Thoughts on Flickr and human rights

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

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.

Facebook’s Secret Role in Egypt

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | researchgirl

by Mike Giglio | The Daily Beast | February 24, 2011

As unlikely protests swept across Egypt on January 25, an administrator from the Facebook page that was helping to drive the uprisings emailed a top official of the social network, asking for help.

The popular page had sounded the call for the protests 10 days earlier. It then became an online staging ground for the budding movement, beaming a constant barrage of news and updates to the walls of its 400,000-plus fans, along with impassioned pleas for people to join.
Protests swelled into the night. The We Are All Khaled Said administrator worried that the Mubarak regime, clued in to the page’s importance, might respond with a cyber attack—to bring down the page or, worse, uncover the anonymous people running it.

It was unclear whether Facebook would help.

The page, titled “We Are All Khaled Said” in remembrance of an Alexandria man murdered by police last summer, was founded in June and snowballed into one of Egypt’s most influential activist sites. In November, as parliamentary elections approached, the page prepared to encourage its fans to document what was expected to be a heavily-rigged vote. But, on election day, the page went down. And that was when Facebook became embroiled in what would eventually become Egypt’s revolutionary push.

Email records obtained by Newsweek, conversations with NGO executives who work with Facebook to protect activist pages, and interviews with administrators of the We Are All Khaled Said page reveal the social media juggernaut’s awkward balancing act. They show a company struggling to address the revolutionary responsibilities thrust upon it—and playing a more involved role than it might like to admit.

On the night of January 25, Richard Allan, Facebook’s director of policy for Europe, responded to the worried administrator. “We have put all the key pages into special protection,” he wrote in an email. A team, he said, “is monitoring activity from Egypt now on a 24/7 basis.”

Allan, 45, is member of Britain’s House of Lords and was a Liberal Democrat MP from 1997 until 2005, when he ran the campaign of current deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, before taking a position with tech giant Cisco. During his time at Cisco, he chaired an Internet task force for the U.K. government. Friends at the company jokingly refer to him as “Lord Allan.”

Allan, who declined to comment for this story, joined Facebook in June 2009. In an August interview with the Financial Times, he listed among his responsibilities dealing with censorship, freedom of speech and privacy, as well as promoting Facebook for public use. “Richard has a great and wonderful passion for both politics and what companies can do in politics,” says a former Facebook official who asked not to be named discussing his old company.

Facebook insists that all users, from Lady Gaga to Burmese dissidents, use their real names, which has obvious drawbacks for people agitating in repressive countries. The network’s terms of service are available in only seven languages (and not in Arabic), which breeds confusion. (The help site, however, is available in more than 20 languages.)

Regimes have used the terms of service against users, bringing down sensitive pages at key moments, such as the early stages of a protest push. A clever cyberthug can discover when a fan page is being run by a pseudonymous account, and send in a well-tailored complaint that forces the hand of Facebook’s automated servers. Emails to the company’s generic appeals address can take weeks to receive a response. “The appeals process is probably not as well defined and staffed as it should be. It may take a couple of weeks to get to a human,” the former official says. “You do catch things that you’d probably rather not catch in that mix, too.”

And in the past, activists complained that when problems arose at sensitive times, they had little idea who to contact. U.S.-based NGOs such as Freedom House and the Committee to Protect Journalists keep in regular touch with tech companies and the on-the-ground activists who use their services, acting as advisers and facilitators.

The structure at Facebook, though, was difficult for outsiders to discern. “It used to be Kremlinology,” says Danny O’Brien, the CPJ’s Internet advocacy director. “You’d sit there and you’d try to work out someone who could talk to someone else who could talk to someone else. … We all have stories of trying to catch Facebook’s eye.”

Last September, Allan traveled to Budapest for a Google conference on freedom of expression on the web, which was crowded with prominent net activists, as well as Egyptian cyberdissidents. There, Allan said that human rights concerns could be directed to him.

