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Highlights from the 28th Chaos Communications Congress

Becky Hogge — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 21:23:54 +0000

'Child's Play' shared by John Flanagan on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, hackers looked at each other and said : “w00t! Only two days to go until 28c3″.

The Chaos Communications Congress is the annual meetup of Germany's Chaos Computer Club, one of the oldest hacker collectives in the world. It takes place in Berlin every year at the height of the holiday season between Christmas and New Year's Eve, a time when only the dedicated European computer obsessive would leave their family and friends to spend four days in a conference centre with like-minded hackers and geeks.

The programme mixes technical talks from the security and free software worlds with talks about online rights and hacktivism, and is well known for breaking new issues that go on to be important in the wider world. Alongside the talks are space for Europe's computer clubs and hackspaces to demonstrate their current projects, as well as break out spaces for workshopping new tools and projects, and labs offering introductions to things like Arduino-based electronics, 3D printing and even lock-picking.

This year was the 28th Chaos Communications Congress (28c3 for short) and my third time going. Here are my highlights.

Roger Dingledine and Jacob Applebaum on TOR

For me, this talk illustrates the central role the hacker community is now playing in world events. The conference opened with a set piece from Evgeny Morozov on the perils of networked, digital surveillance, but it was this talk on Day 2 about the experiences of the TOR community with national network control infrastructures that felt like it united people at 28c3 against surveillance as a concept and a technology, in free societies as well as oppressed ones. The tub-thumping and the casual allusions to the technical vulnerabilities of state censorship technologies were tempered by the pair's obvious expertise and considered ethical attitude. Gold.

Defending mobile phones

Two years ago, at 26c3, Karsten Nohl announced that the GSM encryption protocol had been cracked. This year, he detailed how network operators should be securing their networks while they upgrade the encryption, and asked the community to help him keep track of how the operators perform. He also previewed a new project, CatcherCatcher, which will track the activity of IMSI catchers on behalf of phone users. IMSI catchers are thought to be increasingly used by law enforcement agencies to track people via their mobile phones.

The coming war on general computation

An expertly delivered talk in which Cory Doctorow reminded congress that “information appliances” (like iPads, Kindles and all the rest) are simply fully functional computers with spyware in them out-of-the-box: “All attempts at controlling PCs converge on rootkits and all attempts at controlling the network converge on surveillance”.

Sovereign keys

The EFF's Peter Eckersley proposes a way to fix the broken Certificate Authority system.

Towards a Single Secure European Cyberspace?

A beautifully constructed lecture by Suso Baleato cross-referencing the rhetoric used by European legislators to erode internet freedoms with the character of the new, networked activism which I ruin at the end by asking a stupid question no-one understands.

The hallway track

Random cool stuff I found out about from talking to people in and around the conference: the Open Source Next Generation Multicopter; the Hackerbus and Code Hero.

Tunisia: A chance to get things right?

Rebecca MacKinnon — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:27:18 +0000

This coming Sunday (October 23rd, 2011), Tunisia will hold elections for the constituent assembly that will be tasked with re-writing the country's constitution. While this election is only the first step in a long and winding path that may or may not succeed in establishing a vibrant Arab democracy in North Africa, reports are quoting election observers and human rights groups who are optimistic that people are serious about the process of holding a real election.

Censorship is a major topic in the Tunisian political discoure. There have recently been protests by conservatives demanding censorship of all media including TV, film, and Internet and protests by liberals against censorship. After Internet censorship was ended when President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled the country in January, some censorship of pornographic and incendiary web content resumed in May of this year, prompting heated debates over who has the authority to decide what goes on the censorship list and whether that power will inevitably be abused.

Photo by Mohammed Alaa Guedich

At the Third Arab Bloggers Meeting in Tunis earlier this month, Moez Chakchouk, Chairman and CEO of the Tunisian Internet Agency, gave an amazing presentation (slideshow included) in which he revealed that under Ben Ali, his agency had secretly tested censorship and surveillance software for Western companies. He would not say which ones, although according to Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Tunisia long used McAfee's SmartFilter to censor the Internet under the Ben Ali regime, and controversially has resumed some filtering in a much more limited way during the transition.

