Since then, Egyptian activists and bloggers have been left scratching their heads, thinking of ways to draw attention to the plight of their detained colleague. Their efforts included posting banners over Facebook, holding Press conferences and even going on open strikes in front of the General Prosecutor office. All this amounted to nothing, forcing them to come up with a totally a new idea.

On February 2, an online initiative called “Operation General Mait” was launched in solidarity with Mohamed Adel. A group of Egyptian bloggers were photographed with fake AK-47's and toy guns. They were imitating Adel's photograph holding a gun with Hamas leaders that was used as evidence against him by the Egyptian government.

Mina Zekry explains the initiative to Alexandra Sandels on MENASSAT as follows:

“Our aim is mainly to bring attention to how ridiculous the (Egyptian) government's photo fabrications are (of cyber-activist Mohammed Adel). We are trying to cut-off an escalation of the process against him,” Mina Zekry, a prominent blogger and “Free-Adel” campaigner told MENASSAT on Tuesday.

Posing in photos with fake AK-47s and toy guns, Zekry is part of a new initiative launched on February 2 called “Operation General Meit” – meit being Adel's blog title (and nickname) that translates to “Already Dead.”

Prominent Egyptian bloggers Wael Abbas, Zekry, Mohammed Gamal, and Egyptian human rights activist Noov Sevary launched the online campaign in solidarity with Adel, a 20-year old IT student and blogger who was arrested on a Cairo street in November of last year.

No formal charges have been brought against Adel, but sources in Cairo say that he could face charges of “terrorism and involvement in an armed organization” because of photos he took in Gaza last year.

Among the founders, Wael Abbas was the first to publicly announce the  launch of the campaign's first phase on his Jaiku profile and on his blog, where he was photographed in a picture cross-legged and his finger raised in the air, mimicking an Islamist about to convey his message to the world.

In his Jaiku message, Abbas says:

The first phase of “Operations general mait” is -with phots- on Misrdigital, Mina Zekry and Mo Taher blogs. Followed shotly on Gemyhood, and Asaad blogs. Invitation is open for participation.

Mo EL Taher who is also running Free Adel blog wrote:

Going on further, Leftist Egyptian and Ahmed AbdelFattah fabricated an Osama Bin Laden reaction to the campaign:

Blogger Mostafa, who was supposed to join the campaign, wrote a different point of view:

Five days after the launch of phase one of “Operations General Mait,” more and more people are joining the campaign.  And you can follow their activities, as well as media coverage, on their Facebook group.

Sites targeted by the new filtering policy include adult and dating (deaikei) sites, as well as so-called “communication sites”, which include bulletin boards and blog services. Some of the affected blog services have already posted explanations about the change to their users. At the goo staff blog [ja], an entry posted on February 2nd [ja] explains:

2009年１月下旬頃より、携帯電話会社（docomo、au、SoftBank）にて18歳未満を対象としたフィルタリング（アクセス制限）が実施されております。

現在、モバイル版gooブログはフィルタリングの対象となっており、携帯電話のご契約名義が18歳未満の場合には、ブログの閲覧・投稿が出来なくなる可能性がございます。

このフィルタリングは各携帯電話会社のショップ窓口等で解除が可能となっておりますので、携帯電話の契約名義が18歳未満の方は保護者の方と相談し、ショップ窓口にてモバイル版gooブログにもアクセス可能なフィルタリングサービスを選択していただく、または解除手続きについてお問い合わせください。

gooブログでは皆様が安心・安全に全てのサービスをご利用いただけますよう取り組んでおりますが、18歳未満のお客様におかれましてはしばらくご不便をおかけいたします。

他ご不明な点等ございましたら、お手数ですがご利用の携帯電話会社まで直接お問い合わせください。

Not all Japanese social media sites will apparently be subject to the filtering, however. A J-CAST article [ja] explains that while Ameblo [ja], a popular blogging site featuring famous tarento bloggers, is subject to the filtering, Japan's hugely popular social networking service Mixi is exempt, as is Mobage Town, Japan's largest social network site with gaming functionality.

For the one in five Japanese who already choose to have their web access filtered, the moves described above will likely mean no great change. Many other bloggers, however, responded with puzzled reactions. One blogger writes [ja]:

えー、誠に残念なことに、私のケータイ、いつのまにかフィルタリングかかってましたwww
blogに投稿は出来るんだけれども、アクセス制限のため見れないんだなこれが／(^O^)*＼
なーんてこったーいＯTZ

At PECO's　favorite　things, blogger Peco writes:

そんなことするよりもネット機能のないケータイを作ればいい
そもそもフィルタリング機能って意味がわからないし
例えば卑猥な情報をシャットダウンするものだとして
卑猥な情報ってなに？

例えば真面目な性教育のサイトでもセックスとか女性器男性器って単語で卑猥なくくりにされちゃうでしょ？

女性は16歳から結婚できて、結婚してれば当然性生活もあるわけで、法律上は未成年でも結婚して子供もいれば大人として義務を果たさなきゃいし、立派な大人だし

それなのにフィルタリングする必要あるの？

At Tokotoko Diary, another blogger warns readers [ja] that the filtering is not automatically removed when users turn age 18:

