Cute Cats and the Arab Spring: When Social Media Meet Social Change”

Activists around the world are turning to social media tools usually used for more pedestrian purposes: the sharing of family videos and videos of cats flushing toilets. But these tools can be extremely powerful in the hands of activists, as they are pervasive, easy to use and difficult for governments to censor. Ethan Zuckerman will look at “the cute cat theory” of internet activism, as it helps explain the Arab Spring protests, aggressive internet censorship in countries like China and Vietnam, and the challenges for the corporate owners of social media platforms in an era of online speech.

Flickr Creative Commons |Dantessina.Sara|

By Evgeny Morozov| New York Times |Sept 1, 2011|

AGENTS of the East German Stasi could only have dreamed of the sophisticated electronic equipment that powered Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s extensive spying apparatus, which the Libyan transitional government uncovered earlier this week. The monitoring of text messages, e-mails and online chats — no communications seemed beyond the reach of the eccentric colonel.

What is even more surprising is where Colonel Qaddafi got his spying gear: software and technology companies from France, South Africa and other countries. Narus, an American company owned by Boeing, met with Colonel Qaddafi’s people just as the protests were getting under way, but shied away from striking a deal. As Narus had previously supplied similar technology to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, it was probably a matter of public relations, not business ethics.

Amid the cheerleading over recent events in the Middle East, it’s easy to forget the more repressive uses of technology. In addition to the rosy narrative celebrating how Facebook and Twitter have enabled freedom movements around the world, we need to confront a more sinister tale: how greedy companies, fostered by Western governments for domestic surveillance needs, have helped suppress them.

Libya is only the latest place where Western surveillance technology has turned up. Human rights activists arrested and later released in Bahrain report being presented with transcripts of their own text messages — a capacity their government acquired through equipment from Siemens, the German industrial giant, and maintained by Nokia Siemens Networks, based in Finland, and Trovicor, another German company.

Earlier this year, after storming the secret police headquarters, Egyptian activists discovered that the Mubarak government had been using a trial version of a tool — developed by Britain’s Gamma International — that allowed them to eavesdrop on Skype conversations, widely believed to be safe from wiretapping.

And it’s not just off-the-shelf technology; some Western companies supply dictators with customized solutions to block offensive Web sites. A March report by OpenNet Initiative, an academic group that monitors Internet censorship, revealed that Netsweeper, based in Canada, together with the American companies Websense and McAfee (now owned by Intel), have developed programs to meet most of the censorship needs of governments in the Middle East and North Africa — in Websense’s case, despite promises not to supply its technology to repressive governments.

Unfortunately, the American government, the world’s most vociferous defender of “Internet freedom,” has little to say about such complicity. Though Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton often speaks publicly on the subject, she has yet to address how companies from her country undermine her stated goal. To add insult to injury, in December the State Department gave Cisco — which supplied parts for China’s so-called Great Firewall — an award in recognition of its “good corporate citizenship.”

Such reticence may not be entirely accidental, since many of these tools were first developed for Western law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Western policy makers are therefore in a delicate spot. On the one hand, it is hard to rein in the very companies they have nurtured; it is also hard to resist the argument from repressive regimes that they need such technologies to monitor extremists. On the other hand, it’s getting harder to ignore the fact that extremists aren’t the only ones under surveillance.

The obvious response is to ban the export of such technologies to repressive governments. But as long as Western states continue using monitoring technologies themselves, sanctions won’t completely eliminate the problem — the supply will always find a way to meet the demand. Moreover, dictators who are keen on fighting extremism are still welcome in Washington: it’s a good bet that much of the electronic spying done in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt was done with the tacit support of his American allies.

What we need is a recognition that our reliance on surveillance technology domestically — even if it is checked by the legal system — is inadvertently undermining freedom in places where the legal system provides little if any protection. That recognition should, in turn, fuel tighter restrictions on the domestic surveillance-technology sector, including a reconsideration of the extent to which it actually needs such technology in our increasingly privacy-free world. 

