A Blogger at Arab Spring’s Genesis

By Nicole

Flickr Creative Commons|nosferata1969|

By Kristen McTighe| New York Times| Oct 13, 2011|

She felt the stinging fumes of tear gas billowing through the streets here nine months ago and saw police officers firing live ammunition at protesters. She watched families weeping in grief over the bloodied bodies of their loved ones left lying on the ground.

The violence could have silenced Lina Ben Mhenni with fear, but it drove her to speak louder and clearer.

“It was very dangerous to be a blogger under Ben Ali,” Ms. Ben Mhenni, a 27-year-old activist and blogger, said in a cafe here on the capital’s Avenue Habib Bourguiba. Tunisians had taken to this street and many others to rebel against the regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali just nine months ago. “Of course I had fear, but when I saw people killed by the police I forgot it and it gave me the strength to do my work,” she said.

Ms. Ben Mhenni is an example of how protesters helped break a regime’s stranglehold on the media and accelerate a revolution that brought down the 23-year dictatorship of Mr. Ben Ali and that went on to ignite much of the Arab world. It was a revolution that, in the case of Ms. Ben Mhenni, began even before the Arab Spring.

Now a teaching assistant in linguistics at Tunis University, she began the blog in 2007, the year her mother donated a kidney to her to replace the one that had failed two years before. Six months after that surgery, she competed in the World Transplant Games. (She competed again in 2009, winning two silver medals in race walking.)

She named her blog “A Tunisian Girl” and wrote about censorship, women’s rights, human rights and freedom of speech. She soon found herself at odds with the government, which blocked her site inside Tunisia. She used proxy sites to access her pages, and in April 2010, she said, the police broke into her family home. “They took my computer, my cameras, my everything,” she said. “It was clear it was them because of the way only I was targeted and the way they went after my equipment.”

But Ms. Ben Mhenni — whose father, Sadok Ben Mhenni, was a political prisoner under Mr. Ben Ali’s predecessor Habib Bourguiba — fought on.

On Dec. 17, 2010, she and other Tunisians heard about a fruit vendor in Sidi Bouzid named Mohamed Bouazizi who set himself on fire to protest the confiscation of his goods and his constant harassment by municipal officials and police officers. Ms. Ben Mhenni called friends in the city to see what was happening. She reported what she learned on her blog, a Facebook page and her Twitter account.

On Dec. 25, she took part in the demonstration that erupted in the capital after Mr. Bouazizi’s death, uploading articles and photographs to social media sites. At the beginning of January, she went to Sidi Bouzid, Regueb and Kasserine, where the security forces’ response to the protests had been vicious. She took photos of people killed and wounded by the police and put them all online.

It soon became clear that the protests were not going to stop. “The social movement was spontaneous,” Ms. Ben Mhenni said. “There was no political party. It was just Tunisians. People were angry.”

Mr. Ben Ali fled Tunisia on Jan. 14. Censorship was lifted and Ms. Ben Mhenni and others could write freely.

Themeur Mekki, a journalist and blogger who worked with Ms. Ben Mhenni on an earlier campaign against censorship, said: “What she did was break the media blackout that the media aligned to Ben Ali had imposed during the revolution.”

Laetitia Matiatos, head of the new media desk at Reporters Without Borders, said: “Bloggers like Lina Ben Mhenni and Astrubal of the blog Nawaat during the Tunisian uprising played an important role in spreading information across the world, using VPN and proxies.” The bloggers, she added, not only were censored by the government, they also faced intimidation, arrest and physical attacks.

Kerim Bouzouita, author of ReadWriteWorld at blogspot.com, said Twitter and Facebook were important to the revolt. As in other uprisings, protesters were able to break the media blackout by spreading video, information and commentary through the Internet and social media operations.

But it was the government itself that lifted the blockade on the two sites and ironically allowed them to thrive.

“Ben Ali banned Facebook in August 2008 because of ‘disruptive people,’ according to the regime’s speech,” Mr. Bouzouita said. “We do not know why it was uncensored, perhaps because of popular discontent and mobilization.” But he said the government also hoped to use that openness to keep tabs on those who were using Facebook and Twitter to communicate and organize.

Ms. Matiatos agreed that the move was intended to open the door for surveillance. “Facebook has been unbanned in Tunisia mostly to spy on netizens,” she said. “For example, police also logged into Facebook accounts to steal activists’ passwords and infiltrate networks of citizen-journalists.” She said she believed the security forces in Syria and other countries use the same methods.

Ms. Ben Mhenni, however, said that though such sites played a role in Tunisia’s revolution, they did not spark it: “In Tunisia at least, the role of social media has been exaggerated.”

“Maybe in Egypt the call started on social media,” she added, “but here, everything started on the ground. Mohamed Bouazizi set his body on fire and everyone started to demonstrate. Social media didn’t start the revolution. It was just a tool that helped.”

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.

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.”

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.

