‘We want our cute cats and we want our rights too’

By BHRP

A crisp fall night turned out to be the perfect setting for the 2nd annual Vancouver Human Rights Lecture, co-sponsored by the Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Program, The Laurier Institution, the University of British Columbia Continuing Studies and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Speaker Ethan Zuckerman in his lecture “Cute Cats and the Arab Spring: When Social Media Meet Social Change” asked the question ‘if 2011 ends up being the year of revolution, is it possible that social media had something to do with it?’

He questioned the theory that social media had nothing to do with protests and activism in 2011 and the opposing theory that the Internet changes everything – that as soon as you have access to information and to the internet, people will mobilize.

The reality, he stated, is not black and white: social media is not irrelevant, nor is social media responsible for how (or why) people get together and protest; instead social media falls within a complex grey area.

Citing Mohamed Bouazizi and his act of self-immolation as a launch-pad or ‘patient zero’ in the movements that have swept through the Arab world, he noted that social media platforms make it possible for people to create and disseminate information at a low cost.  More importantly, they allow people to contribute to the wider media ecosystem (including traditional media), which can sometimes result in citizens mobilizing beyond a small protest movement to removing a dictatorship from power.

He argued that while the development of encrypted and specialized tools for activists is important, just as effective are the tools that are simple enough for anyone to use. The tools that allow persons to easily share their own content and interests to a wide audience, as in the case of the internet user sharing her pictures of cute cats, becomes an even more potent tool for the person who accidentally stumbles upon activism. That user may be already using the tools, and can now use them to share their concerns and express themselves. These platforms are often difficult for governments to censor.

Ethan challenged the audience to become empowered citizens and netizens of the online world and to call on governments to respect the idea of a networked public sphere where content and information can be shared but also to call on companies to run the private spaces in a manner consistent with freedom of expression and privacy.

Yahoo! recognizes that the Internet is a powerful space for free expression and for this reason is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder initiative comprised of ICT companies, human rights organizations, academics, investors and others. The GNI is a positive and collective step by these stakeholders to work together to challenge censorship and threats to privacy. The group has worked together to establish a code of conduct to guide technology companies in protecting and advancing freedom of expression and privacy across the globe when they encounter laws and policies that interfere with these fundamental human rights.

Over the next year, the Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Program will continue to explore how people, and more specifically women, are using social and digital media to support positive change in their communities and around the world. Our Change your World summits start in Cairo on January 18 2012, where, together with Yahoo! Maktoob and in partnership with Vital Voices we will focus on how women across the Middle East and North Africa are using technology, the Internet and various social and digital media platforms to create positive change in the world through four areas: leadership in governance and politics, human rights and social justice, journalism and entrepreneurship.  Join us for Change your World: Cairo 2012. Click here for more information.

To listen to the 2011 Vancouver Human Rights Lecture podcast, please click here or view the lecture video here

Political Repression 2.0

By Nicole

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?

Arab Spring– and the Long Winter Ahead

By Nicole

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.

A world with too much freedom is better than one with not enough

By Nicole

Flickr Creative Commons|tokiipictures |

By Suzanne Moore | The Guardian (UK) | July 02, 2011 |

There was something very odd about the bedroom of Ryan Cleary, the young man arrested over allegations of computer hacking. It wasn’t the neatly framed pin-up or the two computer screens but the absolute tidiness of this teenage space. He has been bailed on suspicion of a crime that most members of the public would be hard-pressed to explain.

Arrests have been made in the US and the hacking collective LulzSec says it has disbanded. “Lulz” means laughs. I guess some of what they did was clever, but not really funny. The Lulz are pretty Dulz: hacking into sites to disrupt services. Hackers may know their systems, memes and modes, but often come up with morally specious claims for the cyber equivalent of kicking in a bus shelter. You do it because you can. Because you are bored. Because you hate everything. LulzSec were not so much into hacking the CIA but more in the business of bombarding Sonyand gaming sites with so much traffic they would collapse. This made them unpopular even with other hackers, who certainly don’t want their porn and games ruined.

We don’t really know how to regard such people. The idea of putting Gary McKinnon in prison in America remains fundamentally ludicrous. The brilliant writer William Gibson – please let’s drop the sci-fi label – wrote about such people as connoisseurs not of objects but of data. But they are criminals. They respect no boundaries. They steal. Privacy is violated. Something must be done! But what?

