UC Berkeley team is highlighted in “60 Minutes” story pulled from broadcast

In news from the journalism school and Human Rights Center’s Investigations Lab, the story pulled from “60 Minutes” just hours before airtime this year by new CBS Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss includes interviews with a team of UC Berkeley students who provided essential research for an investigation about the conditions in El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo or CECOT megaprison.

The program used open source techniques to independently verify and corroborate information gathered by Human Rights Watch and Cristosal that led to the report — You Have Arrived in Hell — about the treatment of Venezuelan migrants who were rounded up and sent to CECOT by the Trump Administration.

That report, published in mid-November, had already made headlines as it detailed the torture and brutal treatment of migrants sent without due process to the Salvadoran prison by the Trump Administration. The “60 Minutes” story, as originally produced, references the research and report, alongside new interviews and additional information about the abuse of Venezuelan migrants.

The Investigations Lab, which is based at the Human Rights Center at Berkeley Law and includes graduate and undergraduate students, provided digital open source research support for the Human Rights Watch Americas team. The Lab, launched in 2016, is the first university-based open source research team of its kind in the world and has collaborated with researchers, journalists and lawyers on dozens of projects. Berkeley Journalism students often join the Lab, which often collaborates with the school’s Investigative Reporting Program.

In a leaked email to CBS senior staff published by Axios, Weiss called the analysis from the Berkeley students “strange” and wondered what it added, but the student work is part of rigorous fact-finding and verification that may — or may not — corroborate personal testimony. It was done using open source verification techniques.