“Societal Verification” refers to the concept of incorporating nontraditionalstakeholders into verification and transparency regimes toincrease the likelihood of detection of violations of internationalcommitments. In the case of nuclear arms control verification - whichhas heavily relied on tools such as on-site inspections and satelliteimagery - societal verification should be evaluated as an additionalresource. This approach has become possible in recent years due to theincreased amount of publicly available information about individualsand their activities, the greater connectivity of people in previouslyisolated areas, and improvements in data mining and filteringtechniques. In order to assess the possible advantages of societalverification, it is important to ask questions, such as: How can socialnetworking, publicly available technical information and internationaltrade data help verification efforts? How would such information beintegrated into more formal verification processes? How couldconfidence-levels in such information be quantified? How could suchinformation be filtered to avoid information overload? It is important tolook to past examples, both related and unrelated to nuclear activities,to think about how societal verification may be leveraged to verifyfuture arms control agreements.
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