ちなみに、適用されたフィルタは１８才以上になっても自動的に解除されません！
１８才になったら忘れずに手続きしましょう（笑）

Another blogger describes their experience requesting removal of filtering:

フィルタリングを
解約しましたよー！
やったー(´∀｀)
やっと
自分のブログが
見れるように
なりましたよー
てか、
ありえないですよね
自分のブログを
自分でみれないとか…
いやー良かった

Finally, while many bloggers were puzzled and confused by finding their blog entries blocked, others worried that the filtering was in fact not sufficient. Blogger Nakono Hitorigoto explains:

我が子はもちろんフィルタリングしていましたが、最近みたいサイトがみれないから
「フィルタリング解除して」って言ってきます。

フィルタリングといってもいくつか選択肢があるわけですが、
どこまではずしたらどうなるかがまったくわからないんです。

もう少し、簡単な選択方法が知りたいな～
（勉強すればいいのでしょうが、難しいよあせる）

The blogger then makes a suggestion:

できればURLをみただけでこれはフィルタリングだと見れないとか
フィルタリング何段階のものだとかの判断ができれば、
子どもが見たいサイトのアドレスを見て
判断できるのですが。

実際パケホ（DOCOMO)でメールのやり取りは自由なのは理解していますが、
ネットが見れるのもなんとなく不思議な感じ。
どこまでiモード対応なのか、iアプリなのか
そして、パケホの範囲なのかが理解できていないです

Alas, a growing number of nations in the West are examining the possibility of censoring sites that allegedly harm society. France and Germany are leading the way and the United States is not far behind.

We can now add Australia to the list.

The OpenNet Initiative reported this week:

Australians will be unable to opt-out of the government's pending Internet content filtering scheme, and will instead be placed on a watered-down blacklist, experts say.

Under the government's $125.8 million Plan for Cyber-Safety, users can switch between two blacklists which block content inappropriate for children, and a separate list which blocks illegal material.

Pundits say consumers have been lulled into believing the opt-out proviso would remove content filtering altogether.

The government will iron-out policy and implementation of the Internet content filtering software following an upcoming trial of the technology, according to the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.

A spokesman for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said the filters will be mandatory for all Australians.

Ever since Australia elected a new Prime Minister in late 2007, leader Kevin Rudd has openly discussed introducing such proposals (something I explained in more detail during my speech to the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Budapest this year.)

The primary problem with the proposal is its inefficiency and lack of flexibility (something already argued by watchers.) To make matters worse, the government has trailed this web filtering in certain states and failure was the result.

So why move forward? Leading Australian blogger on this issue, Somebody Think of the Children, says it best:

Criminals accessing child abuse websites will still be able to do so and the horrendous production and distribution of child abuse material online and off will continue. Why does the government think censors are the ones who can fix this and not law enforcement? Mandatory ISP filtering is about protecting votes, not children.

Disturbingly, the proposals have received virtually no media attention in Australia though ISPs are reportedly unsure whether to participate in the program, “depending on the nature of the trials”, according to one major player.

Vigilance on internet censorship is required across the globe, even in “democratic” nations.

At the end of our first day of open work, GV founder Rebecca MacKinnon put an important idea on the table: censorship is not only a political or technological problem; it is also a social problem. Thus, it is important to encourage bloggers to resist; to keep blogging. In this last task, the NGOs are one of the most valuable resources for bloggers who need help to keep blogging actively for their causes. The main question for the session was how NGOs can help more effectively.

Elijah Zarwan, from Human Rights Watch pointed out some of the tasks an NGO must follow in order to efficiently help people in need. Taking his experience in Egypt as a start, and quoting certain Egyptian bloggers, he made clear that an NGO must inform people about their rights and train them to communicate, encourage local support, and connect with people around the world. These bloggers also underlined the importance of spreading the word about the abuses taking place in Egypt.

Thus, as an NGO, to help repressed activists is a matter of commitment. NGOs and activists should work together instead of working for each other. They need to listen carefully, and listen to the right people: there should also be contact with people that don't speak English and who live outside the big cities. NGOs should also support activists, work on prevention, try to find allies inside the government and respond as quickly as possible.

Internet has changed a lot the problems surrounding freedom of expression in many ways. As more people become authors, activists, and information sources; there are more voices to be heard and to be protected. According to Clothilde Le Coz, from Reporters Without Borders, a new space for advocacy for journalists has opened with Internet activism. This NGO specializes in putting pressure on governments in order to make sure they comply with the commitments taken. For them, blogger participation is the main source of information. Without them, their work would become fiercely difficult. They strongly advise bloggers to work on prevention and not wait until censorship affects them directly to fight against.

