The president of Ingushetiya, Murat Zyazikov, was on the same flight. At the airport Zyazikov ordered the police to arrest Yevloev, and he was put in a police car. Yevloev’s body was then delivered to the republican hospital in Nazran, now with a bullet also in his head.

Magomed is a prominent opponent of the pro-Kremlin president of Ingushetiam, Murat Zyazikov. According to the Miami Herald, Yevloyev has angered Russia with criticism of police treatment of civilians in the region. “A court in June ordered him to shut his site on charges of spreading “extremist” statements, but it reappeared under a different name.“

Press quickly jumped into conclusions saying that Russia was attacking Georgia both on the ground and on-line and that was the first cyberwar with a government attacking other also on the Internet, probably by paid “hackers” working for them, when they found out that the President site president.gov.ge and other official sites were blocked. But as expert Gadi Evron said a couple of days after it started on his article Internet attacks against Georgian Websites:

1. There are botnet attacks against .ge websites.
2. These attacks affect the .ge Internet infrastructure, but it's reachable.
3. It doesn't seem Internet infrastructure is directly attacked.
4. Every other political tension in the past 10 years, from a comic of the Prophet Muhammad to the war in Iraq, were followed by online supporters attacking targets which seem affiliated with the opposing side, and vise-versa.

Blurring borders blog has a point on it:

A new type of narrative is taking hold among the coverage of the military conflict between Russia and Georgia. A number of sites are writing about the “cyberwarfare” being waged by pro-Russian forces against the Georgian government. It seems that, like Estonia a year ago, entities evoking the ire of Russia must be forced to combat widespread botnet-based DDoS attacks. I think there is little doubt that such occurrences will be increasingly part of real-world conflicts, but people are rushing into framing this as warfare, which will only lead to military-based reactions - something I fear.

A new, anonymous, ubiquitous enemy to fight was the picture by mainstream media. Warfare and hack attacks are frequently popular items, mostly because it’s a statement that almost always guarantees a reaction. And if it is combines with an armed conflict with Russia it will get additional attention. But it is important to take a second look on it.

“An army of ones and zeroes” was the title of an article by Eugeny Morozov, where he provides details on the attacks and all the information available to any user on the web interested in download the software and attack georgian sites. He tested it by himself and shared the experience:

Not knowing exactly how to sign up for a cyberwar, I started with an extensive survey of the Russian blogosphere. My first anonymous mentor, as I learned from this blog post, became frustrated with the complexity of other cyberwarfare techniques used in this campaign and developed a simpler and lighter “for dummies” alternative. All I needed to do was to save a copy of a certain Web page to my hard drive and then open it in my browser. I was warned that the page wouldn't work with Internet Explorer but did well with Firefox and Opera. (Get with the program, Microsoft!) Once accessed, the page would load thumbnailed versions of a dozen key Georgian Web sites in a single window. All I had to do was set the page to automatically update every three to five seconds. Voilà: My browser was now sending thousands of queries to the most important Georgian sites, helping to overload them, and it had taken me only two to three minutes to set up.

Ethan Zuckrman provides a complete analysis of what he called “Misunderstanding Cyberwar“:

The rhetoric of “cyberwarfare” has a reassuring implication: we understand how to fight wars, so surely we can win a cyberwar. Unfortunately, the truth is more complicated. There’s no magic “cyberspace command” solution the USAF can unleash to defeat a botnet. The administrators trying to bring Georgian webservers back online are doing precisely what any sysadmin does confronted with a DDoS - they are blocking traffic from the IP addresses that are launching the attacks, and sharing these blocklists with administrators confronting the same problems. If they can block addresses more quickly than the attackers can recruit more participants, they’ll win. This strategy is known by the complex technical term “Whack-a-Mole”, and it’s roughly as frustrating as the fairground game of the same name.

Sometimes hacker world is unfamiliar for many of Internet users, even more complex for those that never use the internet (most of the World population). In Georgia, for example, only 7% of the population have access. But certainly almost all the population have access to t.v. and radio news that were repeating the same message: Internet in Georgia under attack, linked to the intervention.