Dictators and Internet Double Standards

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Michael Summers

By Gordon Crovitz | The Wall Street Journal (Opinion) | March 7, 2011 

In Tunisia, the self-immolation of street vendor Muhammad Bouazizi, protesting harassment by local authorities, led to demonstrations that toppled the regime. In Egypt, it was photos posted online of Khaled Said, who had been beaten to death by corrupt police officers. In both cases, Facebook pages drew attention to the cases, and Twitter posts helped organize protests. 

They do things differently in China. In contrast to more amateur authoritarians, Beijing is so sensitive to protests against similar abuses of power that it controls access to the Internet almost totally. 

Consider the case of a college student who might have been killed by railroad employees in January. According to researchers at the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project, Zhao Wei was on his way home to Inner Mongolia from his studies in Tianjin when he got into a dispute with a railway employee over his seat assignment. His parents were informed that he had committed suicide by jumping from the train. 

Last week, the parents managed to post on Sina, the domestic version of Twitter, photos of his dead body with injuries indicating death by beating. The post was quickly forwarded more than 66,000 times and commented on 14,000 times. 

The Hong Kong researchers found that mentions of the case have been “actively scrubbed from the Internet.” Domestic search engines have been so effectively filtered that searches result in a link simply saying the railroad is investigating. 

A similar case late last year involved the son of a public security official who ran over two university students in Hebei, killing one. When arrested, he said, “Go ahead—sue me if you dare. My father is Li Gang,” the local deputy police chief. The case quickly became well known on the Web, including a contest to use “My father is Li Gang” in a poem. The phrase became synonymous with shirking responsibility. The Central Propaganda Department then issued a directive that there be “no more hype regarding the disturbance.” 

In her famous 1979 Commentary essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” Jeane Kirkpatrick argued that totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union differed fundamentally from merely authoritarian ones. Today there is a gap between what we can call information totalitarians and information authoritarians. China has simply shut down communication services such as Facebook and Twitter and sources of information like Google. Likewise, Iran has largely closed off communication, and North Korea has no Internet access. 

Other countries are authoritarian but with modest openness. The Mubarak regime, for example, briefly shut down the Internet in Egypt, but only after reformers had used its tools to organize opposition. 

Beijing does not hide its ambitious control over the Web. According to a study by researchers at Tsinghua University, China spends about as much on domestic security—$77 billion—as it does on its military. There are officially some 80,000 protests a year in China, mostly over abuses such as illegal land seizures, forced evictions and refusals of officials to accept petitions of complaints. 

According to the state news service Xinhua, more than 300,000 government employees perform “community service management,” such as monitoring the Web for dissent. Propaganda ministry officials have told local officials they have about two hours between news of “sudden incidents” to close down online information flows and stop people from gathering for protests. Officials are working on new software to track trending topics such as complaints about corruption. 

More than 100 Chinese have been arrested and charged with “inciting subversion” for blogging about the Middle East demonstrations. When protest organizers used online tools to encourage people to go on “strolls” in cities across China every Sunday, the U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists reported harassment and beatings of foreign journalists trying to cover these silent protests. 

There is a disconnect between the enormous economic progress China has made over the past generation and the tight lid it keeps on their ability to communicate. Chinese people have more reason to be confident and optimistic about their future than did Arabs in authoritarian countries, but they also want to be free of both petty and large corruption of local and national officials throughout China. 

Reformers within the government know they sit on a tinderbox, but Beijing opts to clamp down instead of letting people vent frustrations. Strong-armed control over the Web may be the clearest sign of political weakness. 

“The Chinese authorities instinctively choose repression when confronted with any problem: lock up people, censor their writings, block the Internet,” wrote veteran China watcher Frank Ching in the China Post last week. If this is really necessary, “maybe China is much more vulnerable that it would appear on the surface.” 

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.

Google Says Censorship Not Obstacle to Its Middle East Growth

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Camera Eye

By Vivian Salama &  Heidi Couch | Bloomberg | July 28, 2010

Google Inc., owner of the world’s most popular Internet search engine, said it’s not hindered in the Middle East by government-backed censorship as it seeks to ride growing opportunities in the region.

“We tend to operate in a very, very competitive industry, so users are generally one click away from changing their preferences,” Ari Kesisoglu, manager for Google Middle East, said in a Bloomberg Television interview in Dubai. “We are not censoring our own information, and we’ve never been asked to.”

Google, based in Mountain View, California, is seeking to gain ground in the Middle East, where it estimates that less than 15 percent of the residents go online. The company went public with a dispute in China in January, saying it was no longer willing to comply with filtering regulations.
 
“If you want to play ball in China or the Middle East or basically any other country outside, you’ve got to play by the local rules,” said Jin Yoon, an analyst at Nomura Holdings Inc. in Hong Kong. “If you don’t play by the local rules, you essentially have to mark yourself out of the market.”
 
China’s government confirmed that it renewed Google’s Internet license, after the U.S. company’s local venture pledged to allow regulators to supervise its Web content, the official Xinhua news agency said July 11. The move gives Google a chance to win search share lost to market leader Baidu Inc. and woo advertisers put off by its dispute with the government.
 
