Yahoo! Co-Founder Jerry Yang Keynotes IGF Conference in Egypt

By BHRP

Photo by Michael Samway

from Yodel Anecdotal

While industry analysts estimate that about 1.6 billion people are on the Internet today, this still leaves three out of every four people on this planet without access.

This Sunday, at the Internet Governance Forum’s annual meeting, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang delivered a keynote address to discuss the impact of the Internet on people’s lives, the need to get the next billion people online and the importance of providing those next billion–in emerging markets and beyond–with locally relevant content and communications tools.

“The Internet isn’t just about getting as many people online as possible,” said Jerry Yang. “But making sure that once they’re online, they have something productive to do, something to gain, something meaningful to experience.”

The IGF meeting took place in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, and you can watch the full opening session and keynotes here.  Jerry’s speech starts at about 59 minutes into the opening session, directly after Tim Berners-Lee.

In addition to the IGF keynote, Jerry is meeting with customers, employees and both local and U.S. government officials while in the region.

Yahoo! recently closed the acquisition of Maktoob, the largest Arabic-language Internet site.  According to the World Bank, there are more than 320 million Arabic speakers worldwide, while less than one per cent of all online content is in Arabic.  The partnership between Maktoob and Yahoo! aims to strengthen and support Arabic content on the Internet, adapting current products to the Arabic language while also working with local developers to create new and compelling products.

A Saudi Gamble to See if Seeds of Change Will Grow

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Andre Gustavo

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN | Thuwal Journal | New York Times | November 19, 2009

THUWAL, Saudi Arabia — The $12.5 billion question is this: Can Ben Frevert change Saudi Arabia?

Mr. Frevert is 22 years old. He is from Minneapolis. He had never set foot outside the United States until the day he flew to Saudi Arabia, where he became one of the first 400 graduate students to start classes at the sparkling new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology on the Red Sea.

Mr. Frevert’s presence in this conservative kingdom represents a bold, pricey gamble by Saudi Arabia’s monarch, King Abdullah, who allocated about $10 billion to endow the university. The stated goal is to take a country that consistently ranks among the poorest performing nations in education and, with all the brain power and high-tech equipment oil money can buy, build a world-class research center and university.

But there is a less discussed, yet no less consequential, objective: Can the university help this tradition-bound society become more open to new ideas? Can it help Saudi Arabia stamp out the kind of homegrown extremism that has spawned terrorism?

“We wouldn’t see change without having more things like this,” said Awadh al-Badi, a political scientist at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh. “My thought is that they are trying to create a parallel system, that with time would take from others or balance what exists.”

The first 400 students and 74 faculty members began studies in September, even as construction crews labored to ready the multibillion-dollar campus. In time, the university will be a small town of 20,000, cloistered behind three layers of security, in isolated luxury on the banks of the Red Sea. There will be a yacht club, a golf course, a movie theater (there are no theaters allowed in the kingdom), a town center with fast food and shops — and there will be no rules against men and women working, studying and socializing together. On campus, women do not have to cover up and wear the baggy black gown, called an abaya, mandatory everywhere else in Saudi Arabia.

Because of this, the university is in a rush, hoping to establish itself as a source of pride — and perhaps revenue — before conservative forces beyond its walls try to rein it in.

Not long after the lavish opening ceremony with thousands of guests and dozens of heads of state, a member of the Saudi Council of Senior Scholars, an official body appointed by the king, criticized the university. Most of the uproar focused on his condemnation of “mingling,” which he called “a great depravity.” But the critic, Sheik Saad al-Shathry, also called for the creation of a religious committee to ensure that the curriculum was consistent with Islam.

King Abdullah promptly, and with great effect, fired Sheik Shathry from the council. But at the university, some staff members and students said they were wondering how long they had before the king decided, for political expediency, that he must bow to the nation’s powerful religious forces.

And what happens when the king is gone? He is 85, and it appears that the next in line is not Crown Prince Sultan, who has been out of the country for months after cancer treatment, but the interior minister, Prince Naif, whose political base has been the nation’s conservative religious community.