While this role is one of many, and remains loosely defined—“Richard doesn’t hold the switch. He has the ability to email the people who hold the switch,” the former Facebook official says—Allan has since developed into a crucial back channel into Facebook’s inner workings, particularly for the developing situation in the Middle East.

People such as Robert Guerra, who heads net advocacy at Freedom House and Danny O’Brien, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Internet advocacy director, have worked to build relationships with Allan in order to fast-track issues that need Facebook’s attention.

The Allan pipeline, activists say, came in the nick of time.

After receiving concerned emails from Guerra, O’Brien and others when the We Are All Khaled Said page went down in November, Allan responded quickly with a diagnosis: the page’s administrator had been outed for using a pseudonym. Refusing to budge on Facebook policy, Allan suggested a creative fix.

“There is no discretion here as the creation of fake accounts threatens the integrity of our whole system,” he wrote. “People must use the profile of a real person to admin the page or risk it being taken down at any time. It is not important to us who that real person is as long as their account appears genuine. So if they can offer a real person as admin then the page can be restored.”
Nadine Wahab, an Egyptian émigré and activist based in Washington, D.C., took on that role, passing her user name and password to Google executive Wael Ghonim, who was later unmasked as the creator of the We Are All Khaled Said page, and the page went on to document widespread fraud. That week it received 11,000 new fans.

The new arrangement served as a security blanket as the page became a key rallying point for the protests—as only Wahab could be uncovered if the page were hacked. So did the relationship with Facebook. Ghonim told Newsweek he had an “open line” of communication with Facebook during the protests. “Whenever anything happened, I called,” he said.

But Wahab—who provided the email conversations to Newsweek— remains frustrated that it took so much prodding to get the company to act. “Facebook helped. But it was almost like they were hesitant to help. They don’t understand, or they didn’t understand, the power of Facebook in all this,” she says. “I think it’s unfortunate that you have to have a title to get Facebook’s attention.”

As for the special security status Facebook gave the page, she says: “That’s their responsibility. They ask us to put our private information on their site. I think it’s their responsibility to keep it out of government hands.”

Ultimately, Egyptians remained in the streets for more than two weeks and ousted President Hosni Mubarak in what many came to call the “Facebook Revolution.” As a pro-democracy upheaval rocks the Middle East, the social media giant has been receiving a steady stream of praise. Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered an impassioned speech about Internet freedom that was peppered with glowing references to Facebook.

Facebook officials, however, have shrunk from the spotlight. (“Facebook Officials Keep Quiet on Its Role in Revolts,” read a recent headline in the New York Times.) The company has been particularly tight-lipped about what role, if any, its employees have played in the ongoing unrest in the Middle East. “The trust people place in us is the most important part of what makes Facebook work,” said communications manager Andrew Noyes in an emailed statement. “We take this trust seriously.”

Some analysts say Facebook has yet to come to grips with its new activist role. The ambiguity also has fueled suggestions that business interests in repressive countries—such as Syria, where Facebook recently regained access, or China, where it remains shut out—keep the company from embracing an activist image. “Facebook has seemed deeply ambivalent about this idea that they would become a platform for revolutions,” says Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center on Internet and Society. “And it makes sense that they would be deeply ambivalent.”

The former Facebook official says of the company: “There’s a bit of schizophrenia in trying to think that you’re operating a neutral platform. People at Facebook definitely have pro-freedom views. And there’s also a desire to not get shut off.”

Complaints that Facebook is unprepared—or perhaps unwilling—to take on an activist role has led some prominent human-rights advocates to encourage cyberdissidents to avoid it. “I would recommend that activists find another platform for their activity,” says Jillian York, of Global Voices. Adds Guerra: “It’s not just a college kid’s web site. It’s real activists that are staking their lives for change.”

The still-disjointed chain of command, meanwhile, seems to indicate that Facebook is still in the process of figuring out its role at a sensitive time. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have designated executives to deal with human-rights concerns. “[Tech] companies operate in a very difficult and very complex environment,” says Ebele Okobi-Harris, the human rights director at Yahoo.” I think it’s very critical, in Yahoo at least, to have an organization, and people, and a person who are dedicated to these issues.”

