizen scientists in the US, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, were also diplomats.

Listing image by Ed Uthman on Flickr