As countries like Belarus, Iran and Myanmar digest the lessons of the Arab Spring, their demand for monitoring technology will grow. Left uncontrolled, Western surveillance tools could undermine the “Internet freedom” agenda in the same way arms exports undermine Western-led peace initiatives. How many activists, finding themselves confronted with information collected using Western technology, would trust the pronouncements of Western governments again?

Flickr Creative Commons| chris.corwin|

By Alison Craiglow Hockenberry| Huffington Post |August 16, 2011|

For all the debate about whether this is the year of the Twitter revolution and the Facebook riots, the much more interesting question is: What is not happening on the giant social media websites of the world?

The answer is: A lot.

About two billion people have been touched by the Internet revolution. The connections they have made, information they have exchanged, and actions they have taken are undeniably revolutionary and immeasurably profound. But Facebook and Twitter, for all their power to speed a new era of openness, can’t do it all.

While we celebrate the fact that two billion people now have access to the Internet’s opportunities for speaking out, five billion others are still waiting for their chance to be heard.

In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, there are countries with regimes every bit as repressive as those we hear about daily in the Middle East, in which Internet penetration is only about one percent.

This dismal rate is due to many factors, including the lack of cable and electrical infrastructure, a prohibitively-high cost of service, language barriers, and illiteracy. The region’s more readily-available mobile phones allow some information access, but sharing one’s own views and interacting over social media is not practical on a non-smart phone and in places where languages are not digitized.

Globally, there is another group without a strong enough voice: women. In much of the world where home Internet connections are prohibitively expensive, Internet communication happens mostly in cyber cafes. In regions where women are not allowed or not comfortable going to these public gathering places, it’s mostly men doing the blogging. This is a vastly unbalanced situation.

“If we want a world that is more just and more representative and involves more perspectives and more voices, and has more fairness for more people, then let’s build it,” said Ethan Zuckerman, who was recently named director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media. The big question is, he said, “How do we get our technologies to do what we want them to?”

In Afghanistan, for example, the Jalalabad-based FabLab develops locally-designed tech solutions from start to finish that address communications challenges specific to the country. Among other things, the organization aims to keep information flowing across Afghanistan despite sketchy infrastructure and a fluid political and security situation. FabLab is an initiative of MIT; there are FabLab workshops around the world.

Mizzima News Agency trains the passionate storytellers of Burma’s emerging democracy to create engaging, well-crafted narratives out of their citizen journalist impulses. Mizzima recognizes that in a country long under the grip of censorship, factual, compelling journalism of the kind that can engage citizens and hold the government accountable is a skill that needs to be developed. Citizen media cannot be the only source of checks and balances.

FreedomBox aims to confront the privacy risks associated with communicating over huge, easily-tapped networks by building simple, low-wattage devices that put privacy controls squarely in the hands of users. “We integrate privacy protection on a cheap plug server so everybody can have privacy,” explained James Vasile, FreedomBox counsel. “Data stays in your home and can’t be mined by governments, billionaires, thugs, or even gossipy neighbors.”

Mizzima, FreedomBox, and many other brilliant ideas can be found among the entrants in Citizen Media, a Google-sponsored online competition with Ashoka Changemakers. The global competition welcomes innovations that “catalyze full information citizenship… to engage freely and powerfully with information to advance their own lives and society.”

The competition seeks not only tools for increasing access to information and avenues for expression, but also to solve other challenges of a more open world, including: How to figure out what sources to trust, how to get other people to care about a story, how to share ideas efficiently and effectively and ensure people’s exposure to a diversity of opinion, and how to sift through the ever-growing supply of information.

These grass roots approaches may be the key to opening access to free expression to more and more people — especially those in the “Long Tail” — in rural and marginalized communities. The solutions may overcome the challenges of infrastructure requirements, expense, and cultural barriers that have left people totally unconnected, especially in places where the profit-potential hasn’t been attractive to investors.

“Free expression is a universal value,” said Jillian York, director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. A universal value that’s not nearly yet experienced universally. You can help change that. If you have or know of a solution for creating a more engaged global citizenry through boosting media access, you have until September 14 to enter and vie for $5,000 and a chance to become an Ashoka Fellow, part of the world’s leading network of systems-changing social entrepreneurs.