Nasser Weddady gave interesting examples of how bloggers and NGOs have worked together in order to make people aware of censorship situations happening in countries apparently far away. He illustrated with the example of Jane Novak, who carried important work as an activist against the Yemeni government from her home. The main question for this activist defender was “why should we care?” and underlined, apart from the need of defending Human Rights in any country of the world, the importance of connections among governments and how putting pressure on the authorities of the West can be helpful for activists in the East.

The NGO Tactical Tech, represented by Stephanie Hankey presented the tools they use to help activists through technology in order to remain anonymous. Also, they work with marginalized communities in order to make them aware of their rights and to communicate safely. So far, they have trained 1500 advocates and independent journalists. One of the most important tasks is based on information, especially in what it comes to the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of activist, in order to help people to take their own decisions. They put the light on the hidden challenge of blogging anonymously.

Finally, Antony Loewenstein made an interesting summary on censorship in countries such as his native Australia, a place in which censorship takes another shape. Who are the ones to decide what is convenient or not in the Web? This points out the problems that are merging when society and Internet users decide to censor the content on the Internet. He focused on the current Australian situation and in the Asia Pacific region and how NGOs can efficiently protect online activists and analyzed the prejudices and preconceptions in the West around repressive goverments. “I’ve long believed that activism must be mainstreamed to be truly effective, rather than just the concern of a minority. Our job as journalists, activists, NGOs, bloggers or concerned citizens is to bring the stories of the world to a media that welcomes localism and shuns complexity. These rules of the game are ripe for change.” At the end, it was clear that one of the main goals for the future of blogger activism will be to find a way to work together and eliminate the dichotomy that separates us, in an absurd way, as Easterners or Westerners.

Nart Villeneuve, an internationally recognised expert on internet access issues argued that during the so-called net 2.0 generation, the fight for internet access and anonymity has become global where even in so-called liberal democracies, activists critical of local governments have become victims of censorship. Yet, the fight for internet privacy affects all computer users. Villeneuve struck a common theme throughout the hour-long discussion: Civil libertarians have more to worry from corporations than repressive governments. That’s because some authoritarian governments may harass bloggers, block certain news and social media sites and attack activists and cyber dissidents, but these crimes may not be carried out thoroughly. On the other hand, corporations systematically track net users’ movements on the web and indefinitely store this information.

What becomes of this intelligence is unknown. Civil libertarians worry that companies could be bullied by governments to provide the information. Or worse: Companies, looking for a better economic foothold in larger markets like China and India, could willingly restrict certain features (like chat) or hand over user data on specific bloggers. Users should be aware that when following commercial firms’ weak civil liberties track record, one should not be taken by surprise, argues Danny O’Brien from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “All these companies will make these compromises” to stay in business, he says.

Making things better for users around the world, O’Brien argues, is that internet communication is moving away from centralised platforms like Google’s Blogger and MSN chat toward more decentralised social sites like Facebook, Live Journal and Skype, which provides encrypted chatting.

Another result, Villeneuve says, has been the creation of a number of programs to assist those seeking to access blocked sites or remain anonymous from traffic analysis. Problems remain that users have a variety of security choices, no single tool offers complete anonymity. More importantly, users need to understand the threats against them before choosing such a tool.

One of the internet’s best opportunity for users to remain anonymous is Tor, codeveloped by Roger Dingle. The product was not envisioned to be an anticensorship tool. Rather, Dingle’s group was originally funded by the U.S. Dept. of Defense and designed to allow users to travel the internet anonymously. It became popular with law enforcement officers setting up sting operations and corporate interests wishing to check out the competition without leaving tracks. However, a handful of news gathering organisations like Voice of America and Internews have also provided funding so that people to view their content from countries where it has been blocked

According to the Tor site, the product works like this: Instead of providing a single, straight path to a desired web page (or computer), Tor uses a series of constantly changing encrypted links through several servers, making it nearly impossible for a single observer to track a user.

“They don’t know where you are going or where you have been.” Dingle says. “It lets people do for themselves what they need to do.”

Isaac Mao, one of China’s first bloggers, has experienced his share of internet censorship. When a government like China moves to limit access to certain sites, Mao says, it acts as a form of self censorship to all Chinese citizens, no matter where they reside. “When I am out of the country, I still don’t dare to access some blogs, even though I can,” he said. “… I can’t break my mindset.”

Mao and others have began a system where people can create their individual domain names, which will be hosted on different servers around the world to keep users’ content secure and constantly online. This will protect blogs from getting hacked. Or, if your blog is restricted in some countries, to keep it online by changing addresses very quickly. Mao calls his group’s “collaborative model” — which means not having a permanent office — allows the service team to keep servers up without worrying about authorities.

While bloggers in various countries worry about obtaining access to the internet, groups and organisations providing relief and human rights work must understand that the most basic security threats now belong to e-mail programs, which has become a fundamental form of communication.

Because issues vary by geography, there is no single solution for keeping the lines of communication open for these groups. What organisations need to do, argues Robert Guerra, is begin sharing best practices and developers of security tools must better localise software and training manuals.