Says Zuckerman: “The fact that it works that way shows the inadequacy of the system … They’re trying to figure out after the fact how to construct a process. And they’re doing it in a moment when things are crazy.”

In Tunisia, for instance, “Ali,” an anonymous activist who runs a Facebook fan page called SBZ News—named after Sidi Bouzid, the city where that country’s uprising first took hold—had no NGO connections. But he ran, anonymously, the main Facebook page that was providing news of that country’s revolution. Every time his page would grow in its following, it would get knocked down by Facebook. He says this happened five times.

Ali was running the page under a pseudonym with a wary eye to Tunisia’s notorious cyberpolice. Though fan pages such as his and Ghonim’s don’t show the administrator, that information can be found out if the page is hacked. Which is exactly what happened in Tunisia—the government was able to phish passwords of Facebook users. (Facebook responded by quickly rolling out a harder-to-crack https code.)

“When Facebook say that I’ve to use the real profile, what if the page was hacked? And there are some pages that were hacked by the cyberpolice. And some bloggers were arrested,” Ali says. “Just because I haven’t used my real ID, [is the reason] I’m talking now to you.”

With his pages getting spiked, Ali sent an email to the appeals address. Three weeks later, he finally received an emailed reply, asking that he send a scanned copy of his passport, and getting him even more confused. “Are Facebook administrators not supposed to help us?” he asks. “Are they interested in our personal information more than supporting a revolution?”

Facebook has yet to answer the question. Mike Giglio is a reporter at Newsweek.

Iconic in Egypt

By Kee

Witnessing the literal influence of Internet icons in Egypt in analog form.

photo credit: @whoisubik and @tomgara

via @whoisubik in Dubai and @tomgara who received this great photo from a friend in Egypt.

What are you seeing on the ground?

Egypt’s Web, Mobile Communications Severed

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Divine Harvester

By Shereen El Gazzar, Lilly Vitorovich, and Ruth Bender | The Wall Street Journal | January 28, 2011

The Egyptian government’s crackdown on protestors intensified Friday with access to most forms of mass communication, including the Internet, mobile and SMS down, even as United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned that “freedom of expression should be fully respected.”

Government-owned Telecom Egypt runs the country’s fixed-line network. Attempts to connect to the websites of several Egyptian ISPs, including EgyptWeb, TeData and Purenet all failed.

U.K.-headquartered Vodafone Group PLC said in a statement that all mobile operators in Egypt had been “instructed to suspend services in parts of Egypt. Under Egyptian legislation, the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it.” It said the Egyptian authorities will be clarifying the situation in due course.

Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao said in comments to a Davos session on mobile devices that “Egyptian authorities” had asked the company to “turn down the network totally.”

Mr. Colao said Vodafone determined that the request was legitimate under Egyptian law, and therefore complied with the request. “I hope” the decision will be reversed by Egypt “very soon,” Mr. Colao said.

In a blog, U.S.-based Internet intelligence firm Renesys recorded how late Thursday it saw “the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet’s global routing table,” in what it called “an action unprecedented in Internet history.”

It contrasted the scale of the crackdown with the “modest Internet manipulation that took place in Tunisia, where specific routes were blocked, or Iran, where the Internet stayed up,” but download times were slowed.

During the rallies in Iran in 2009, one account from a person in the capital, Tehran, said it took 20 minutes to download Yahoo’s website and that landlines, satellite phones and SMS were all disrupted.

And in 2007, security forces in Myanmar cracked down on communications following monk-led protests against the regime there, disabling some mobile phones and closing some service providers, but images of the clampdown continued to be relayed out of the country via cellphones. More than 110,000 people joined the Support the Monk’s Protest in Burma group on Facebook. Facebook and Twitter weren’t immediately available to comment on what is happening in Egypt.