“We have a leader who is willing to take the furthest step, but is it a policy of the country or just the leader?” asked Mr. Badi, the political scientist. “That issue is not resolved.”

And there is reason for concern. Even though the king fired Sheik Shathry, demonstrating his commitment to the university, his critics have not been silenced.

“Those voices calling for opening up are strange voices that do not represent public opinion,” said Soliman al-Duwaish, a Saudi preacher who said that the mingling of men and women at the university was a “blemish” on the king’s “dream.”

The idea of trying to foster change by building enclaves like the university is not new. Even in an absolute monarchy, public sensitivities and political alliances cannot be ignored. So the leadership tries to promote change from the outside in. The royal family has relied on the outside-in approach for years. It has two pan-Arab newspapers in London and a satellite television station, Al Arabiya, in Dubai. Not far from the university, crews are building the King Abdullah Economic City, which like the university will allow residents to live a more Western life — behind a cordon of security. And there is Aramco, the nation’s oil company, which operates almost as another state and has been credited with liberalizing and modernizing eastern Saudi Arabia.

But that, many people here say, is exactly the problem. Aramco changed its community but had little effect beyond that.

“You cannot bring change from the outside, you have to build it from within,” said Saleha M. Abedin, vice dean of a women’s college, Dar al-Hekma, in Jidda, 50 miles away. “All our programs and our curricula have sensitivity to local needs. It is not a totally foreign institution that doesn’t realize the reality on the ground.”

On campus at the university recently, Mr. Frevert, the student from Minneapolis, was in the library curled around his laptop. He had been there, he said, exactly two months and three days and had visited Jidda a few times. But when he had the chance to take time off, he said, he flew to Dubai.

His parents, he said “were a little freaked out” when he decided to study in Saudi Arabia. But he was enticed by the financial aid and the adventure. The kingdom paid for the last two years of his undergraduate education and, as it does for all its students, waived tuition, provided free room and board and gave him a stipend. Mr. Frevert said he was studying solid state optics, and while obligated to complete his master’s degree, he said he had already decided that he would be heading back to the United States for his Ph.D.

“My mother will sleep better, at last,” he wrote in a recent blog entry.

Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting.

Obama praises dissident Cuban blogger Sanchez

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | AndreDeak

By Jeff Franks| Reuters | Thursday, November 19, 2009

HAVANA (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama praised dissident Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez and said in a posting on her website on Thursday that he looks forward to the day “all Cubans can freely express themselves.”

The U.S. leader, in responses to questions on Sanchez’s “Generation Y” site, also repeated his desire to improve U.S.-Cuba relations, saying he wants “direct diplomacy” with Cuba and could visit the Communist-ruled island.

“The United States has no intention of using military force in Cuba,” Obama wrote in a reply. “Only the Cuban people can bring about positive change in Cuba and it is our hope that they will soon be able to exercise their full potential.”

Obama’s comments broke no new ground on U.S. policy toward Cuba. Relations between Washington and Havana soured after Fidel Castro came to power in a 1959 revolution and were further strained when he pushed Cuba toward the Soviet bloc.

The United States maintains a 47-year-old trade embargo on the Caribbean nation.

But the unusual written exchange — Sanchez wrote that she sent questions to Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro — added to the blogger’s international stature as a leading dissident voice in Cuba.

“Your blog provides the world a unique window into the realities of daily life in Cuba. It is telling that the Internet has provided you and other courageous Cuban bloggers with an outlet to express yourself so freely,” Obama wrote.

“The government and people of the United States join all of you in looking forward to the day all Cubans can freely express themselves in public without fear and without reprisals,” he said.

A spokesman for the White House National Security Council confirmed that Obama had written Sanchez.

Raul Castro, however, has not responded, according to Sanchez, 34, who has won several international awards and was named by Time Magazine last year as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.

She is among a growing group of young Cubans who have taken to the Internet to express their desire for change in Cuba.

DAILY HARDSHIPS

Her blog often describes the hardships of life in Cuba and criticizes the repression of dissent by the government, which has made clear its distaste for her. Havana views dissidents as mercenaries working for the United States and other countries.

Sanchez said two weeks ago that she was detained and roughed up by state security agents in what she believes was a Cuban government message to quiet her criticism.