Beginning in July the Federal Government of Australia will be censoring over 500 websites that pertain to specific themes deemed unsuitable for Internet users. The censorship will take place through two of the largest Aussie Internet service providers, Telstra and Optus, who voluntarily opted to take part in the plan aimed at child pornography websites.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority, with a few International partners, will be personally selecting the ISPs to be filtered, a procedure that was previously part of the Federal Government’s $9.8 million plan to scrape the Australian Internet of specially selected sites. Though that plan was cut from the Federal budget, Telstra and Optus remained on-board to voluntarily filter offending sites.

Those who oppose the program worry the filtering is merely vanity work, since these sites can still be accessed with a swift change of URL. Even more worrisome, content can also be accessed through peer-to-peer networks and aggregation sites, where web surfers are more likely to accidentally stumble upon it.

Members of the Electronic Frontiers Association are most concerned about the creation of the list of URLs to be blocked and are hoping the process will include an appeals court for websites that have been unfairly listed. They are calling for the government to be more transparent in their process and are asking for the censorship discussion to be opened up further so that the correct content can be more closely targeted.

Flickr Creative Commons | Vladimir Frolov

By Leyla Boulton | Financial Times | June 16, 2011 |

When state television showed a dynamic Vladimir Putin at the wheel of a yellow Lada touring the provinces after devastating forest fires, a fuller picture was to be found on the internet.Video shot by laughing onlookers and uploaded to the net showed that the prime minister was in fact followed by a motorcade of at least two dozen vehicles, including three spare yellow Ladas in case of a mechanical breakdown.

There are few sectors that better reflect Russia’s lopsided development than the internet. The web has grown strongly as a business, drawing on the nation’s strengths in maths and science to produce a domestic search engine, Yandex, that describes itself as “better than Google”.

Yet the government’s efforts to foster a Russian Silicon Valley outside Moscow show how a poor investment climate is letting down that human potential. Politically, the return to an authoritarian system, in which the government controls television but not newspapers or radio, has turned the internet into a valuable – though incomplete – forum for free speech and discussion.

Like jokes in the Soviet era, the internet takes the sting out of Russian life in the 21st century.

Unfettered news and comment about everything that television will not touch includes descriptions of high-level shenanigans and mockery of the ruling tandem of Mr Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, the president.

Mr Medvedev’s online nickname of “Captain Obvious” refers to his tendency to say the right thing with little to show for it. A few days after he declared that the release from prison of Mikhail Khodorkovsky would pose “absolutely no danger” to society, the former tycoon was sentenced to a second term in prison in what was widely seen as a politically motivated trial.

“You can go on the internet to vent your frustration and that makes you feel like you’ve done something, although of course you haven’t really changed anything,” says Sergey Alexashenko, a 21-year-old student at Georgetown University in the US. He is struck by the idealism of his US peers, compared with the cynicism back home.

Exceptions to such apathy include the Duma intern who was fired after he published details of expense-fiddling and time-wasting by parliamentarians on his blog.

Although internet penetration in Russia is expected to increase from 40 to 70 per cent over the next four years, according to Public Opinion Foundation, a Moscow-based polling agency, online debate is confined to a relatively small proportion of the population.

At one end of the range is the slick website of Snob magazine. Blogs by subscribers including oligarchs sit alongside interviews with the likes of Bill Browder, a foreign investor banned from Russia, whose lawyer died in custody while trying to protect his client’s assets from a scam involving officials.

At the other extreme, rightwing groups used the internet to organise demonstrations against immigration and corruption in December, and more chillingly, to target specific individuals. Oleg Kashin, a reporter, was savagely beaten in November (and filmed for all to see) after his picture appeared on a farright website labelled “to be punished”.

Given widespread apathy, Maria Lipman, a political analyst at the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow, argues that an Arabstyle revolt driven by social media is not on the cards. “I see the mood but not the movement,” she says. “People are increasingly angry, but this does not change the overall assumption – that ‘there is nothing we can change’. ” The authorities, for their part, are taking no chances.