“Regimes are becoming more sophisticated [with their xxx] that e-mail is not being received or being disappeared,” said Guerra, a internet privacy expert based in Canada. “Skype and chat are also being blocked.” He said that cell phones — which he called “the portable spy you carry in your pocket” — are also being targeted.

O’Brien from the Electronic Fronteir Foundation argues that users would be better finding internet access and ID protection through open source software, which has a very decentralised business model. Users should be looking from the companies or organisations that create this software is an amount of trust, continuity, or proof they have been around for a long time, an amount of good publicity about the product and a funding stream so they will be around in the future.

Originally posted on GlobalVoices Summit 08

NGO’s and on-the ground activists: Defending the Voices

How can NGOs seeking to advance freedom of expression most effectively work with on-the-ground free speech activists to combat censorship?

As a journalist, author and blogger living in Sydney, Australia, the opportunity to be involved in this Global Voices event is a privilege. I thank the organisers for the opportunity.

My country may be a democracy of sorts, but internet censorship is a creeping problem in every country of the globe, including my own. Late last year, with new Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd just elected after more than a decade of conservative rule under John Howard, the government announced measures to supposedly offer greater protection to children from online pornography and violent websites. Similar ideas have been implemented in France and proposed in Scandinavia.

Australia’s Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy said in December: “Labor makes no apologies to those that argue that any regulation of the internet is like going down the Chinese road. If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree.”

Conroy said that anybody wanting to opt of the system, to be implemented by ISPs, would have to notify authorities.

The system has not yet been imposed, but NGOs, web companies and free speech advocates have been loudly campaigning against the moves, arguing that the plan would cripple the already slow speed of broadband in Australia.

The high-profile NGO, Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA), issued a blistering press release in response to the proposal and motivated the local blogosphere to quickly mobilise its resources, namely online noise, writing letters to government ministers and the media. The statement read, in part:

“Australia is supposed to be a liberal democracy where adults have the freedom to say and read what they want, not just what the Government decides is ‘appropriate’ for them. These announcements smack of the condescending paternalism which contributed to the downfall of the Howard government. The proposals threaten the free speech rights of every Australian, and our concerns will not be silenced by Government sound bites equating free speech with access to child pornography.”

It continued: “EFA has previously raised concerns about Australia joining North Korea, China and Burma in the club of nations who censor their citizens’ access to the internet. While the Minister makes no apologies for this alarming development, he has given us little reason to put our faith in his bureaucrats to administer such a system competently, transparently and fairly. Who decides what is ‘appropriate’ for adult Australians to read on the internet, and according to what standards? What will happen if the Government decides that information about abortion or gay marriage is ‘inappropriate’ at the behest of [Christian conservative] Family First Senator Steve Fielding?”

Stephen Dalby, chief regulatory officer with Australian ISP company iiNet, said in mid-June: “This whole notion of taking a technological solution to what is otherwise a social issue really has some problems…Our only concern is that the government may push this through, raise their hands and say ‘right, we’ve done something about it.’ Let’s hope there’s some sincerity in looking at fixing the community problems associated with this more intently.”

That may be wishful thinking. Equally concerning is the lack of transparency about which websites will be blocked. I’m less concerned about filtering child pornography than websites that allegedly celebrate violence or terrorism. Does this mean, for example, that the website for the Palestinian group Hamas may be censored because the US and many Western countries regard them as terrorists? Likewise with Hizbollah or even al-Qaeda? Do we not have the right to view information that some people may find offensive but a free society should both tolerate and protect? Sadly, censorship is no longer just a problem in non-Western nations.

The “war on terror” has emboldened those in Western societies who cloak their censorship under the guise of “protecting” citizens from supposedly harmful online material. As we’ve seen during the Bush administration years, intrusive governments are increasingly willing to legislate what they deem we can and cannot see and watch. Free societies are never truly free and eternal vigilance is essential. A disturbing future is already being imagined for us.

The Former US House speaker, Newt Gingrich, said in 2006 that free speech may have to be curtailed in the fight against terrorism. “Either before we lose a city or, if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city”, he said, “we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the internet…” The authoritarian impulse is alive and well in the West.

Australia’s proposals are likely to be realised before the end of the year, but I suspect some ISPs, though unlikely to ignore the directives, may balk at rules and regulations that are likely to constantly change according to the whims of the day.

We often presume that people who live in a repressive regimes do not want Big Brother deciding their online habits, but a recent study by Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the vast majority of Chinese web-users supported their government controlling and managing the internet. “Our” values are clearly up for discussion and should never be imposed on others. It almost beggars belief that Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently told The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta that he never anticipated repressive regimes would begin imposing internet censorship at the router level. Perhaps he temporarily forgot his own company’s complicity in China’s extensive web filtering. Just who is imposing whose values on whom?

During my travels to various non-democratic countries over the last years, including Cuba, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, China and Sri Lanka, I’ve met countless bloggers, dissidents and NGOs determined to circumvent government censorship, imprisonment or filtering. Most of them are under-funded, often scared of being caught and looking for international solidarity. Just being heard is half the battle. I was highly conscious in nations such as Iran, China and Cuba that talking to a Western journalist could endanger a blogger or activist.