France Telecom also confirmed that the Egyptian authorities had taken “measures to block mobile phone services,” and apologized to Mobinil customers, adding it had no information about when service would be restored.

All attempts to reach other mobile and Internet operators in the country were unsuccessful either because offices were closed due to the weekend or because mobile numbers weren’t working.

“From my knowledge of the region, I suspect the Egyptian government controls the main ISP in the country and would thus be able to decouple the main backbone in Egypt from the rest of the Internet,” said Sean Sullivan, security adviser at Finnish IT security firm F-Secure. Mr. Sullivan drew parallels with Syria, where the government also has full control of the Internet backbone and can therefore shut down the network if it wishes.

According to Egypt’s National Telecom Regulatory Authority, or NTRA, mobile subscribers in the country reached 53.43 million by the end of the third quarter of 2010, the latest figures available.

Earlier this week, blogs and social networks were full of calls to take to the streets to bring down the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Egypt’s Interior Ministry had warned it would take decisive measures against the protestors in the Arab world’s most populous nation, after organizers said demonstrations set to take place after noon prayers Friday would be the biggest in decades.

The protests in Egypt come after the 25-year regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was toppled in Tunisia, sparking shockwaves across the Arab world.

—Alan Murray in Davos, Switzerland, contributed to this article.

How Egypt Killed the Internet

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Syd Daoust

By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries | WSJ Blogs | January 28, 2011

UPDATE: This post has been updated with more detailed information on the timing of the shutdown.

How do you turn off the Internet in an entire country?

Egypt severed mobile and Web communications late Thursday, the Journal reported.

Mr. Cowie said in an interview with Digits that he isn’t privy to how Egypt actually shut down the Web but outlined a scenario based on his “knowledge of how the Internet is structured.”

“People have talked about a ‘kill switch’” that would link to every router and be able to shut each one off from a central location, “but that is not realistic,” he said. “What is most likely is that somebody in the government gives a phone call to a small number of people and says, ‘Turn it off.’ And then one engineer at each service provider logs into the equipment and changes the configuration of how traffic should flow.”

Mr. Cowie said a detailed look at the traffic shows that Egypt’s Internet providers started shutting down their networks at about midnight Cairo time. Rather than turning off all at once, they each initiated the process separately, starting with Telecom Egypt at 12 minutes and 43 seconds after midnight. Raya started the process about a minute later, and the other networks followed at intervals of two to six minutes. This could lend credence to the theory that a decision to shut down was made around midnight and each operator was notified in succession and began the process shortly thereafter.

In many countries, including Egypt, the Internet involves a few large providers that sell service to smaller providers. The large providers — of which there are a handful in Egypt — pay money to international carriers to transmit internet data over undersea cables. Ordinarily, the large providers announce via computer code that they will accept and send transmissions. But late Thursday, the code at most providers simply switched to stop allowing that — thus blocking communications altogether.

About 3,500 of these “border gateway protocol” routes were withdrawn, Renesys reported. BGPmon, which also monitors such traffic, said more than 88% of Egyptian networks were unreachable as of early Friday morning, Egyptian time. As of Friday evening, Renesys reported that 93% were offline.

And what about the small number of Egyptian networks that are still transmitting? One major network appears to have been entirely unaffected: Noor Group. It’s unclear why this provider didn’t go silent, but Mr. Cowie pointed out that it has one of the Internet protocol (IP) addresses for the Egyptian Stock Exchange (www.egyptse.com). “Apparently they didn’t get the call, or if they got the call, they didn’t listen to it,” he said.

So could this sort of shutdown happen in the U.S.? Mr. Cowie said it’s unlikely, and not just because of the legal issues involved. Egypt’s Internet ecosystem is small enough that a few phone calls could shut it down, but that’s not the case in the U.S. “To say the least it would be very implausible,” Mr. Cowie said. “You’d have to make far too many phone calls, and most of those people would ignore you.”