In an embarrassing episode before its IPO in New York last month, Yandex was forced by the FSB security agency to hand over details of contributors to an anti-corruption website run by Alexei Navalny, a popular blogger and whistleblower. The details found their way to Nashi, a nationalist youth group prone to violent harassing of government critics.

And was the Kremlin involved in a cyber-attack on LiveJournal, a blogging site used by Mr Medvedev, Mr Navalny and the Duma intern? “Yes and no,” says Ilya Ponomarev, head of the Duma’s subcommittee for high-tech development, who advises the president on the internet.

He believes the attack was the “initiative of people sponsored by the administration to generate pro-government content in the blogosphere … but I don’t think they were directly ordered to [attack].

“As this community becomes larger, they invent activities for themselves to prove they are important. The same applies to our nationalist groups. It’s a Catch-22. The authorities give them money to gain leverage; they ask for more and go out of control.”

But in the absence of “open” politics, says Mr Ponomarev – speaking in a still largely empty mansion housing the president’s Institute for Contemporary Development – high-tech remains Russia’s most likely engine of progress.

Flickr Creative Commons | mujer (ensimismada)

By Neil Macfarquhar | New York Times | June 16, 2011 |

AL KHOBAR, Saudi Arabia — When Manal al-Sharif posted a video of herself breaking the law by driving her own black S.U.V. around this hot, flat city and called for a collective protest on Friday, the government responded harshly: she was jailed for nine days.

But unlike in the past, government censure did not quash debate. Instead, the Internet buzzed to life in Ms. Sharif’s defense, building on the surge of social media here after the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. Twitter and Facebook overflowed with comments denouncing both Saudi Arabia’s ruling princes and the clerics who called for her to be flogged as Neanderthals completely detached from the realities of life for women here.

More than 30,000 comments about Ms. Sharif’s arrest showed up within days on Twitter, the vast majority from supporters, said Abdulaziz al-Shalan, who tracks Saudi-related Twitter messages.

”Are you accusing a woman of being a sinner because she went to jail for driving? What kind of religion would come up with that?” wrote a woman in Jidda, on the Red Sea coast.

Social media, which helped drive protests across the Arab world, seems tailor-made for Saudi Arabia, where public gatherings are illegal, women are strictly forbidden to mix with unrelated men and people seldom mingle outside their family.

Virtually any issue that contradicts official Saudi policy now pops up online, including the status of prisoners being held without trial or a call to boycott municipal elections this September.

Louai A. Koufiah, a Twitter enthusiast, quipped: ”Saudis cannot go out to demonstrate, so they retweet!”

Essam M. al-Zamel, who helped start the municipal election boycott campaign, boasts that he cannot gather 30 people in a room, but that he can reach more than 22,000 instantly on Twitter.

But wherever the public goes, the government follows.

After Saudis thronged Twitter, activists noted a rash of new users without pictures who described themselves in patriotic terms and attacked government critics. Since the default picture on Twitter is an egg, they earned the nickname #saudieggs.

”My purpose in life is to be a watchdog to protect my religion, my state,” read part of one such user’s information.

Abdulaziz AlGasim, a lawyer and activist in the capital, Riyadh, is convinced that such users work for the government because in attacking him they used information unknown to the general public. ”Oh, this is a famous egg!” he said laughing as he flipped through his account, pointing out how they try to provoke factional or sectarian fights.

Previously, government critics were nervous about seeking out allies, never sure whom to approach. But the combination of bold opinions online and monitoring whom the ”eggs” attack has expanded contacts between activists nationwide.

Seeking to highlight the plight of prisoners held for years without trial, activists recently put a video on YouTube called ”Absent Saudis.” It featured the distraught relatives of some of the 16 men imprisoned in 2007 for what Bassem Alim, a defense attorney, said was taking rudimentary steps toward creating a political party and what the government said were links to terrorism. They were only formally charged last August.