The Cuban government has said nothing about the incident, but the U.S. State Department said it expressed its “deep concern” to Havana. Obama did not mention it in his reply.

Obama pointed out to Sanchez what he said were steps to improve relations with Cuba, including an easing of the trade embargo and the initiation of talks on migration and postal service.

But he has said further normalization of relations depends on Cuba making progress on human rights and releasing political prisoners.

Raul Castro, who replaced ailing older brother Fidel Castro as president last year, has said Cuba is willing to talk to the United States about anything, but that it will make no unilateral concessions to its long-time enemy.

“I have said that it is time to pursue direct diplomacy without preconditions, with friends and foe alike. I am not interested, however, in talking for the sake of talking,” Obama told Sanchez.

Asked if he would be willing to travel to Cuba, Obama said, “I would never rule out a course of action that could advance the interests of the United States and advance the cause of freedom for the Cuban people,” he said.

Sanchez has a larger international audience but is little known in Cuba where Internet access is limited.

She asked Obama whether the U.S. trade embargo was to blame for Cuba’s lack of Internet, to which he pointed out that he had lifted restrictions on U.S. telecommunications companies that want to offer service there.

“These are small steps but an important part of a process to move U.S.-Cuban relations in a new and more positive direction,” he said of his policy.

“Achieving a more normal relationship, however, will require action by the Cuban government.”

(The website is http://www.desdecuba.com/generaciony/)

(Additional reporting by Matt Spetalnick in Washington; Editing by Jane Sutton and Paul Simao)

Toronto’s Citizen Lab uses forensics to fight online censors

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Hank Ashby

by Robert Mahoney, Deputy Director, CPJ

from CPJ’s Blog

A basement in the gray, Gothic heart of the University of Toronto is home to the CSI of cyberspace. “We are doing free expression forensics,” says Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, based at the Munk Centre for International Studies. Deibert and his team of academics and students investigate in real time governments and companies that restrict what we see and hear on the Internet. They are also trying to help online journalists and bloggers slip the shackles of censorship and surveillance. Deibert is a co-founder of the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a project of the Citizen Lab in collaboration with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. ONI tracks the blocking and filtering of the Internet around the globe.

“We are testing in 71 countries,” says Deibert, who shares his data with Berkman. “We are testing all the time. We are the technical hub of ONI.”

“We started out in 2002 with China,” said Jillian York, project coordinator for Berkman. “The work evolved, and then with Cuba we cracked it.” By 2006, ONI had expanded its dragnet for blocked or filtered content to more than 40 countries. However, as Citizen Lab and Berkman gained expertise and resources so did the censors they battled.

“We are now onto third-generation controls,” York said of Internet censorship. “The first generation was simple filtering, IP blocking in China, for example.” The second generation was surveillance, which ranged from placing spies or closed-circuit cameras in Internet cafés to installing tracking software on computers themselves. “The third generation controls combine all the above. We see it in China, Syria, and Burma. It’s a very broad approach,” York laments.

ONI’s research and public awareness-raising provides just one weapon in the increasingly sophisticated armory that bloggers need to deploy against government encroachment. Some free-speech campaigners engage across a wide battlefront, taking on authorities in Tunisia or Pakistan, for example, to keep blogging and video platforms open. Others, like Deibert, devise tools for an individual user to tunnel beneath a firewall or slip past a digital spy undetected. He helped develop Psiphon, a free, open source application that channels data through a network of proxies to circumvent censorship. “Anyone can use it. It’s fast and there’s nothing to download onto your computer for the Internet police to find,” said Deibert.

It’s a game of digital cat-and-mouse with authorities hunting down circumvention nodes, and Psiphon switching to an alternate as soon as a node is compromised. Citizen Lab launched Psiphon in December 2006 but did not have the resources to develop it further. So in May this year, Deibert and another ONI founder, Rafal Rohozinski, spun it off as a commercial enterprise. It is still free to users but charges companies to deliver their blocked content. Clients so far include the BBC and the U.S. government-funded Broadcasting Board of Governors. Social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been a boon to Psiphon and other circumvention tools like Tor, spreading node connection information among bloggers and journalists. This was evident during the media crackdown in Iran that followed the disputed June presidential elections, when Twitter proved difficult to shut down.