My forthcoming book, The Blogging Revolution, gives voice to a world still largely ignored in the Western media. For me as a journalist, one of the key things we can do, with the assistance of like-minded NGOs, is allow bloggers to speak for themselves and not automatically classify them as suspect, non-English speakers. For example, in Australia, more than five years after the start of the Iraq war, Iraqi voices are still virtually ignored. It is as if only Westerners, usually middle-age men, have the right to speak for the occupied people.

NGOs should work with news organizations and reporters to educate a Western media that remains highly suspicious of bloggers and the apparent inability to check their credentials. I regularly encounter editors in Australia and overseas who question my use of blogger quotes but don’t look twice if a government official is cited. This is gradually changing but remains mired in conservative, so-called objective reporting rules. NGOs can help in this transition to a more responsive and worldly kind of networked journalism.

I’m currently working with Amnesty International Australia on its China campaign in this Olympic year. Its Uncensor website aims to highlight the extensive use of internet repression in China and hook into growing concerns in Australia and elsewhere over the country’s human rights abuses. Amnesty has hosted many “Tear Down the Great Firewall of China” events across the country, giving citizens the opportunity to learn the ways in which Western multinationals are assisting web repression.

The Uncensor website highlights the cases of well-known imprisoned Chinese activists and displays real-time examples of what internet searches, such as Tiananmen Square and 1989 Democratic Movement, look like inside China. The campaign has generated solid media coverage. Chinese activists in Australia, with many contacts back home, also write regularly about the mood on the streets in Beijing, Shanghai and beyond.

After Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd admirably told students in Mandarin at Peking University in April that, “we…believe it is necessary to recognise there are significant human rights problem in Tibet”, public opinion firmly swung behind strong pressure being placed on Beijing and Olympic sponsors. A majority of Australians polled in April favoured the country’s Games’ sponsors speaking out strongly against China’s abuses with four out of ten saying they would be more likely to purchase a product from an outspoken sponsor. Sympathy for the Tibetan cause was paramount and NGOs such as Amnesty are central to keeping the stories of human rights infractions in the media.

One of the central myths that NGOs should counter is the idea that citizens in non-democratic nations are craving American-style democracy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course, freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of the press are central to any modern, democratic state, but embracing unregulated capitalism is not largely welcomed. As John Lee, a fellow at an Australian think-tank, recently wrote about China:

“The rise of an alternative to the Western liberal model of development - the so-called Beijing consensus - has been the unexpected consequence of China’s rise and is proving a difficult ideational challenge for the West. Where once we placed our hopes on the me generation to push for political change, we must now confront the fact that China’s young elites believe working within a one-party state is the better bet for their and the country’s future.”

These realities are arguably more attractive for Western multinationals to enter China and navigate the relatively open regulatory system. A recent report in Business Week magazine highlighted the role of Chinese firms assisting some of these foreign multinationals with the confusing Chinese blogosphere and netizens criticising firms for alleged slights against Chinese culture. The founder of one of these companies, CIC’s Sam Flemming, explained it well: “If it touches on nationalism, or if the client clearly made a mistake and disrespected a customer, that’s dangerous.”

The role of Western NGOs is essential in providing a bridge between on-the-ground activists and a sceptical media back home. Convincing the masses that censorship in, say, Iran, is relevant to the outer suburbs of Sydney, can only be achieved through the internet. The ease with which a web user anywhere in the world can campaign for campaigners in repressive regimes creates both a sense of community and protection, however slight. Online campaigning has exploded around the globe.

I’ve long believed that activism must be mainstreamed to be truly effective, rather than just the concern of a minority. Our job as journalists, activists, NGOs, bloggers or concerned citizens is to bring the stories of the world to a media that welcomes localism and shuns complexity. These rules of the game are ripe for change.

Audience intently focused on the “Citizen Media and Online Free Speech” session.

Wael Abbas spoke first and led off with several difficult-to-endure videos showing clear human rights abuses in Egypt.

Abbas emphasizes that while Egypt claims to be a democracy, its government system is really a façade of democracy which does now allow for full political participation. Unsurprisingly, that also applies to online political participation. Most famously, Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Soliman was sentenced to four years' prison for insulting Islam and the president. Kareem's detention spawned the Free Kareem! campaign which has been documented at length by Sami Ben Gharbia on Global Voices.

It's not easy to be a citizen media activist in Egypt, notes Abbas. Several bloggers have suffered character assassination campaigns. Abbas himself has been accused of being Christian (he is Muslim) and homosexual in hopes of discrediting the videos and blog posts he publishes.

Up next was the tireless (and currently pregnant) Ory Okolloh who was ordered by her doctor to stay in bed. Her version of bed rest, she told us, would be to briefly share her personal experience of the valiant response by Kenya's bloggers in the political crisis following their country's late December presidential election. Ethan Zuckerman has recently documented Okolloh's participation (along with other Kenyan bloggers) throughout the crisis.