The video response was called ”Saudis Are Present,” featuring an interview with the father of a Saudi girl killed in an attack by Al Qaeda and mixed in with pictures of famous Saudi dissidents.

”Keep them locked up!” screams the zipper running across the bottom of the screen. ”Side with the country against them and distribute this video.”

Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, the Interior Ministry spokesman, denied any government role in such counterattacks. Its main online effort was seeking out Qaeda ideology, he said. ”It is not our way to challenge individuals or social networks on the Internet. That is nonsense,” he said.

While social media was once almost solely the playing field of the liberal elite, Saudi activists say it has become more democratic this year, with more varied voices.

The religious conservatives are catching up. Gone are the days when they issued one fatwa reported by the newspaper Al-Watan that commanded women to avoid writing ”LOL,” or laughing out loud, because the very idea of a woman laughing might arouse male strangers.

Two Saudi conservatives started a special YouTube channel, CH905, to highlight the work of the most prominent clerics in the Sahwa or Wahhabi traditionalist movement in the country. (The telephone number for directory assistance is 905.) One cleric called for the Saudi government to tear down the mosque around the Kaaba, the sacred shrine in Mecca toward which Muslims turn when they pray, and put up a new, stacked structure so that men and women circulate on different floors. Others have attacked proposals for co-education in early elementary school.

Saudis who follow social media closely say that the crosscurrents, particularly on Twitter, have had a moderating affect. The more extremist religious figures and the hard-core social liberals have adopted flexible attitudes on some issues — seen as an attempt to increase followers and an indication that the different camps no longer talk solely among themselves, they said.

The women’s driving campaign shows what online organizing can accomplish — and what it cannot. Ms. Sharif, a 32-year-old information technology specialist working for Aramco, the state oil company, announced her campaign in April, and Saudi activists said they expected women at least in the hundreds to drive on Friday. But her open challenge to the government in posting the videos alienated countless supporters who thought she should have simply waited until the announced date.

Supporters believe the nine-day jail sentence was a deliberate attempt by the monarchy to eradicate any kind of online movement inspired by Tunisia and Egypt. It most likely had the desired effect of scaring off many women.

But it has not squelched the robust online debate. Some men suggested that Ms. Sharif, a single mother, was simply looking for a husband. Supporters, even Abdel Aziz Khoja, the minister of information and an avid Twitter user, weighed in, saying, ”My personal opinion is that a woman has the right to drive as long as she respects public etiquette and Islamic behavior.”

Younger women are particularly defiant, with a group of five 20- to 30-year-olds detained in Riyadh last Thursday for taking driving lessons. One brazenly kept posting to Twitter even when thrown into a holding tank by the morals police: ”We are waiting in a tiny, dirty, dusty room!”

One weakness in online movements is that their organizers often stay hidden to avoid government wrath.

In March, nobody knew exactly who was calling for street demonstrations. The day was suddenly named after Hunain, a famous battle in Islamic history that Shiite Muslims revere more than Sunnis. Numerous activists think the government planted the name online to try to turn the protests into a sectarian issue.

Saudi activists said they recognized that social media alone would not bring changes, although it exposes issues and links organizers.

”If you can reach the public, it will put pressure on royal family to modernize,” said Mr. AlGasim, the Riyadh lawyer, who found that even his 72-year-old mother had signed a democracy petition online. ”Change will come from demonstrations, not from talking.”

Flickr Creative Commons | Maisha Elonai

By Nicholas Bariyo | The Wall Street Journal | April 19, 2011

KAMPALA, Uganda—Uganda’s state communications regulator warned Tuesday that it is likely to close down more media outlets deemed to be inciting people protesting escalating food and fuel prices.

This followed the arrest Monday of Uganda’s main opposition leader, Kizza Besigye, who was charged with riotous behavior and inciting violence after he was arrested while leading protests over prices.

Last week’s order to Internet-service providers to block the use of Facebook and Twitter was just a “caution,” according to Godfrey Mutabazi, the executive director of Uganda Communications Commission.

“We shall not hesitate to close others if they incite people,” he said, adding that the regulator has already asked media organizations to be cautious of the danger of inciting protesters.