Hackers are extreme disrespecters of any notion of privacy. Arguably they cause harm to those in power, not individuals. This is what supposedly drives Wikileaks. I hope no actual humans were harmed in the latest fundraising ad for WikiLeaks, yet another supplication at the feet of St Julian of Assange. Still most people make a distinction between the underworld of hacking and bad people who just try to steal your bank account details.

Most people use computers for more and more transactions with little idea of how they work. But then do I know how my dishwasher works?

Yet I am a total fan of what this technology enables me to do, even with all its privacy implications. I love social media. Facebook. Twitter. For their silliness, and for their seriousness. Twitter operates as my main news feed. But often it’s watercooler chat. If you don’t like Twitter, then don’t use it. Just don’t try banning watercoolers. Twitter was the thing that busted the Ryan Giggs injunction. This mangled attempt at privacy was shot to pieces.

I was debating press privacy this week at an event organised by the excellent Index On Censorship to launch its new issue Privacy is Dead, Long Live Privacy. Much has been said lately about the use of injunctions and superinjunctions not just by footballers, but by companies such as Trafigura. The concern is, surely, that any creeping legislation is enforceable. This is why I began this piece talking about hackers. Sure enough, I was in august company, but felt I was on another planet to someone like Max Mosley. He is a persuasive speaker whose private life has been terribly invaded, and he has gone to the European courts to get newspapers to give notice of stories. I feel if you buy sex off a number of women at once, then pragmatically privacy may be harder to maintain. Actually, I care little about what he does in private, but totally disagree about what he wants in public life. Look at the French, who have a privacy law that means their politicians and journalists form an elite that keeps the public out of the loop.

The injunctions that bother the public are mostly those concerning the affairs of famous men. We perfectly understand the need for injunctions taken out by local authorities to protect the identities of children. The feral press, on the whole, is not trying to bust them.

Somewhere between the extremes of hackers who recognise no boundaries and the activities of Giggs’s lawyer Hugh Tomlinson, who was also speaking at the event (and who makes a fine living from trying to maintain his clients’ privacy), I felt something was missing.

That is, the simple reality of the cultural and technological shift we have lived through. Yes, I think people are entitled to private lives. No, I don’t think footballers are role models. But yes, people do want to read about sex and celebrity. Broadsheets pick up tabloid “scandals” two days later for their postmodern postmortems. Mosley’s case is a muddle between libel and privacy law. Phone-hacking is desperate stuff and a crime that does not require new legislation to deal with.

Basically though, I do not want what I read dictated by a carve-up between judges and media lawyers. They do not understand that the means of production of celebrity, or the means of production of information, are now in so many hands.

It is appalling that the judiciary and the politicians are engaged in an argument without bothering to understand the basics. Twitter, said Max Mosley, is not to be taken seriously. He sneered: “Anybody can write it.” This, of course, is the actual point if it. The idea that any privacy legislation may stop online communication is simply unworkable. Once a name has been online, it is very hard for any court to say that this information is not already in the public domain. Tomlinson argued vaguely that eventually, technically, we can somehow regulate the internet. Sarkozy wants the G8 to act. How? Are we to be like China? Maybe instead of locking up hackers, we get them to bring down servers?

More importantly, we need to understand a generation that defines privacy differently. Any overheard conversation about “the night before” on any bus will tell you that. Social media, alongside the projection of personae encouraged by reality TV, mean boundaries are changing. This is really not even a generational argument. You get it or you don’t. The wonderful Zygmunt Bauman, not perhaps in his first flush of youth, wrote this week of the death of anonymity online: “Or perhaps we just consent to the loss of privacy as a reasonable price for the wonders offered in exchange.”

This is so unless you are super-sussed and have bought anonymity software that hides your IP. Any talk of privacy and press regulation cannot ignore the internet. When I told Mosley the press was mostly online, he just said it wasn’t. What can you say? These “Who are the Beatles?” judges have now been replaced by the “What is Twitter?” brigade. It matters when Cameron sits bemused by laws being broken and Prescott blusters about “mass civil disobedience” by the twits.

Laws work when a pact is made, when a consensus had been reached. This does not exist around privacy, or even piracy, as it is sometimes called.

We live in a world where younger people have simply been able to divert and bypass the rules of their elders by using technology. It was ever thus. The ruling class is ridiculously legislating about something it is almost proud of not understanding. Do I want a world where I choose to invade my own privacy, where there is too much information, a lot of oversharing, lots of daft gossip and sometimes facts and news that no official body is telling me? Do I want too much freedom? Yes. Because the opposite is unthinkable.