As it became clear that Kenya would be in crisis for more than a few days, bloggers began to search for ways to share their workload. Okolloh, who resides in Johannesburg, returned home on January 3rd, after a difficult debate over whether she should stay to document the crisis or prioritize the safety of her young child. Three days after arriving in South Africa, she added a new feature to her blog: “diary entries” written by guest bloggers and submitted to her via email. In the month the diary was active, it featured 26 posts from a variety of Kenyans, including regular bloggers who sought an opportunity to reach a larger audience and from people who had not previously published online. The tone was sharply different from Okolloh’s opinionated, but news-focused, reports - the diaries were personal reflections on the crisis, providing context for readers interested in how the crisis was affecting individual Kenyans.

In her first post on returning to Johannesburg, Okolloh proposed another form of distributed reporting, a Google Maps mashup that showed incidents of violence reported throughout Kenya […] The reaction to this idea, one of nine points in a long roundup, helps demonstrate Okolloh’s influence and reach in the blogger community. (Technorati lists Kenyan Pundit as the #15,282nd most popular blog in its index, a very high rank for an Africa-focused blog. At the peak of its popularity during the crisis, 0.004% of all blog posts on the internet linked to Kenyan Pundit, a level comparable to regular linking to Global Voices Online, one of the 200 most popular blogs in the world. Within three days of her January 3rd blog post, a prototype version of the system she proposed had been built. By January 9th, it was live at Ushahidi.com. (The term Ushahidi means “witness” in Swahili.) A day later, a partnership with Kenyan mobile phone operators allowed Kenyans to post reports using an SMS shortcode.

Okolloh is clear that, especially compared to her Ethiopian and Zimbabwean colleagues, there was very little institutional censorship, but that most bloggers self-censored during the crisis because of societal and family pressures. There was also the matter of moderating comments. Okolloh received many comments threatening to rape and attack her. Every time she wrote a post she thought of her family and their safety. On a related note, the popular Mashada.com discussion forums were also briefly shut down after some posters advocated violence.

While Okolloh added the element of self-censorship to the discussion, Alex Au starts his presentation with a slide which reads “the psychological side of censorship.” He is concerned about the amount of apathy to the internet censorship which takes place in Singapore. What is it that drives a local society to advocate for their right to free speech and why isn't it taking place in Singapore? Alex wonders if it might have to do with Singapore's impressive economic development over the last twenty years. “If life is pretty good,” asks Au, “is there a need for freedom?” On a closing note, Alex adds that he understand the need for anonymity among online activists, but that anonymity usually doesn't lead to social change, and that activists should be encouraged to use their real names and stand up to repressive governments.

Oiwan Lam describes a court case which was brought against her by Hong Kong's Obscene Articles Tribunal for posting a photograph of a shirtless woman covered in leaves [Not work safe.]. Oiwan's case has been covered in detail by Rebecca MacKinnon in a three post series.

Amine also started his talk out with videos to show how online citizen media is spreading awareness about government corruption throughout Morocco. This video shows a police officer collecting bribes from passing cars.

Of course, it only spreads awareness when YouTube isn't being blocked like it briefly was in 2007. Other sites that have been blocked in Morocco include Google Maps, Livejournal, OpenDNS, Anonymizer, and Google Earth. Amine says the Moroccan government is ‘allergic' to all website which allow for user-generated content which it cannot control. This is most famously exemplified, of course, in the arrest of Fouad Mourtada for creating a fake Facebook identity of Crown Prince Moulay Rachid. Amine says that it is typical of the Moroccan government's ignorance about the internet that when Mourtada was being interrogated he was asked by he invented Facebook.

Finally, Hamid Tehrani of Global Voices filled in for Mehdi Mohseni and offered an overview of censorship in Iran. He starts off with a slide of what National Geographic looks like from within Iran. While censorship has always existed in Iran, notes Tehrani, it has been stepped up in the past three years both online and off. Now most social networking sites are blocked, including content-rich sites like YouTube and Flickr. Interestingly, anti-Bush and liberal blogs from the US like Juan Cole and the Huffington Post are also blocked in Iran. This has led to innovative tools from anti-censorship activists like Hamed Saber's Access Flickr! Firefox extension.

Many of the questions for the speakers focused on how to get more internet users interested in and involved in the anti-censorship movement. How do you make anti-censorship an issue which attracts as much attention as celebrity and technology news? What role does the diaspora community play? How do you try to promote an atmosphere which encourages active participation over self-censorship? These were all mostly open-ended questions, which generated some speculation from the speakers (eg. governments can discredit diaspora communities as out of touch), but no concrete answers.

If you are interested in issues of censorship and citizen media, make sure to subscribe to Global Voices Advocacy.

Originally posted on GlobalVoices Summit 08

Opening Remarks

Day One opened with Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founders of Global Voices Online, narrating the background to how Global Voices came into being. The opening session was blogged live by Jillian York and Renata Avila using the tool CoveritLive. Ethan described an international conference for bloggers held at Harvard University in December of 2004, where the idea for Global Voices Online was hatched.