Digital Natives Blog provides an analysis on the attacks on “Cyberwar and Non State Actors” and also discussed the importance of “digital citizenship”:

After the first headlines some experts said that it might be a grassroots global reaction, a protest, an electronic riot. But the first headlines raised concerns on the security divisions around the world, Cyberwar is a strong word with heavy political consequences all around that can shape the future of security measures and intervention of the Internet.

Now the debate among experts monitoring the situation such as Info War Monitor is:

were the attacks in cyberspace part of deliberately planned campaign, or did they happen spontaneously, inspired by events?

For hacktivists code is a form of speech, and their actions from grassroots are an expression of civil disobedience, an effective way to be heard, so their message will not be lost, their way to engage in political participation, to make political statements, something not analyzed in the first headlines by the press. And their hacks are political expressions, not hurting human beings but systems. Of concern of activist and hacktivists has to be the impact of information, misinformation and lack of information during humanitarian crisis.
People might react in different ways to a headline, and public opinion (lacking technology knowledge) can support in the future strong measures to control the Internet if media is not careful enough and pictures attacks as serious threats to global security. It might have an ugly impact to consider hacker actions an “act of aggression”, a “crime against peace”.

And at the end of the day, as as “The Wars virtual dimension” said:

while the political and informational wars are taking place, over there - in South Ossetia, in Georgia - people are dying and suffering. […].

Perhaps it is time to start thinking about internet tools to help those in the middle, as good net citizens and show media and public opinion the huge potential of Internet to do good.

Here is a rough translation of the comment:

I hate cops [menty], [swear word omitted]

I don't agree with the thesis that “policemen still have the mentality of a repressive stick in the hands of the powers that be.” First, they are cops [menty, not militsionery, a less respectful way to refer to police]. Second, their mentality isn't still here. It's simply ineradicable. Once a musor [a synonym for ment; non-slang meaning of the word is “trash”], always a musor, even in Africa. Those who become cops [menty] - rednecks and thugs - are the dumbest and least educated representatives of the live/animal world. Would be great if there was an oven, similar to those in Auschwitz, in the center of every Russian city, at the main square (in Syktyvkar, right in the center of Stefanovskaya, where the New Year's tree stands, so that everyone could see), and there'd be a daily ceremony - or, even better, twice a day (at noon and midnight, for example) - of burning a dishonest cop [ment] there. The people would be doing the burning. This would be the first step towards cleansing the society of the dirt that the thuggish cops are.

The court found Terentyev guilty of inciting enmity and publicly humiliating representatives of a social group (Article 282, part 1 of the Russian Federation's Criminal Code).

Here is a rough translation of a tiny part of the 12-page “guilty” verdict (RUS), posted by one of the defense witnesses, LJ user mezak, on his blog (the original of the passage below is on p. 11; the post also has photos of Terentyev, his defense team, and the judge reading the verdict; there are 376 comments to the post so far):

[…] Defendant Terentyev S.S. [Savva Sergeyevich], by means of the language, by having a negative impact on the public opinion and mood, and by aiming to incite social enmity and hatred, to escalate social conflict, to sharpen social contradictions, to awaken base instincts in people, contrasted the people and police officers, calling to [their] physical annihilation by the people. The text does not allow for ambiguous understanding and interpretation of [its] content and meaning, because it should be understandable to any average native speaker of Russian who has basic oral and written language skills. […]

LJ user sholademi re-posted the verdict on his blog and added this note (RUS) at the end of his entry:

Hmm, it has to be noted that the court's verdict contains many orthographic mistakes. This, in addition to the legal side of the case (namely, the questionable linguistic analysis). In short, it's getting crazier and crazier.

In another post, LJ user sholademi posted a 5-question survey (RUS), explaining that Terentyev's defense team was planning to appeal the blogger's sentence and, among other things, would like to “find out how Savva Terentyev's case is going to affect the discussion environment in the Russian blogosphere.” Below are the survey's results so far:

1. Before Savva Terentyev's case, were there many LJ bloggers who allowed themselves to speak harshly of law enforcement and other state institutions and officials?

a. Many bloggers made such statements - 842 (75.4%)

b. Only some bloggers made such statements - 233 (20.9%)

c. I've never encountered such statements on blogs - 41 (3.7%)

2. Before the verdict on Savva Terentyev's case, how often did you encounter harsh statements about law enforcement and other state institutions and officials on your friends feed?