Social Media Help Keep the Door Open To Sustained Dissent Inside Saudi Arabia

By Nicole

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.”

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei arrested in latest government crackdown

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Charles Hope

By Keith B. Richburg | The Washington Post | April 3, 2011

BEIJING — Ai Weiwei, one of China’s most prominent artists and an outspoken critic of the communist regime, was taken from Beijing’s airport by security agents Sunday as he was about to board a flight to Hong Kong. Police later raided his studio.

Ai is the most high-profile activist to have been detained in a government crackdown in which dozens of bloggers, human rights lawyers and writers have been swept up.

The arrests seem related to the government’s concern that activists in China want to launch a “jasmine revolution” similar to the popular uprisings roiling autocratic governments in the Middle East and North Africa.

Some of those detained have been accused of “inciting subversion of state power,” a catch-all term used to jail anyone critical of Communist Party rule. Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, faced the same charge and received an 11-year prison sentence.

Since mid-February, when anonymous calls for “jasmine rallies” in China began circulating on the Internet, 26 people have been arrested, 30 have disappeared and are presumed held by security forces, and 200 have been placed under “soft detention,” meaning their movements are restricted, according to a count by the group Chinese Human Rights Defenders on Thursday.

But the arrest of Ai and the others appeared to mark what human rights groups and others called a new and more sinister phase in China’s ongoing, and typically cyclical, repression of dissidents. In the past, such sweeps of activists have preceded major events on the calendar — the 2008 Olympics, major Communist Party meetings or the Nobel Prize ceremony in Oslo last December — and have receded once the event ended.

The arrests of bloggers and writers, in particular, on subversion charges suggests a rollback of the limited open space recently allowed for free opinion on the Internet and particularly on popular Twitter-like microblogging sites.

“This is not a crackdown in the classic cycle of tightening and loosening,” said Nicholas Bequelin, Hong-Kong based China researcher for Human Rights Watch. “This is an effort by the government to redraw the lines of permissible expression in China, to restrict the most outspoken advocates of global values.”

Activists such as Ai — an active Twitter user — have been continually pushing the boundaries of what is allowed, while increased connectivity is giving ordinary Chinese people more access to uncensored information and viewpoints.

Chinese Human Rights Defenders, in its Thursday statement, said, “In the context of the democratic uprisings taking place in the Middle East and North Africa, the Chinese government, fearful of its own people, is counting on getting away with staging one of the most repressive campaigns in more than a decade because of the international community’s preoccupation with events elsewhere.”

The outspoken Ai, 53, was the artistic director for the “Bird’s Nest” Olympic Stadium, but he later turned critical of the Games. He has been arrested before: In 2009, in the western city of Chengdu, Ai was beaten so badly that he required surgery to have blood drained from his brain. Late last year, he was stopped at Beijing’s airport from flying to South Korea because authorities feared he might go to Oslo to attend the Nobel ceremony for Liu. Liu is in prison, and his wife, Liu Xia, is under house arrest.

Ai was prevented from having a solo exhibition of his work at a Beijing gallery this year, and in January authorities demolished his newly built Shanghai studio. In March, Ai announced that he was opening a studio in Berlin to escape the restraints on artistic freedom in China.

Police detained Ai on Sunday morning, and his assistants and attorneys said they were concerned that they have not had any communication with him since. After his arrest, police blocked off the streets to his studio and raided it, carting away laptops and the hard drive from the main computer, Ai’s workers said.

They said eight staff members and Ai’s wife, Lu Qing, were taken to the local police station for questioning. Even as night fell, Lu and two staffers were still being held, they said.

Liu Xiaoyuan, a lawyer, said he hoped Ai’s international fame would provide him some protection while in police custody.

Liu also said the arrest appears to be “related to the intense international situation, such as what happened in Egypt, Libya and other Middle Eastern countries.” But he said it was too early to say whether Ai’s Twitter posts and interview statements about jasmine rallies in China played a part.

On Feb. 24, amid an online campaign for Middle East-style jasmine rallies in major Chinese cities, Ai posted on his Twitter account: “I didn’t care about jasmine at first, but people who are scared by jasmine sent out information about how harmful jasmine is often, which makes me realize that jasmine is what scares them the most. What a jasmine!”

Twitter is blocked in China, except for those with a virtual-private-network line or an Internet connection from outside the country. Ai has 72,000 followers.

Researcher Zhang Jie contributed to this report

Judge the Global Network Initiative by How It Judges Companies

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | United Nations Information Service - Geneva

Originally featured by Elisa Massimino on Human Rights First blog on March 31, 2011.  Elisa Massimino is CEO and President of Human Rights First, a leading human rights advocacy organization in the US.  The views expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily of Yahoo! Inc.