Much of the light in Deibert’s Toronto basement may come from rows of LCD screens but unmasking digital spies is not all about electronic wizardry. “With ONI, we are testing all the time but we are not just a technical operation. The technology is not as important as the cultural information,” says Deibert, sounding like an old-school Le Carré character who stresses “human intelligence” over gadgetry. Reporting by volunteers on the ground in repressive countries provides vital information and context for monitors to analyze censorship developments and anticipate blocking strategies.

Berkman has expanded the reporting network through a crowd-sourcing tool called Herdict, which allows individuals to report a blocked Web site immediately.

“This is a constant struggle—the threat environment is always morphing,” according to Deibert. And the threats don’t just come from governments. Defenders of free expression and user privacy are increasingly concerned about the potential dangers of “cloud computing,” in which vast stores of personal data are held remotely by private companies both in democracies and repressive states. “Some of the biggest threats are from private companies. Cyberspace is largely owned and operated by private companies. Data is sent into a cloud over which we have no control,” Deibert says. The potential for such abuse is heightened in repressive states. An example of the dangers for the Citizen Lab team was TOM-Skype, the Chinese version of Skype. Citizen Lab uncovered a huge privacy breach where supposedly secure data were being stored secretly on servers in China.

Another case that Diebert says should concern us was in July this year when BlackBerry users in the United Arab Emirates were directed by text messages from their service provider Etisalat, which is majority owned by the UAE government to a link to upgrade their phones. The software they downloaded, however, turned out to be spyware. BlackBerry maker, Research in Motion Ltd of Canada, denied involvement and showed customers how to remove the software.

Deibert cautions online journalists in these days of increased third-party hosting to pay attention to corporate as well as government surveillance, and to read the fine print of terms-of-use agreements with ISPs and others before checking the sign-up box for an e-mail account or blog hosting platform.

“We need to lift the lid on the Internet. Where are the servers, where does your e-mail go, where is the Internet exchange point located, who has access to the building?” he asked.

Every day journalists and bloggers are reminded of the need to fight for their freedoms. Censorship and surveillance are slippery slopes. Take Pakistan. In February 2006, in its first case of Internet censorship, Islamabad decided to shield its populace from cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, published in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten. The Pakistan Communications Authority blocked 12 Web sites that reproduced the offending caricatures. By April of that year the authority was censoring five other Web sites saying they had published “misleading information”. In July, 30 more Web sites were blocked, nearly all of them associated with the movement advocating independence for the province of Baluchistan.

This censorship creep is an established phenomenon in Asia and the Middle East. But now it is spreading to Africa, where Internet use is still relatively low. Sub-Saharan African governments that have hobbled their own broadcast and print media have watched the celebrity-censors of other continents like China, Cuba and Iran and have drawn the inevitable conclusion: Online journalism is the future, so control it now.

“Ethiopia is going to be a test case,” says the Berkman Center’s York. “Internet penetration is low, yet platforms like Blogspot are blocked.”

When you talk to people at organizations such as ONI, one thing quickly becomes clear: They don’t know who is going to win the war for control of cyberspace. Circumvention tools like Tor and Psiphon are tactical weapons. A strategic response requires unrelenting campaigning and public education to raise the economic, political and social costs of censorship and surveillance for governments and private companies.

Meanwhile, Citizen Lab keeps doing what it does best; “We combine the technology with human intelligence, then turn them around to watch the watchers,” Deibert said.

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival: Youth Producing Change

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | WhiteAfrican

The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival (in partnership with Adobe Youth Voices) seeks youth-produced film, video and animated works on human rights issues made by youth ages 19 and under for its third annual Youth Producing Change program.

Armed with digital cameras, computers and their own boundless creativity, young people across the globe are bravely exposing human rights issues faced by themselves and their communities. Youth Producing Change provides a platform for youth to share their perspectives with audiences worldwide.

To submit films and read more about the program, click here.