Tensions are mounting across the country, triggered by rocketing food and fuel prices. The government blames the food shortage on a drought late last year, which hurt yields of crops like corn, grains and cereals across the country.

The drought also affected major cash crops like coffee, tea and cocoa. Last week, Uganda’s state coffee body revised the 2010-11 coffee production forecast downwards by at least 13% because of the drought.

The commission has already directed Uganda’s local television and radio stations to stop covering the protests live, blaming the coverage for the escalation of protests in recent days.

Last week Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni warned that the government would step up a crackdown on protesters. At least four people have been killed in the crackdown, which has also left dozens injured, according to the Red Cross.

The United Nations High Commission for Human Rights urged the government Monday to stop using excessive force during protests and to guarantee people’s right to freedom of assembly and expression, Uganda’s state media reported Tuesday.

On Monday, the main opposition leader, Mr. Besigye, was charged with riotous behavior and inciting violence after he was arrested earlier Monday while leading protests over rising food and fuel prices.

The state prosecutor tried to block Mr. Besigye from receiving bail, but the magistrate ruled in the opposition leader’s favor, granting him a court bail of 10 million Ugandan shillings ($4,348), according to David Mpanga, attorney to the opposition’s Forum For Democratic Change.

The charges were the second round against Mr. Besigye in less than two weeks after he started protesting against the escalating food and fuel prices.

In the Kampala suburb of Kasangati, law-enforcement teams fired teargas to disperse Besigye supporters demonstrating against his arrest.

At least one person died of suffocation after police accidentally fired teargas at a hospital, according to the Red Cross. Judith Nabakoba, Uganda’s police spokeswoman, said the police suspect that the patient died of natural causes. Witnesses said patients were seen scampering in the hospital’s yard after police fired tear gas at the building.

The opposition has rallied supporters to protest against rising food and fuel prices in the country by walking from their homes to their workplaces at least twice a week until the government addresses the situation.

Uganda suffered months of drought at the end of 2010 and earlier this year, which hurt agricultural yields and led to food shortages.

The national statistics agency said last month that average food prices rose 29% in March from a month earlier.

Mr. Besigye was President Museveni’s main challenger in disputed Feb. 18 polls.

Flickr Creative Commons | infinitewhite

Voice of America News | March 30, 2011

Family members and human rights officials say Bahraini authorities have arrested the country’s most prominent Internet activist as part of a crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators.

They say officials took Mahmoud al-Youssef into custody on Wednesday.  Al-Youssef has been a vocal critic of the government for its limits on freedom of expression. He has been referred to as the “godfather” of blogging in the Gulf nation.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch says Bahraini authorities are harassing demonstrators and bystanders who were wounded in anti-government protests.

The rights group said Wednesday the country’s security and military forces have sought out and threatened injured activists who were taken to Bahrain’s largest medical facility earlier this month.

On Monday, the Reuters news agency said Bahrain’s opposition party claimed 250 people had been detained and 44 others were missing in a government crackdown on protesters.

Bahrain declared a three-month state of emergency on March 15 after troops from Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states came to help the Sunni monarchy quell Shi’ite-led protests.

On Wednesday, Bahraini opposition leader Ali Salman demanded the withdrawal of the Saudi-led forces.  Iran has also condemned the deployment but Salman warned Iran against interfering in Bahrain’s internal affairs.  

Bahrain’s parliament accepted the resignations of key political Shi’ite opposition members on Tuesday, signaling a further divide in the sectarian crisis gripping the island nation.

Bahrain’s parliament is the nation’s only elected body but holds limited powers. The government is mostly run by the Sunni monarch.

Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters

Flickr Creative Commons | YasminMoll

As director of the Business & Human Rights Program at Yahoo!, I spend a great deal of time thinking and learning about how people use social media to further human rights aims, and also all of the ways that companies can try to ensure that their platforms and processes respect that expression.

Lately, with all that we are learning about the role of social media in uprisings around the world, companies are facing even more difficult questions. Our recent experience with Flickr is an excellent case study.

