September 08, 2000 | "This would be a good time to leave."

That's what Patrick Ball heard in 1992 when he was working for the Salvadoran Human Rights Commission. Ball, a peace activist with expertise in data mining, had spent two years in El Salvador building a large-scale database that tracked atrocities and human rights violations perpetrated by both the Salvadoran government and militias during the 1970s and 1980s. It was a digital record of this most troubled period in that country's history.

The Human Rights Commission had actually created two databases. The first was a detailed account of threats, thefts, beatings, mutilations, murders and massacres. This database was largely created from eyewitness testimony -- more than 9,000 reports in all. The second was a database that tracked the careers of El Salvador's police and military, built largely from official records, newspaper accounts and some personal recollections.

"What we were doing was tracking them by job, rank and unit from when they graduated the military academy as young lieutenants until they retired as senior colonels or generals," recalls Ball. "And then we crossed these two databases, by unit and time." The technique allowed the commission to develop "statistical human rights profiles" of individual officers and units. It showed how units became more violent when certain officers took control, and cataloged the crimes that had been committed under the watch of specific individuals. Essentially, the commission had created a Who's Who of the nastiest criminals of the country's 20-year civil war. "And then we published them in the newspaper!"

It was a bold move for a Yankee living so far south of the border. But the move was calculated. El Salvador was in the middle of a closely watched transition from military to civilian rule. "Because it was 1992, and not 1982, they didn't blow up our office," says Ball. Instead, the people who had been named in the files -- most of whom by then were high-ranking officials -- attacked the commission in the courts. And as for Ball, he left the country.

It certainly wasn't what Ball had expected when he signed up to work as a peace activist in El Salvador after graduating from Columbia University. His first job in Central America was as a so-called nonviolent accompaniment. "You hang around with people who were likely targets of political violence, on the premise that your witness would prevent people who wanted to do political violence from doing it," he remembers. "It's interesting work, but it's actually boring when you do it. They go to meetings, but you sit around out front" and talk to the secretaries.

It was these secretaries who gave Ball his first big break. To hear him tell it, the universal experience of secretaries in offices around the world is losing files on their computers. "If you can do anything to recover their files you become a computer expert."

As it turns out, Ball is a computer expert. He paid for his undergraduate education by working part time as a database and statistics programmer. Soon after moving to El Salvador he took a job doing computer work for the human rights office of the Lutheran Church. From there he moved to the Human Rights Commission, where he designed the databases to track El Salvador's bloody history.