In his work on media coverage patterns, Ethan noticed that the mainstream media focused on certain kinds of people and certain kinds of places, and left out others. He and Rebecca started round ups of bloggers. Soon the work became too much for two people. David Sasaki was brought in as the first regional editor, covering Latin America. More funding came from Reuters, and in 2005 Global Voices held its first summit in London. The 2006 summit took place in New Delhi, India, leading up to this summit in Budapest, Hungary. Over the years, the challenge has been to go beyond the realm of educated elites who dominate the blogging world. Ethan and Rebecca talked of how Global Voices has been working on bringing in other voices from other parts of the world. That concern gave rise to another prominent Global Voices project, Rising Voices. Now the concern keeps getting broader, said Ethan, and at present there is a need to go beyond citizen media, to media activism.

Another major development over the years has been translation. Ethan said Global Voices now translates twelve languages, which are further translated into other languages, “touching all corners of the world.”

Also making opening remarks on Day One was Sami Ben Ghabia, Adcovacy Director for Global Voices. Sami is originally from Tunisia, but is now living in the Netherlands. Sami described how the Advocacy Project for Global Voices has been following how citizens are using digital media for social activism. Sami showed video clips of Moroccan citizen journalists secretly taping corruption practices by the Moroccan traffic police. The clip in question, shot by a video blogger called TarSniper, showed a police officer collecting bribes from drivers. Another clip showed Egyptian bloggers exposing torture, and a third example showed Tunisian bloggers exposing police brutality. In the Tunisian example, police shot live bullets into a crowd of demonstrators, killing a number of them. The police denied shooting and killing the two people.

Sami concluded his remarks with a statement that read “Youtube and blogosphere=dangerous combination for repressive regimes,” and listed several Internet tools that have sprang up that are used to circumvent censorship on the web. Amongst those he listed were Feedburner, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Googlemaps, youtube, vodpod, flickr, and feedblitz.

Panel: Toward a Global Anti-censorship Network

After the opening remarks, John Kennedy, Global Voices Chinese Language editor, introduced Helmi Noman, who moderated the first session. The first session was titled “Toward a Global Anti-censorship Network”, with four panelists: Andrei Abozau, a Belarusian activist, Chris Salzberg who covers the Japanese blogosphere, Alaa Abdel Fatah from Egypt, and Awab Alvi of Pakistan.

Andrei Abozau described the website LuNet, which was accused of slandering Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko. Andrei talked about how the control of the Internet in Belarus, which has been around for two years now, “has destroyed liberty and freedom of expression.” He said it had also affected trade and entrepreneurship, as some businesses use the Internet for their work and are affected by the censorship. Andrei said the focus of new struggles “should have a global scale,” to come up with new ways of bypassing filtration and censorship tools. He said democratic societies should be called upon to apply economic sanctions on countries that censor free speech.

The second panelist, Egyptian blogger Alaa Abdel Fatah spoke of how the legal system in Egypt has been used to limit freedom of speech. Alaa showed pictures of an Egyptian blogger tortured by Egyptian police, archived on www.misrdigital.blogspirit.com. The remarkable thing about the video, said Alaa, was that it was shot on a cellphone, and was then uploaded on Youtube. It had not been shown on any mainstream media networks. Another example of citizen media in Egypt was the website www.tortureinegypt.net, which, as the name says, exposes torture in Egypt. The blogger is a young woman, who lost job when her blogging was exposed, and she now works for a radical paper. Her parents were also harassed, leading her to find out that “It’s easier to stand up to a dictator that to stand up to your father”

Another example from Egypt was www.elhakika.blogspot.com, which Alaa said tracks petro-chemical companies for industrial pollution. One company sued a blogger for libel. In Egypt, the court needs proof of all the claims. One can go to jail for managing to prove all cases except one, for example, said Alaa. And the court process can be vey painful as well; one can stay arrested throughout the duration of the trial. “I was personally involved in a case. I was sent to prison for criticizing Mubarak,” reported Alaa.

The next speaker was Chris Salzberg, Japanese language editor for Global Voices. Chris started by saying he was not Japanese, and therefore what he was about to say would not be representative of all Japan. He also observed that “Web censorship means different things in different contexts, nations, and societies,” before noting that in Japan the Internet was free and open, although there were debates about regulation.

Japan is a very different example. The internet is open in most respects, but what I want to do in this 10 minutes is go back over what censorship really means. It means something different in Japan than in Egypt, or elsewhere.

Chris prepared a document, available at http://gyaku.jp/internetregulationjapan.pdf. His presented discussed an article taken from a Japanese magazine, titled “The age of net regulation is coming.” One interesting example was how a Japanese Internet user warned on their website that they were going to kill certain people, and went ahead to kill them and themselves. A new bill passed in the Japanese parliament, on June 11^th. The bill was aimed at regulating Internet content, copyright legislation, and mobile web access, among others. In the new bill, manufacturers of computer software would be required to preinstall filtering software in PCs and mobile phones, and filter phones for under 18s, gay and lesbian sites, among others.