Selected films will travel to:

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, New York : June 10-24, 2010

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, London : March 2011 (dates tba)
Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, San Francisco: March 2011 (dates tba)

Selected films will also be:

Included in the 2010 Traveling Film Festival
Posted to the Adobe Youth Voices and Human Rights Watch websites
Distributed to teachers throughout the United States

To watch the films from the first year of Youth Producing Change please click here:

To learn more about Youth Producing Change, and to watch interviews with young film-makers, see here.

The deadline for submissions is December 10, 2009.

Learn more about the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival.

Learn more about Adobe Youth Voices.

Yahoo! Georgetown Fellow Event, November 17

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

Evgeny Morozov, Yahoo!’s 2010 Georgetown Fellow, will be speaking at a seminar (co-sponsored by Yahoo!) on the Internet, free expression and authoritarian regimes. If you will be in the DC area on the 17th, please see below for more details and to RSVP.

Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Diplomacy

and the Mortara Center invite you to

THE INTERNET, FREE EXPRESSION AND AUTHORITARIANISM

Please join us to discuss the evolving nature of authoritarianism in the age of social media and digital communications. Our speakers will assess the impact of new communication technology on regime stability, free expression and civic engagement, and discuss the changing political environments in Russia, China, and Iran.

2:00 to 5:00 p.m.

Tuesday, November 17th 2009

Mortara Center

3601 N. St. NW

Washington, DC

Click here to RSVP

Session I:         2:00 PM – 3:00 PM

Evgeny Morozov

Yahoo! Fellow at Georgetown University

Coffee Break

Session II:        3:30 – 5:00 PM

Andrew Carvin

Senior Strategist, Social Media Desk, National Public Radio

Arvind Ganesan

Director of Business and Human Rights, Human Rights Watch

Shanthi Kalathil

Co-author, Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on

Authoritarian Rule

Marc Lynch

Professor, The George Washington University

This program is sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy and the Mortara Center for International Studies at Georgetown University, with the generous support of the Schott Foundation and Yahoo!

Gossip, Rumors and Preaching to the Choir

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Redvers

I spend a lot of time thinking about the Internet as a platform for social change and engagement, and also about how access to the Internet and technology broadens the mind and exposes people to diverse opinions and new information. When I consider everything that I have learned from logging on (How else could I have learned about this and this and THIS for free and in less than 10 minutes?!) and I think of the trillions (gajillions?) of bytes worth of information “out there”, and I really do believe in the power that the Internet has to bring us closer than we’ve ever gotten to the Jeffersonian ideal of a well-informed citizenry.

But what if the way that we typically use the Internet makes us less informed, and more closed-minded?  Dumber-er, if you will? That’s the premise of an interesting article by Elizabeth Kolbert, in the November 2 edition of the New Yorker.  The article reviews “On Rumors:  How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done,” the most recent in a series of books on the Internet and the virtual commons by legal scholar and current head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Cass R. Sunstein.

Sunstein’s premise is that consumers of information on the Internet tend to filter what they read, and that we all select sites that confirm and reinforce beliefs we already hold.  (I suppose the fact that I, a dedicated farmer’s market shopper/yoga enthusiast born in the People’s Republic of San Francisco, am linking to a New Yorker article and to Cass Sunstein’s book could demonstrate the narrowing of my own mind, but enough about me.) According to research cited in the article, continued exposure to only those who hold similar beliefs strengthens those beliefs and biases, and can lead to group polarization and extremism of all kinds.  It also allows lies and half truths to live on forever, because no matter how unfounded or bizarre the rumor, one can always find a community of fellow believers to keep it alive on the Interwebs.

The article stops short of offering a solution (I think you need to read the book for that.), but it does close with the view that it is tempting to assume that just because the Internet is being used “to produce a certain political effect, it [is] somehow destined to do so.”

I suppose that means, in the end, that the Internet is what we make of it. It can be a powerful platform for information and connecting disparate communities, but only if we work to make it so. Any thoughts on how we, as Internet users, companies, non-profits, academics and bloggers, can foster conversations as opposed to shouting? And might I have to consider reading blogs about, I don’t know, bear hunting and processed pork products?

Read the article and the book! And if you get the chance, let me know what you think.