Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations
Publisher: UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) + Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley School of Law
Published: 2020; second edition 2022
Scope: Ethical and methodological standards for OSINT investigations intended for use in international accountability proceedings (ICC, ICJ, UN mechanisms, domestic war crimes tribunals)
Core Principles
- Legality — collection must be lawful in the analyst’s jurisdiction and comply with applicable privacy/data-protection law
- Necessity and proportionality — collect only what is required; do not retain more personal data than the investigative purpose demands
- Do no harm — assessment of risk to subjects, witnesses, and communities before and during collection
- Impartiality — the investigation follows the evidence; prior conclusions are not imposed
- Transparency — methodology must be documentable and disclosable to the degree compatible with source protection
Evidentiary Standards
- Chain of custody: hash all collected digital evidence (SHA-256); document acquisition context (URL, timestamp, access method)
- Verification: multi-source corroboration; geolocation, chronolocation, and metadata analysis where applicable
- Authentication: distinguish between content created by the target vs. content attributable to the target
OSINT Applications
- War crimes documentation: satellite imagery + OSINT to establish presence of forces at incident sites
- Accountability reporting: verification chain required before attributing specific incidents to specific actors
- Standard referenced by: ICC Office of the Prosecutor, UN CoIs, Bellingcat, Forensic Architecture, WITNESS