About
The team behind the Digital Evidence Toolkit.
The Digital Evidence Toolkit is rooted in our research in and experience of investigative reporting and human rights documentation, dating back to the Syrian conflict in the 2010s.
Built by investigators, for investigators
Basile Simon
Basile is a researcher working at the intersection of engineering, law, and journalism. He leads the law program at the Starling Lab for Data Integrity at Stanford and USC, and is a resident with the ECCHR law firm in the cross-NGO investigative group Investigative Commons. He co-founded Airwars, a civilian harm watchdog, in 2014 and has designed archiving and verification workflows ever since.
Niko Para
Niko co-founded Syrian Archive in 2014 and has since worked in Berlin and New York with NGOs, media organisations, and businesses across the public and private sectors, including Security Force Monitor at Columbia Law School's Human Rights Institute. He co-founded DOT • STUDIO in 2024 — a development agency for projects with social impact.
Tilman Miraß
Tilman works at the intersection of technology, politics, and journalism. As a developer at Deutsche Welle, he built AI-powered tools for investigative journalism. He co-founded DOT • STUDIO in 2024.
Origin and funding
The Toolkit started as a solo research project. In 2021, Basile Simon received a software grant — from the Prototype Fund, the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF, grant number 01IS21S26), the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Amazon Web Services — to build a solution to the legal and technical challenges he had encountered documenting civilian harm at Airwars. That prototype became the foundation of what the Toolkit is today.
In 2024, Niko Para and Tilman Miraß joined to form the current team, with development led through DOT • STUDIO.
In December 2025, the Toolkit received investment from the Babelsberg Media Innovation Center to develop a sustainable business plan and product targeting the investigative journalism vertical.
Contributors
Thank you to everyone who contributed code to the original prototype of the Toolkit. Architecture and workflow graphics by La Loma. Newsletter copywriting in 2022 by Patrick Harvey.