IT in the Trenches
As in most organizations, demands on IT workers at the Tribunal continually fluctuate and mutate, often unpredictably. For example, as Greenwood notes, "There is no statute of limitations on genocide." An indictment might be two years old and appear to be languishing when suddenly the accused is captured and the case needs to be brought up-to-date quickly—ssembling evidence for prosecution teams, locating witnesses who may be all over the globe. Greenwood's unit employs 67 people, a mix of IT staff and IT users.

World events also affect demands on Tribunal IT. When hostilities erupted last year in Kosovo, information began pouring in as investigators tried to stay on top of events. The OTP set up a temporary evidence-processing facility in Skopje, Macedonia, to receive and process tens of thousands of items recovered in Pristina, Kosovo, most of which was in document form. "1999 had already seen a massive increase in the evidence processing workload," says Greenwood. "The Kosovo materials represented a further increase amounting to a quarter of the previous year's entire evidence processing workload, and it had to be completed within 11 weeks."

"We were totally slammed," says David Falces of his department, whose 45 members include 22 in IT, seven in communications, 13 in court operations and audiovisual and three in administrative support. "We had to support the sudden establishment of three new field offices [Tirana, Skopje, Pristina], at the same time continuing our operation in The Hague. Not to mention our Y2K program."

The fighting in Kosovo had a ripple effect by flooding Greenwood's information and evidence section, which is probably the biggest customer of the Tribunal's broader IS department. "But three-quarters of what we're their biggest customer for, I can't talk about—operations," says Greenwood. The OTP jealously guards the details of its internal systems and workings in order to safeguard the integrity of its investigations.

Secrets in the Silos
"The worst thing to happen," says Blewitt, "would be for someone to be able to hack into us and expose the fact that, hey, guess what? Here's a list of sealed indictees and we got it from the prosecutor's network."

David Falces points out further gradations of that fear. "Even [using an internet] system that's—quote unquote—100 percent reliable could undermine our work. So many major sites have been hacked—NATO, for example—that even if nothing sensitive was or could be hacked here, we'd have a perception problem. Witnesses might not come forward; indictees might not turn themselves in." The NATO site was crashed during the fighting in Kosovo when it was deliberately flooded with more e-mail than it could handle, allegedly by Serbs angry over NATO's bombing of Belgrade.