“Whatever happened in China is completely exceptional and it doesn’t result in us making any decisions globally,” Kesisoglu said.
 
Middle East Censorship
 
In many Middle Eastern countries, television programs and films cut out nudity, physical intimacy or homosexual scenes. Internet firewalls are common across the region, particularly in the Persian Gulf, where several countries ban popular websites such as Skype and Flickr. Websites that are critical of Islam or ruling political regimes are often blocked.
 
In August, Yahoo! Inc. purchased Maktoob.com, providing it with an entry point into a market that includes 22 countries and more than 350 million Arabic speakers. Maktoob is the largest portal in the Arab world with 16 million monthly users. Vodafone Egypt last year purchased Sarmady, a Cairo-based provider of digital content.
 
“Google, Yahoo, help the region and lobby the government for less censorship,” said Samih Toukan, founder of Maktoob.com. “We lobby as local people because censorship hurts us, it hurts innovation it hurts growth.”
 
Bloggers Arrested
 
Global Voices Online, an international bloggers’ network, has documented 206 cases of bloggers under arrest or threat, mostly in China, Egypt and Iran. In Egypt and Iran, online political activists have been arrested and prosecuted after rallying in support of opposition parties.
 
Restrictions stretch beyond the Web and films. In the United Arab Emirates, Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry smartphones may be subject to monitoring if the government is able to bring communications by the handheld devices under emergency and security rules.
 
Blackberry devices, introduced in the U.A.E. in 2006, are not covered by the country’s 2007 Safety, Emergency and National Security rules, the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority said July 25.

Mr. Yang goes to Washington

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

On April 26th, Jerry Yang was a featured speaker at President Obama’s Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship. To read his speech, and see video of his remarks, check out the blog post at Yodel Anecdotal.

Jerry Yang Speaks at Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship

By BHRP

AP Photo | J. Scott Applewhite)

By David Alexander | Reuters | April 26, 2010

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama launched a new effort on Monday to build business and social ties to the Muslim world, but analysts said the need for progress on big issues like Middle East peace would overshadow the initiative.

Obama hosted a two-day Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship that brought together about 250 successful entrepreneurs from more than 50 countries, most with large Muslim populations, fulfilling a pledge he made in his Cairo speech to the Islamic world last June.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke opened the gathering by challenging the entrepreneurs to take “the tremendous success that all of you have had individually and expand it throughout the Islamic world.”

Obama will address the summit at the end of the first day to underscore his commitment to “deepening our engagement around the world with Muslim-majority communities,” Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said.

While the summit was widely viewed as a positive step that demonstrated follow-through on the Cairo speech, analysts said Obama ultimately would be judged on his handling of key issues in the Muslim world — the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Iran’s nuclear program and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“In some ways Cairo is not going to be fulfilled until you get grander solutions to some of the big geopolitical problems,” said Juan Zarate, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an ex-deputy national security adviser to former President George W. Bush.

“The president is going to be judged by his ability to move those big issues much more so than whether or not he hosts a conference at the White House,” he said.

Obama has struggled to advance many of those issues. His effort to revive the Middle East peace process has been hampered by Israeli settlement activity, and his attempts to engage Iran over its nuclear program have been rebuffed.

SENIOR OFFICIALS, PRIVATE EXPERTS

In addition to Locke, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and other senior U.S. officials were participating in sessions alongside private sector experts like Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang, Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus and Arif Naqvi, head of Abraaj Capital, the largest private equity firm in the Middle East.

The aim was to bring together successful entrepreneurs from different countries, venture capitalists, development bankers and other business experts to discuss ideas and share experiences with a view toward creating support networks that would help promote development in the region.

Yang, in a luncheon address, said entrepreneurs needed an entire ecosystem to flourish, including education, capital and research and development. He said he saw increasing signs of a willingness in the Middle East to support entrepreneurs, noting Yahoo’s recent acquisition of the Arabic-language email service Maktoob.

The White House has urged groups outside the government to take advantage of the summit by organizing related events. That has spawned more than 30 other sessions by groups such as the National U.S.-Arab Chamber of Commerce, the Arab Empowerment Initiative and the Middle East Youth Initiative at the Brookings Institution.

Observers and participants said the success of the event ultimately depended on whether it produced concrete results — financial and otherwise — after it ended.

“What kind of networks does it establish? What kinds of funds will come out of it? What kind of … concrete recommendations for legal reforms that need to take place in certain countries?” said Ehaab Abdou of the Middle East Youth Initiative, which is participating in an event on using entrepreneurial techniques to address social challenges.

Obama planned to announce some new financing to support entrepreneurship, but administration officials made clear the government wants to be seen not as a funder but as a catalyst bringing together entrepreneurs with potential investors.

Rajiv Shah, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, announced 13 partnerships aimed at supporting entrepreneurs in the Muslim world with education and programs to encourage market opportunities and financing.

(Additional reporting by Diane Bartz, Editing by Paul Simao and Cynthia Osterman)