а. Such statements were pretty frequent on my friends feed - 664 (59.7%)

b. Such statements were pretty rare on my friends feed - 347 (31.2%)

c. Such statements were never present on my friends feed - 102 (9.2%)

3. If the verdict on Savva Terentyev's case comes into force, how will it affect the number of bloggers who would allow themselves to make harsh statements about law enforcement and other state institutions and officials in open posts and comments?

a. Their numbers will grow significantly - 193 (17.4%)

b. Their numbers will grow, but not significantly - 239 (21.6%)

c. Their numbers will decrease, but not significantly - 550 (49.6%)

d. Their numbers will decrease significantly - 126 (11.4%)

4. If the verdict on Savva Terentyev's case comes into force, how will it affect the number of bloggers who would allow themselves to make harsh statements about law enforcement and other state institutions and officials in locked (friends-only) posts?

a. Their numbers will grow significantly - 386 (34.9%)

b. Their numbers will grow, but not significantly - 470 (42.5%)

c. Their numbers will decrease, but not significantly - 219 (19.8%)

d. Their numbers will decrease significantly - 31 (2.8%)

5. Do you consider Savva Terentyev's sentence fair?

a. I consider it fair - 73 (6.5%)

b. I consider it unfair, as it is too soft - 12 (1.1%)

c. I consider it unfair, as it is too harsh - 71 (6.3%)

d. I consider it unfair in principle, because, in my opinion, Savva did not commit a crime - 963 (86.1%)

On July 14, Savva Terentyev and his lawyer held a press conference in Moscow (see photo of Terentyev at LJ user mezak's blog). LJ user dolboeb - Anton Nossik, the self-described “Social Media Evangelist at SUP,” the online media company that owns LiveJournal.com - announced the event on his blog and added this note (RUS) at the end of his post:

[…] Each month, 10-12 million comments appear in the Cyrillic LJ (10.5 million in June, 130.5 million in the past 12 months). On the average, every post gets 3.7 comments. [The police unit that initiated Savva Terentyev's case] has plenty of work ahead (unless, of course, they've got nothing else to busy themselves with).

At the press conference, LJ user dolboeb reiterated his point (RUS, link to an article in Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper for which Anna Politkovskaya used to write):

[…] Of course, spending 15 minutes on the web and finding a criminal is a lot more convenient than running around the dark, narrow streets with a gun. As a taxpayer, I'm not satisfied with this situation. […]

The 23-year old Russian blogger, Dmitry Shirinkin, who wrote a fiction story on his blog inspired by the Virginia Tech shooting, could face up to three years in prison (Please read the whole story on Global Voices). Dmitry Shirinkin was running a LiveJournal blog under the title tetraox and wrote about buying a gun and killing number of people in one of the city's colleges. He is being accused of “falsely warning of a terror threat.”

“The Prosecutor's Office analysed Dmitry's blog and concluded he had a desire to shoot dead a dozen people,” Russia Today reported. However, Shirinkin's defense is requesting a language analyst to give his expert opinion on the controversial text. The trial has been adjourned to September 20th.

In an interview with Russia Today (watch the video above), Shirinkin said “I didn’t expect that a short writing piece could provoke such reaction from the security services. They interrogated me asking where my gun was, but I'd never had one.”

According to Russia Today, the blog made Dmitry popular even before the trial as he was awarded the title of the best blogger in the region. On the other hand, Russian bloggers are concerned since Shirinkin's case might set a bad precedent for the country's Internet users.

Another Russian Livejournal blogger is also facing a two-year prison sentence or a fine of 100,000-ruble ($4,000) for “inciting hate” against police. According to Komi regional prosecutor, the allegedly offending message- which has been deleted from the site - of the 21-year old Savva Terentyev contains “a direct call aimed at inciting hatred or hostility, as well as harming the dignity of … a particular social group: policemen.“