Recent press stories about the Global Network Initiative (GNI) paint a distorted picture, judging the Initiative’s effectiveness and impact based primarily on the number of companies that have joined the effort to date.  That’s the wrong yardstick.  While the GNI seeks to secure a sector-wide commitment to uphold basic principles of privacy and free expression and to provide companies with framework for decision-making that will deliver on these commitments, the real measure of success (and, ultimately, the key to attracting more companies to join) will be whether corporate members—to date, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!—are making business decisions that uphold their commitments.

Human Rights First joined the GNI because we believe that it has the potential to address the human rights impacts of global business operations. The GNI brought together highly independent companies—each of which had faced challenges in resisting government demands for censorship of content and disclosure of user information—under a single multi-stakeholder initiative with a common goal—to identify ways to resist government demands that limit freedom of expression and privacy and to improve business decision-making to better protect these rights.

The GNI provides member companies with access to expertise and information about how global operations impact free expression and privacy rights, and space for discussion and learning about strategies for protecting them.  For us, as a human rights organization, the effectiveness of the GNI will be demonstrated through independent assessments of member companies’ efforts to adopt and implement policies and procedures to implement the GNI’s guidelines and uphold the principles to which member companies committed themselves at the outset.  Shared learning has value—companies that go it alone in this space are likely to make costly mistakes–but it is independent assessment that distinguishes GNI from a trade association, coalition or public policy forum. Independent assessment will help to ensure that GNI member companies are publicly accountable for their commitments, and that the GNI can demonstrate progress in promoting freedom of expression and privacy in the internet and telecommunications sector.  The first round of assessments have not yet been made — they are tentatively scheduled to begin this summer — and the GNI is still in the process of making key decisions that will determine how thorough and independent those assessments will be.

The GNI is often asked why no additional companies have joined yet.  Some have suggested that the GNI charter requirement that member companies open their human rights compliance system to independent inspection makes some companies nervous. It’s true that GNI member companies have signed up for a rigorous verification mechanism as part of their membership.  But that is because we founding members—companies, NGOs, investors and academics—understood that independent assessment is the key to GNI’s credibility.

Companies outside the GNI can claim that they are working to promote freedom of expression and privacy, and that they’ve adopted policies and procedures along the lines of GNI requirements. Some have made these claims.  And while pledges to uphold free expression and privacy are welcome, without an outside, independent assessment, the public has no way of verifying that these pledges are being implemented consistently, or whether they are effective in addressing threats to freedom of expression and privacy.  This independent assessment is what the GNI is designed to do and on which its success, or failure, should be judged.

Of course membership in the GNI does not guarantee that a company’s policies on Internet freedom will ultimately produce the right result in every case.  Governments intent on violating users’ human rights are innovative and relentless.  But, because of GNI’s system of independent assessment, member companies—and the public—can be assured that company decision-making will be transparent, and assessed against a common and credible standard. That credibility will create pressure from users on other companies to join the GNI, and will demonstrate the value of the initiative to skeptics in the private sector.  Our ultimate goal is a realistic one:  not perfection, but demonstrated, reasonable steps– independently verified and assessed–to anticipate, prepare for, and resist pressure from governments to infringe on human rights.  At the end of the day, if those criteria are met, the GNI should be judged a success.

Syria Tests Internet Freedom Theory

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | PGrandicelli

By John D. Sutter | CNN | March 30, 2011

In the wake of Egypt’s “Facebook revolution,” which was fueled in part by online social networks, much has been made about the role of technology in encouraging or even creating democracy.

“If you want to liberate a society, just give them the internet,” said Wael Ghonim, one of Egypt’s tech-savvy revolutionaries.

Syria, the latest country in the region to announce reforms in the wake of protests, is a curious test of that theory.

The country — squished between Iraq and Turkey — is known as one of the world’s toughest police states. But unlike in Egypt and Tunisia, the government supported the development of local technology, at least before the protests that pushed President Bashar al-Assad on Tuesday to announce the resignation of most of the country’s government officials.

The president has not given up power. He addressed the country on Wednesday, blaming the protests on an international conspiracy and calling the situation “a test of our unity.”

There are at least three ways to read this fluid situation.

First: Syria is an exception to Ghonim’s theory about internet freedom, since the tools of online revolution have failed, at least to date, to bring about a fundamental change in power in the country. Some scholars say Syria has successfully used the internet to monitor would-be dissidents, keeping them from using the internet to organize.