First Egyptian Blogger Imprisoned for Writings is Released

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | John Ward

By Courtney C. Radsch | Huffington Post (Blog) | November 22, 2010

Kareem Amer, the first Egyptian blogger to be prosecuted for the content of his writings, was released Tuesday after serving a four-year sentence for defaming Islam and President Hosni Mubarak. His sentence expired Nov. 5, but upon being released he was immediately re-arrested, pretty par for the course in terms of Egypt’s approach to dealing with its ‘problematic’ bloggers and digital activists.

Amer was a student at Al Azhar University studying law and growing increasingly disillusioned with his religion and his government. The 24-year-old started his blog in April 2005, in the height of the Kefaya movement, the genesis of cyberactivism and in the midst of a series of protests against constitutional amendments and for the independence of the judiciary.

“I am down to earth Law student; I look forward to help humanity against all form of discriminations,” Kareem wrote in his Blogger profile. “I am looking forward to open up my own human rights activists Law firm, which will include other lawyers who share the same views. Our main goal is to defend the rights of Muslim and Arabic women against all form of discrimination and to stop violent crimes committed on a daily basis in these countries.”

Kareem traversed red lines on his blog, including criticizing Islam and Christianity, assailing the Egyptian regime including Mubarak, and attacking Al Azhar University and his professors there by name. In March, 2005 he was subjected to disciplinary hearings at Al Azhar, which he chronicled on his blog, labeling them an “inquisition” by a “repressive” institution. According to one fellow blogger I interviewed in Egypt for my doctoral research on digital activism, Kareem would print out hard copies of his posts and distribute it, like a newspaper, to people walking down the street. Although laws specific to Internet publishing were not yet in place in 2005, Kareem’s translation of electronic materials to hard copy printed materials meant he could be prosecuted under existing libel and defamation laws. Nov. 6 became the first time a blogger was explicitly arrested for the content of his writing rather than his activism in the streets.

His first arrest came on Oct. 25, 2005 after he posted an entry entitled “The naked truth about Islam as I saw it in Maharram Beh.” Three weeks later he was released, only to be arrested again on Nov. 6. By the next day the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), which had positioned itself as a leading defender of freedom of expression and essential monitoring organization that became a leading reference on cyberactivism and regime response for journalists and NGOs around the world.

Two days after Kareem’s arrest the pan-Arab Al Quds al Arabi published a piece on detention followed the next day by a piece on the emerging global activist & citizen journalist network Global Voices. Reporters Without Borders issued a press release on his detention and an article appeared in the popular liberal Arabic website Elaph. By the end of January nearly every major media outlet in the English-speaking world and beyond had published articles about his case, including the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera English, the Associated Press, Le Monde, and The Guardian, to name a few.

A bi-partisan letter by two members of the US Congress demanding Kareem’s release was the first of many high-level governmental interventions around the world, from Italy to Sweden to the United Nations. The US State Department expressed its concern and his case was mentioned in Egypt’s Universal Periodic Review at the UN Human Rights Council. Kareem became a cause célèbre of internet freedom and freedom of expression, garnering mention in the reports of every major human rights organization from Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF), the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House. In 2007 Index on Censorship bestowed its annual Freedom of Expression award on Kareem.

Perhaps more interesting, however, was the widespread support he received from fellow bloggers from across the political and religious spectrum. The self-proclaimed “cynical, snarky, pro-US, secular, libertarian, disgruntled” blogger who blogged pseudonymously under the moniker Sandmonkey came to his defense as did the Muslim Brotherhood’s first, and most famous, blogger Abdel Menem Mahmoud (Ana Ikhwan). Manal and Alaa’s joint blog Manalaa’s Bit Bucket featured the campaign and “Free Kareem” banners appeared on blogs throughout the Arab world and beyond. The rallying effect sparked by Kareem’s arrest was a powerful message to the Egyptian government and its autocratic neighbors that there was widespread support among the activist youth for freedom of expression as a fundamental right, even if the views expressed are repugnant or offensive. It was also a clarion call to the West that there were youth show shared the same values and desires as their counterparts in more open societies. Free speech, it turned out, was the common denominator that connected bloggers of all stripes and trampling on that right put them all at risk. Today the blogosphere is more diffuse and diverse than it was when the Free Kareem campaign launched.

