A New Episode, New Leads, and a Data Bomb

The latest episode of Ghost Boat is out now:

“At First The Traffickers Were More Human. Then Slowly They Started The Torture.”

In it we meet up with two people with intimate knowledge of the situation on the ground, and talk to readers taking part in our investigation. Beautiful portraits by Gianni Cipriano. Please read, recommend and share as widely as you can.

This Just In

Kirk Pettinga follows up on yesterday’s note with a data bomb: A long post explaining and visualizing the vessel tracking data he dug up, showing what he’s found so far — and giving some ideas on how people can take it further.

The data is way too big for a google spreadsheet so I ended up importing it into an SQL database. This made it a lot faster and easier to query specific information. But my next thought was, where do I even start?

Further reading

One of the saddest passages in Episode 5 the involves the effort taken by thousands of Eritrean refugees to cross the Sinai peninsula to get to Israel — taking a huge amount of personal risk — and the grim future that them when they got there. This New York Times feature talks to many refugees who get treated in a way that is intentionally designed, as one senior politician put it, to “make their lives miserable.”

Notes from the field

We’re starting to mobilize efforts in Libya — a complicated proposition, but it’s the only way we can hope to verify the supposed departure point of the boat. Meanwhile Eric Reidy, Gianni and Martino Galliolo are now headed back to Sicily to try and find out what they can there.

Onward.

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