Second: We’re watching another tech-led revolution unfold. The Syrian government reportedly unblocked access to Facebook amid the turmoil in Egypt and Tunisia. Perhaps that was enough to spark recent changes.

Third: The internet has had little impact on Syrian reform. Conflicting reports suggest the internet and some mobile apps may have been blocked recently.

Coming events in Syria will challenge or support these theories.

No matter the outcome, a look at Syria’s nascent tech renaissance – bubbling long before violence in the country started making headlines — offers a framework for understanding these current events.

Local techies hosted iPhone app development contests; they created websites, including a Syrian version of Foursquare; they went to internet cafes, which are so common “you can’t walk without stumbling upon one,” one blogger said; they blogged, sometimes under real names; and they used proxy servers to access Western sites and information.

About one in five Syrians is online and nearly half use mobile phones. Those tech penetration rates are only slightly lower than in Egypt.

If internet equals freedom, then these activities should lead to the end of the regime — meaning internet technology would be something the Syrian government should fear. In reality, however, Syria’s ruling party at times supported the digital tools that have spelled disaster for authoritarian regimes elsewhere.

“We’re going to see dramatic changes still in the ways Syrians use the internet,” one Syrian tech entrepreneur said by phone before protests broke out. “Now (people) feel more comfortable doing this; they’re not doing something that is going to be frowned upon. They’re not doing it under the table. They’re doing it openly.”

‘There is change’

Many of Syria’s tech entrepreneurs seem to have no political aspirations.

In interviews before the recent protests, they were quick to say they’re interested in technology for technology’s sake.

One Syrian app developer, referred to here as Ahmed to protect his real identity, moved back to the country after going to school in Texas. When he arrived, there weren’t many “social” websites or apps to speak of, so he created one.

The reason: He wanted to know the hippest place to grab dinner or a beer with friends. He said he’s not the type to dabble in politics.

Syria is becoming a good place for tech entrepreneurs, he said.

“I’m the kind of person who thinks things are getting better here,” he said. “There is a change. Maybe it’s not as fast as everybody hopes — but it is happening.”

Syria’s ‘Day of Rage’

Syrians organized a “Day of Rage” on Facebook, similar to the Facebook event that helped kick off Egypt’s revolution.

Unlike in Egypt, where protests raged for 18 days and eventually toppled the 30-year regime of Hosni Mubarak, only a dozen people showed up to that first planned event, which was scheduled for February 4, according to news reports.

Those who did were arrested or dispersed.

Subsequent protests in the south of Syria have attracted more attention and clashes with security police have resulted in the deaths of 73 people, according to Human Rights Watch.

Conversely, tens of thousands of people crowded the streets of Damascus, Syria, on Tuesday in support of the government.

It was soon after that initial February 4 demonstration that the government legalized Facebook, which had been banned since 2007, according to local internet users. Members of Syria’s tech elite saw this as a vote of support from the government — a sign the government trusted people to use social media for personal reasons while keeping their digital hands out of coup-plotting.

“Facebook is like part of the culture right now, it’s unbelievable. Everybody knows Facebook,” one tech entrepreneur said.

People outside the country, however, who are freer to speak their minds without fear of government intimidation, were skeptical of Syria’s motives.

“The message is clear: They don’t want people talking,” said a young Syrian blogger now living in the United States, referred to here as Salam. “Unblocking Facebook and YouTube was just a charade. They wanted to show that they had some confidence and they weren’t afraid of such protests going on in Syria.”

Evgeny Morozov, an internet scholar at Stanford University and author of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,” put it this way:

“The end result is that the Syrian police will be able to monitor its opponents much better, and if they want to, they would be able to trace their locations, they would be able to arrest them and intimidate them.”

It seems, despite Ghonim’s claim that the internet will liberate people, technology can be used as tool for both freedom and repression.

Crack-down on dissent

Fears of arrest and intimidation have been very real inside Syria.

Shortly after Syria made Facebook legal, the government arrested and four days later released a blogger, Ahmad Hadifa, 28, who allegedly had been critical of the regime, according to the human rights group Reporters Without Borders.

Authorities in February also handed down a five-year prison sentence to Tal Al-Mallouhi, then age 19, who the group says is the world’s youngest imprisoned blogger.