A chronology of press, NGO and governmental attention to Kareem’s case compiled by the FreeKareem.org campaign shows that from the day of his arrest through mid-2008 there was sustained engagement on his case on a near weekly basis. Yet despite the efforts of Egypt’s most seasoned digital activists, a global online campaign that spanned continents and languages, the global media’s attention and engagement on the issue, condemnation by Western governments, and the sustained engagement of human rights and journalist rights organizations, Kareem served his four-year prison sentence. He was not released early. The Egyptian government did not bend to international pressure. And the extensive mobilization in support of his cause did little to impact Kareem’s imprisonment, although it likely prevented him from being treated more harshly, as is all to common in Egyptian prisons. Of course the by product of keeping Kareem in jail for the past four years is that the Egyptian government has remained under scrutiny for its treatment of its citizens, and especially of cyberactivists and other human rights defenders. But this likely would have been the case even without Kareem’s compelling story, leaving me to wonder whether the past four years were merely a simulacrum of effective activism.

Beaten to Death for Using the Internet

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Mark Kobayashi-Hillary

By Reagan Kuhn | Human Rights First Blog | June 11, 2010

Activists and supporters of Internet freedom in Egypt have described to Human Rights First different measures the Egyptian authorities take to control the activities of people accessing the Internet, but as of last week, it seems they have reached a whole new level. A young man was dragged out of an Internet café and beaten to death after refusing to show his ID card to police.

Patrons of Internet cafés are often required to provide identification details before logging on, and then their searches and activities online can be monitored. Police officers carry out random raids on Internet cafés and gather identification information from those present, even though there is no justification in Egyptian law for this kind of demand.

On the evening of June 7, 2010 what appeared to be one of these random raids escalated into the horrific brutalization of a young man by two policemen. Reports now reveal that the man may have been targeted for exposing police corruption. He posted a video on the internet depicting officers sharing the profits of a drug bust.

One thing that distinguishes this incident from other incidents of government intimidation of bloggers and activists is that it was carried out in plain view, and other citizens were able to capture and transmit images of police brutality before they could be confiscated. As human rights defenders in Egypt have told us, the government’s usual approach is to brutalize activists/netizens after detaining them and to hold them in custody until the bruises have disappeared. Gamal Eid, lawyer and Executive Director for Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, has said that with respect to bloggers and Internet activists, the government will find reasons to “kidnap them, torture them, take their passport and send them to prison until the hurts on their body become normal so for us there is no evidence of what happened.”

Here are the facts of this tragic case: Khaled Mohamed Saeed, 28, was at an Internet café that he frequented in the Sidi Gaber district of Alexandria when two officers from the local police station entered the café and demanded to see everyone’s ID cards, claiming that they were authorized to do this under the Emergency Law, a law that has been condemned by international human rights organizations and Egyptian activists as allowing security forces to commit abuses with near impunity.

Khaled objected to what he saw as a violation of his rights. There are various reports of what happened next. One press report mentions that the police bound Khaled’s hands and started to beat him, others just describe the beating. Police officers knelt over him beating his head against the marble floor tiles of the café. Khaled was then dragged outside the Internet café, covered in blood, and the beating continued in full view of many witnesses, some of whom pleaded with police to stop. Two doctors even tried to help. Eyewitnesses said his head was banged against an iron door, steps and walls of an adjacent building. He was thrown into a police vehicle, and fifteen minutes later, his gruesomely disfigured dead body was deposited in the street.

Police cordoned off the area, barring patrons from the Internet café, and then passed through the crowd reportedly confiscating cellphones on which people had been taking photographs and shooting video of the beating. Some of these images have appeared online.

Khaled’s family filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Alexandria. Hundreds of protestors have taken to the streets calling for a prosecution in this case. Security forces have responded with further brutality and arrests and in some cases attempted to ban media and journalists from the scene.