A well-known Egyptian activist, Mr. El Hamalawy, used his Flickr account to post photographs of people identified as members of Egypt’s security force. In the caption to the set of images, the activist explicitly stated that the photographs were not his, and that the people in the images should be exposed, shamed, and made to answer for their crimes. The Flickr community manager received more than one report from the Flickr community through the report abuse function, took down the photographs and sent Mr. El Hamalawy a notice that the images were taken down because they violated Flickr community rules.

Flickr is and has always been quite clear about users only being allowed to post their own photographs:

From Flickr’s Community Guidelines:

Don’t upload anything that isn’t yours.

This includes other people’s photos, video, and/or stuff you’ve copied or collected from around the Internet. Accounts that consist primarily of such collections may be deleted at any time.

This rule applies regardless of content, or of the purpose of the post. The reasoning for this is not only about copyright—and in this case, it’s not a copyright issue.  It’s an issue of community:  Flickr is meant to be a place where photographers, amateur and professional, can share their own work. Flickr, as a community, does not want to be a photo-hosting site, and anyone signing up for Flickr agrees to those rules, which apply whether one is a proud grandmother or a human rights activist.

This is a perfect example of the difficulty that human rights activists and companies have when activists use tools and products that were not initially created for human rights aims; activists are still subject to the community rules. In this case, following the rules would not endanger the user, whether or not he or she is a human rights activist. The rule simply requires human rights activists to use Flickr to post photographs that they have taken–they can use photo-hosting sites or create their own website to post images that are explicitly not their own work.

I have heard from some activists who believe that Flickr applies the rule unevenly; they have pointed out other photographs, including others from Mr. El Hamalawy’s account, that also appear to be photographs that were not taken by Mr. El Hamalawy. Here’s the thing: with millions and millions of photographs and Flickr accounts, Flickr does not have the ability to proactively moderate for photographs that were not taken by Flickr users. Flickr reactively responds to reports from Flickr community members.

Others have asked why Flickr would not make an exception to the rule for activists. It’s a great question, and one that I think about a great deal.  It raises a number of questions for me, and I’d like to pose them to you:

Who is an activist?  Who gets to decide? Are activists, for example, only people who hold views and advocate for the kinds of issues with which I agree? Should the designation be limited to registered human rights organizations? What about organizations in countries where registration as a human rights organization is illegal or dangerous? Would identified activists then be exempt from all of the rules? Or would they get to select which rules apply? Or should the company? What kind of mechanisms could companies set up to make these kinds of decisions?

What about the stated purpose of a community or semi-public space? Flickr was created specifically to allow photographers to share their work. Many Flickr users believe that the community of passionate and invested people make Flickr unique. They want to preserve Flickr’s character and to have a space where members, regardless of purpose, respect the rules, and the unity of purpose.  Many Flickr members use Flickr to highlight human rights issues while taking care to follow community guidelines. If a space is created to serve a particular community, is it fair to the community for one group to be allowed to break those rules? Does a company have the responsibility to change the purpose of a product or platform because a segment of users demand it, regardless of whether that demand is made by a majority or a minority of members? These questions are fundamental to defining exactly what Flickr is – and what it can or should be in the future.

This afternoon, I was on a panel at SXSW, moderated by Danny O’Brien of the Committee to Protect Journalists.  A number of participants expressed outrage about Flickr’s decision. One vowed to never use Yahoo!’s services again, and said that he believed that any Yahoo! product should not be used by human rights activists. I disagree, but I think it’s a point of view that, as a company, we have to be willing to hear. I am a passionate supporter of free expression as a fundamental human right, and I believe strongly in the idea that technology and social media provide incredible opportunities to create social change. I also know that millions of people use Yahoo! products, including Flickr, to create their version of the change they wish to see in the world.  That’s a tremendous privilege, and a huge responsibility.

I look forward to hearing what you think.

Flickr Creative Commons | tuxthepenguin84

By Amol Sharma | The Wall Street Journal | March 14, 2011

NEW DELHI—A top executive of BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion Ltd. said Indian security agencies are making “rather astonishing” demands for increased powers to monitor email and other data traffic, raising serious privacy issues that threaten to harm the country’s reputation with foreign investors.