Reporters Without Borders puts Syria on its “Enemies of the internet” list for spying on citizens and using digital tools to crack down on dissent. According to The Atlantic, a 50-year-old “emergency law” in Syria “outlaws unofficial gatherings and abets the regular practice of beating, imprisoning, torturing, or killing political dissidents, human rights workers, and minorities.”

Watching such events creates a chilling climate of self-censorship, said Salam, the Syrian-born blogger. It’s difficult to press the “send” button on anything that could be considered even remotely controversial.

“You’re always cautious of what you write. You’re always wondering if what you write will get you in trouble,” he said. “The Syrian bloggers who were writing about the recent arrests … had to contemplate things for a few days or a week before posting.”

Encouraging the internet

While it may not encourage the open expression of ideas, Syria certainly has encouraged the development of an internet infrastructure.

This is a shift from past practices.

Salam remembers the first time he got online, in 2000, when the Syrian government first decided to let the technology in.

“It’s like somebody who got a new toy basically and they were so excited to figure out what they could do with it,” he said.

Soon, he had started a blog — “typos, teen angst, stuff like that” — from his parents’ home in a town in the southern part of the country.

It wasn’t long before it was shut down, he said.

“Basically it feels like you were violated when you did nothing wrong,” he said. “It was absurd. There was no good reason given.”

At least before the recent protests, Syria’s president, who has a Facebook page and is the former head of the country’s computer society, appeared to see the internet boom as a continuation of Syria’s history — not a tool that would change its course.

“We are the fastest growing internet user in the Middle East,” al-Assad told The Wall Street Journal in a rare interview published January 31. “And this is because of the nature of the Syrians: They are very open generally … They want to learn.”

Building a tech scene

Some Syrians have been geeks-in-training for years.

At age 3, Ahmed, the app developer, used his father’s screwdriver to dismantle a radio. Then the family got a VCR — and he took that apart, too, wanting to see how it worked. “My dad used to lock the drawer where he had all the screw drivers because he was afraid I would do something,” he said.

Now he plans to keep building.

He’s unsure if his social website will take off in Syria.

But, at least before the recent wave of protests, he was encouraged by how quickly Syria is taking to technology.

Where that tech adoption will lead remains an open question.

Bahrain Arrests Leading Internet Activist

By Kee

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

Internet Censored in Iran to Sabotage Pro-Democracy Protests

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Troy Holden

International Business Times | February 17, 2011

In an expected repeat of the January internet and electronic communication blockade in Egypt, Iranian authorities have begun censorship by disrupting mobile phone services and slowing down broadband speed in the major cities.

Following the outbreak of the Opposition-fueled pro-democracy demonstrations in Tehran, pro-opposition websites have been blocked. The anti-government movement began in Iran on Monday, when thousands of supporters of opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi took to the streets.

The anti-government dissidents have also been forced to compromise on electronic communication as mobile-phone and text message services stand disrupted.

Iran, along with Bahrain and Libya, is among the latest states to experience the aftermath of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions led to the ouster of autocrats. In all these regions, internet, especially social media platforms, were used to mobilize the protests.

Iran is among the group of 12 countries, including China, North Korea and Syria, which are labeled as ‘Internet Enemies.’ These countries have strict laws limiting Internet use and are known to block government-opposition and human rights websites.

Through URL blocking and keyword filtering of words such as ‘torture’ and ‘rape’, Iran has blocked 5 million websites. Now, in the wake of the protests, another word has been added to the list. The word ‘bahman’, which is the current month in the Persian calendar, has reportedly been blocked.

Media Gagged

Besides cutting of the communication life-line, authorities have also gagged the media by forbidding reporting of the events related to the protests.

Iran has blocked top two news sites, jammed satellite TV broadcasts and prohibited photography.

U.S. vows Internet Freedom Plan

Moved by the attack on freedom of expression in the pro-democracy protests across Egypt, Tunisia, and now Iran, the United States has vowed to push for global Internet freedom.

“There is a debate underway in some circles about whether the Internet is a force for liberation or repression. But as the events in Iran, Egypt and elsewhere have shown, that debate is largely beside the point,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Tuesday.

Also, departing from the wait-and-watch stance of the U.S. on its military allies in Egypt, Clinton hailed the “courage of the Iranian people.”

Internet Censorship Not New To Iran

Besides the fact that the current censorship in Iran is similar to the January 28 Egyptian Internet blackout, the country is not new to this form of censorship. In 2009, Iranians turned to internet and social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to reach out to the world after the authorities imposed a media lock down. It was not long before Iranian bloggers were ordered to remove all pictures of protests from the web immediately or face legal action.