Human Rights First is joining with Egyptian human rights activists and bloggers and calling for a prompt, thorough investigation into the brutal killing of Khaled Mohamed Saeed. Those responsible need to be brought to justice.

Human Rights First also calls upon the United States government to defend citizen access to the Internet by expressing strong concern regarding this incident to the Egyptian government.

Egyptians should be able to access the Internet in cybercafés free from harassment and intimidation—when an online post or a random ID check turns into a murder, it is an entirely different problem, and just can’t stand.

For more information, see:

• Video depicting security officers aggressively confronting protestors following the death of Khaled Saeed.
• Egyptian Democratic Academy campaign video depicting Khaled Saeed as a martyr following his death.
• “The brutal killing of Khaled: **Viewer discretion is advised**, June 10, 2010″ blog summarizes accounts including the Facebook post of opposition leader, Ayman Nour and an article in al-shorouk newspaper that describe how Khaled Saeed was brutally beaten by police at an Internet café for refusing to comply with an inspection under the national emergency law and noting that police are trying to avoid liability for the death.
• A news article reporting on the death of Khaled Saeed at the hands of police for failing to comply with their request for identification at an Internet café and noting that police are saying Saeed was using narcotics.

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.

Arab Winds of Change

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | FaceMePLS

Guardian | Brian Whitaker | October 22, 2009

“Women, bloggers and gays lead change in the Arab world.” That is the headline of an article by Octavia Nasr for CNN’s blog AC360°. “Several new lines are being drawn in the Middle East’s desert sand simultaneously,” she writes. “If they continue to be drawn at this rate longer and thicker, it’s hard to foresee any governments, censors or jails being able to stop them.”

Though Nasr sounds a bit overexcited about the existence of a feminist mag in Arabic in which “no one dares to advertise” and a few other developments which are interesting straws in the wind but scarcely signs of an imminent revolution, I think she has a point. If asked where change is likely to come from in the Arab countries, I would not put much faith in “reformist” politicians and opposition parties – they’re mostly no-hopers – but I would definitely put feminists, gay men, lesbians and bloggers very high on my list.

It’s important not to exaggerate what they are actually achieving at the moment, but let’s consider their potential as challengers of the status quo and drivers of change. The “Arab problem” is mostly perceived in terms of the regimes: the lack of democracy, authoritarian rulers who trample over people’s rights, and so on. That was the perception of the Bush administration in particular and it led to the simplistic idea that regime change was the solution.

It’s now very clear (as I explain in my new book, What’s Really Wrong With the Middle East) that this was a mistake. You can overthrow dictators, you can force countries to have elections and you can even insist on voting procedures that are reasonably fair, but that doesn’t bring freedom unless it forms part of a much bigger social transformation.

What has emerged in Iraq, for example, is not so much a model for the rest of the Middle East (as originally intended by Bush and the neocons) but a model of it. As the smoke drifts away, Iraq is emerging as a fairly typical Arab state with most of their usual negative characteristics – a government with authoritarian aspirations, institutionalised corruption and nepotism, pervasive social discrimination and a rentier economy that produces little besides oil – plus, for good measure, resurgent tribalism and sectarianism.

Arab regimes, by and large, are products of the societies they govern and it is often the society, as much as the government itself, that stands in the way of progress. In Kuwait, for instance, it was not the hereditary emir who resisted granting votes to women, but reactionary elements in the elected parliament – and there are plenty of similar examples.

Khaled Diab, an Egyptian who contributes regularly to Cif, summed it up pithily when he told me: “Egypt has a million Mubaraks.” In other words, the Mubarak way of doing things is not confined to the country’s president; it is found throughout Egyptian society, in business and in families too. The Arab family as traditionally conceived – patriarchal and authoritarian, suppressing individuality and imposing conformity, protecting its members so long as they comply with its wishes – is a microcosm of the Arab state.