Robert Crow, vice president of industry and government relations for RIM, said India’s Home Ministry, which oversees domestic security, wants the ability to intercept in real time any communication on any Indian network—including BlackBerry’s highly secure corporate-email service—and get it in readable, plain-text format.

Such a broad requirement raises the question of whether the government believes any communications are legally off-limits, he said, including email conversations of foreign ambassadors and financial records that get transmitted over secure telecommunications networks to Indian outsourcing companies.

“You connect those dots and you’re saying, ‘Holy smokes,’ ” Mr. Crow said during an interview. “This claim is made in an environment where we don’t really have any privacy- or data-protection laws—and where we have a pretty poor administrative record of keeping similar things like wiretaps secret.”

A spokesman for India’s Home Ministry declined to comment. Government officials in India have previously said they want to ensure suspected terrorists and criminals can’t elude government surveillance by using newfangled communications technologies. Under current Indian law, the home secretary—the top bureaucrat in the Home Ministry—authorizes all telecom surveillance by central-government agencies for 60 days at a time.

For several months, RIM has faced demands from India to give security agencies a way to access encrypted messages on BlackBerry’s corporate-email service. BlackBerry has repeatedly said its system is designed so that it doesn’t have the “keys” to unlock users’ messages—and it has refused to change its technology architecture in any one of the 175 countries where it offers service.

Mr. Crow said he is heartened, at least, that India no longer appears to be singling out RIM. India has realized, he said, that other advanced services—such as virtual private networks, or VPNs, and peer-to-peer messaging services, are outside its surveillance reach.

It isn’t clear whether the Indian government has set any firm deadline for when it should gain access to BlackBerry corporate-email and other services and whether it would take the drastic measure of shutting down services that aren’t compliant. Indian media reports have said the government has told Indian telecom operators to submit plans by March 31 showing how they would accommodate security agencies’ demands. But the government has made no announcement to that effect.

Mr. Crow said he is optimistic that India’s telecom ministry, which is beginning to assert more authority on the matter, will have a better understanding of the technological constraints RIM faces and will find a solution to the issue that doesn’t require BlackBerry to compromise user privacy. A telecom-ministry spokesman declined to comment.

But Mr. Crow said he expects talks with India to drag on, given the inherent delays in the country’s democracy and the lack of well-defined regulations on data protection and privacy.

“I think this may well go on and on in India, and frankly it will be one of those factors that people talk about in the Indian business environment—not one that will be seen in India’s favor in international comparison,” Mr. Crow said.

BlackBerry, which touts the highly secure nature of its email service as a key selling point globally, has faced intensifying demands from foreign governments for access to the service in recent months. The stakes in India are especially high, given that the country has more than 770 million wireless subscribers who are just beginning to shift from ordinary phones to smartphones such as BlackBerrys.

Mr. Crow said he has proposed ways for Indian intelligence and security agencies to advance investigations without gaining access to the actual content of encrypted BlackBerry email messages. He said telecom operators can glean so-called meta data about messages, such as the time messages were sent, and the corporate-email server they went through.

“If that pattern of communications were known to the authorities on lawful grounds,” Mr. Crow said, “then the authorities would be in a position to go to the correct corporate entity that owns the server” and pursue their investigation of a suspect.

In January, RIM resolved India’s security concerns with the BlackBerry Messenger chat service, which uses a lower level of encryption than corporate email. The company gave Indian telecom operators a system that lets them key in a suspect’s phone number and get unscrambled versions of Messenger chats, when a legal order has been provided, Mr. Crow said.

Mr. Crow said RIM is “kicking the tires” on potential plans to expand in India, where it already has a data center and where about 11,000 software developers are making programs to run on BlackBerrys. One possibility down the line is for India to manufacture some of the several thousand parts that go into a BlackBerry.

“There’s a heck of a lot of demand [for BlackBerrys] within three to four hours flight of most of the manufacturing places in India, including India itself,” he said.