Warning that surveys always need to be used critically as not all questions capture the accurate reality, Chris presented results of a survey in Japan, in which 67.8% of the population were said to favor internet regulation, with 76% percent supporting web filtering. Companies wee now pushing against censorship because customers were abandoning companies that participated in the filtering. Bur Chris also observed that in Japan government and corporate censorship were not big concerns; rather people were concerned with how other users used digital media.

The last speaker for the first session on Day One was Dr. Awab Alvi, a dentist who is also a blogger and an activist in Pakistan, who founded the blog Don’t Block the Blog.

Awab said in Pakistan there was an attempt to silence Pakistani bloggers, after a blog named drawmuhammadweek.blogspot.com was set up. This lead to blogspot being blocked. Immediately that happened, a proxy servers went up, to sidestep the censorship. Now blogs can be seen wit pkblogs.com, which renames blogs blocked in countries such as Iran, India, Pakistan, China and other countries. Another way of circumventing the censorship, such as Greasemonkey scripts, which rewrites the URL to sidestep the blocked blogger.com. India friendship package was another way, enabling access to Indian blogs at www.inblogs.net

Awab said only 7% of Pakistanis have access to computers, and internet exposure sometimes starts with pornographic sites, and then grows into other uses. Newspaper readership has gone down, while online presence (not readership) is up.

Another aspect in Pakistan was SMS activism. With more people having access to cellphones than to computers, people send text messages as a way of communicating. Mobile content was huge, bypassing online access. There was need to come with ways of sending text messages directly to the Internet. After a question and answer session focusing on what bloggers can do to help other bloggers in other countries, the session ended with a refreshments break.

Originally posted on GlobalVoices Summit 08

I came from journalism, Ethan from non-profits; we both shared concern about the media and global attention flows. I saw the international English-language media focusing a lot of attention on certain people and places, and less attention on other voices and places. Ethan was doing a lot of research on media attention patterns. We were studying the blogosphere and wanted to talk about all the people around the world who were starting to blog.

Following the introductions, Session 1: “Toward a Global Anti-censorship Network,” started up, with Helmi Noman moderating. Jillian York and Renata Avila liveblogged the session using CoveritLive. Internet filtering, self-censorship, and related issues in Egypt, Morocco, Belarus, Japan, and Pakistan were discussed during this session, which featured Sami Ben Gharbia, Chris Salzberg, Andrei Abozau, Ethan Zuckerman, Awab Alvi, and Alaa Abdel Fatah.

Session 2 was liveblogged by Juliana Rotich. Mary Joyce moderated; Ory Okolloh of Kenya, Wael Abbas of Egypt, Amine of Morocco, Oiwan Lam of hong Kong, Au Wai “Alex” Pang of Singapore, and Hamid Tehrani of Iran spoke on the subject “Citizen Media and Online Free Speech.” Issues broached during the discussion were the use of twitter, proxies and SMS to get around internet filtering and censorship. Each panelist shared stories of recent events from their countries.

Jillian York liveblogged Session 3, entitled “Living with Censorship.” Awab Alvi of Don't Block the Blog moderated, whilst Helmi Noman, CJ Hinke, Andrew Heavens, Rezwan, Yazan Badran, and John Kennedy were panelists. Each panelist discussed what it's like to live with censorship, and each had a different perspective on the issue.

Session 4, liveblogged by Juliana Rotich, brought special guests, whom moderator Ethan Zuckerman said we are very lucky to have at the Summit, as they are in high demand as speakers! Roger Dingledine of Tor, Nart Villeneuve (Citizen Lab), Isaac Mao (Digital Nomads Project), Robert Guerra (Privaterra), and Danny O'Brien (Electronic Frontier Foundation) spoke. Danny O'Brien discussed selecting a circumvention tool:

What criteria should you look for when choosing circumvention & anonymizing tools? This is important because some tools that you can use now may not be safe to use in future. Google may be good now, but as it continues to grow, will it remain so?

The features you want…
-You want a tool that is well funded.

Juliana notes that O'Brien recommends against commercial products.

The day wrapped up with Session 5, liveblogged by Rebecca Wanjiku and moderated by Xiao Qiang. Panelists were Clothilde Le Coz (RSF), Elijah Zarwan (HRW), Nasser Weddady (HAMSA), Stephanie Hankey (Tactical Tech), and Antony Loewenstein (Amnesty International Australia's campaign Uncensor).

Rebecca MacKinnon spoke at the very end of the panel, discussing censorship as a legal, political and social program:

Without the social layer on top of the technical and legal solutions, a lot of these problems are going to be difficult to solve. I was really struck by stories about social demoralization and isolation that some bloggers feel.

She added that we as citizens need to work together to get past censorship and focus on what we can do, rather than what we can’t. To conclude, she also mentioned how censorship can have a landslide effect, for example: Japan’s freedom of speech/anti-pornography censorship stance could be used as an example by China to subdue its activists and dissenters.

Day 2 promises to be just as incredible, with Rising Voices, GV Lingua, and other topics.