Changing the power structures within families (and in many parts of the Arab world this is already happening) will also gradually change the way people view other power structures that replicate those of the traditional family, whether in schools and universities, the workplace, or in government. This is where women come in. In an Arab context, demanding the same rights as men is a first step towards change. Asserting their rights doesn’t mean that all women have to be activists for feminism. Even something as simple as going out to work – if enough people do it – can start to make a difference.

Contrary to popular opinion, most human rights abuses in the Arab countries are perpetrated by society rather than regimes. Yes, ordinary people are oppressed by their rulers, but they are also participants themselves in a system of oppression that includes systematic denial of rights on a grand scale.

In these highly stratified societies, people are discriminated for and against largely according to accidents of birth: by gender, by family, by tribe, by sect. Women, as the largest disadvantaged group, can play a major role in overcoming this and helping smaller disadvantaged groups to do the same. Once the equality principle is accepted for women it becomes easier to apply it to others.

Discrimination against gay people has only begun to be challenged in the Arab countries during the last few years. In a patriarchal system, where masculinity is highly prized, any deviation from the sexual “norms” and expected gender roles is not only subversive but is regarded as extremely threatening. The vigilante killings in Iraq are the nastiest example – not just of men who are thought to be gay, but others who simply don’t dress and behave “as men should”.

The third group driving change are the bloggers. A recent survey found 35,000 people blogging in Arabic, plus countless others who use Facebook, Twitter, etc, to communicate over the internet. There has been much debate about the extent to which this is reshaping public discourse and undermining censorship, but that is not really the main significance of blogging and the internet in the Middle East. The traditional “ideal” of an Arab society is one that is strictly ordered, where everyone knows their place and nobody speaks out of turn. Basically, you do what is required of you and no more. You keep your head down, don’t make waves and let those who supposedly know better get on with running things.

The point about bloggers is that they want none of that. They are engaged, they are alive, and they’ll speak out of turn as much as they like. Put all these elements together and you can see how, sooner or later, the edifice could start to crumble.

UN Rights Body Approves US-Egypt Free Speech Text

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Scazon

GENEVA (AP) — The U.N. Human Rights Council approved a U.S.-backed resolution Friday deploring attacks on religions while insisting that freedom of expression remains a basic right.

The inaugural resolution sponsored by the U.S. since it joined the council in June broke a long-running deadlock between Western and Islamic countries in the wake of the publication of cartoons depicting the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.

The resolution has no effect in law but provides Muslim countries with moral ammunition the next time they feel central tenets of Islam are being ridiculed by Western politicians or media through ”negative racial and religious stereotyping.”

American diplomats say the measure — co-sponsored by Egypt — is part of the Obama administration’s effort to reach out to Muslim countries.

”The exercise of the right to freedom of opinion and expression is one of the essential foundations of a democratic society,” the resolution states, urging countries to protect free speech by lifting legal restrictions, ensuring the safety of journalists, promoting literacy and preventing media concentration.

Rights groups cautiously welcomed the resolution as an improvement on earlier drafts, but said Egypt was in no position to lecture other countries about free speech as it has a poor record on the matter.

”Egypt’s cosponsorship of the resolution on freedom of expression is not the result of a real commitment to upholding freedom of expression,” said Jeremie Smith, Geneva director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies.

”If this were the case, freedom of expression would not be systematically violated on a daily basis in Egypt,” he said.

Others warned that the resolution appears to protect religions rather than believers and encourages journalists to abide by ill-defined codes of conduct.

”Unfortunately, the text talks about negative racial and religious stereotyping, something which most free expression and human rights organizations will oppose,” said Agnes Callamard, executive director of London-based group Article 19.

”The equality of all ideas and convictions before the law and the right to debate them freely is the keystone of democracy,” she said.

Although the resolution was passed unanimously, European and developing countries made it clear that they remain at odds on the issue of protecting religions from criticism.

Some Asian and African countries had called for stronger condemnation of articles, cartoons and videos they believe defames Islam.