ATI (as the Tunisian Internet Agency is known according to its French acronym) was much reviled by activists under Ben Ali and nicknamed “Ammar 404″ - the Arabic equivalent of “Joe 404,” with “404″ referring to the “404 page not found” error message that appears on browsers when a web page has been blocked. Now Mr. Chakchouk says he is trying to turn the agency into a “transparent” and “neutral” Internet exchange point (IXP) that can support a robust public discourse in an evolving new democracy. He wants to put an end to web filtering at the network level and instead provide tools and services for households to filter their home Internet if they so desire, without engaging in blanket censorship for the entire nation. In general, he believes that Tunisia must foster competition and innovation in Internet services. He wants Tunisia adopt global “best practices” in Internet governance.

After a Tunisian court ruled in May that some websites must be blocked, the ATI appealed the ruling twice, but lost both appeals. It is making a further appeal to the highest court.

Click here for a video of Chakchouk's entire speech in French. Here is a shorter English interview he did immediately afterwards with Tunisia Online.

A team from the Tor Project who conducted security workshops during the Arab bloggers meeting stayed on in Tunisia for an extra day and visited ATI. Here is an excerpt of their report:

On our extra day after the workshops, we visited Moez [Chakchouk] at his Internet Agency and interviewed him for a few hours about the state of filtering in his country. He confirmed that they renewed their Smartfilter license until Sept 2012, and that they still filter “the groups that want it” (government and schools), but for technical reasons they have turned off the global filters (they broke and nobody has fixed them). We pointed out that since an external company operates their filters — including for their military — then that company not only has freedom to censor anything they want, but they also get to see every single request when deciding whether to censor it. Moez used the phrase “national sovereignty” when explaining why it isn't a great idea for Tunisia to outsource their filtering. Great point: it would be foolish to imagine that this external company isn't logging things for their own purposes, whether that's “improving their product” or something more sinister. As we keep seeing, collecting a large data set and then hoping to keep it secret never seems to work out.

One of the points Jake kept hammering on throughout the week was “if *anything* is being filtered, then you have to realize that they're surveilling *everything* in order to make those filtering decisions.” The Syrian logs help to drive the point home but it seems like a lot of people haven't really internalized it yet. We still find people thinking of Tor solely as an “anti-filter” tool and not considering the surveillance angle.

Tunisian activists attending the conference observed that whether Mr. Chakchouk will succeed in making ATI neutral and transparent or even keep his job, or whether the ATI will survive as an independent agency, will depend in no small part on the outcome of this weekend's elections and the continued political jockeying beyond.

Riadh Guerfali, co-founder of the citizen media platform Nawaat.org which played a key role in spreading protest information and who is now running as an independent candidate from his home town of Bizerte (and who features prominently in chapters 1 and 14 of the book), has made Internet access and online free expression a key goal, as have many other former activists who are now running for office. On the other hand, there are other candidates - on both the left and the right - calling for Internet censorship as part of an effort to attract more conservative religious voters. Who will prevail in the election remains to be seen… and how the constituent assembly will choose to handle the questions of censorship and civil liberties when they write the constitution is even less clear.

“Information infrastructure is politics,” writes Philip N. Howard of Washington State University in a recently published Brookings Institution report on authoritarian regimes and Internet controls. Tunisian politics over the coming year are likely to determine the shape of the country's information infrastructure - and decide just how different it will be from the past, or not. The shape of the infrastructure will in turn shape political discourse to the extent that it enables a full range of political viewpoints, debates, and even whistleblowing; or whether it enshrines censorship and surveillance mechanisms that can enable power-holders to subtly (or not so subtly) manipulate information and surveil Internet users.

Cameras Everywhere: Current Challenges and Opportunities at the Intersection of Human Rights, Video and Technology

Guest Contributor — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 11:32:29 +0000

This is a guest blog entry by Sam Gregory Program Director of WITNESS.

I’m pleased to announce the launch of our new report: “Cameras Everywhere: Current Challenges and Opportunities at the Intersection of Human Rights, Video and Technology.” You can read and download it on our website. The report, like the initiative of the same name, aims to ensure that the thousands of people turning to video for human rights can do so as effectively, safely and ethically as possible.

The revolutions of the “Arab Spring” and the ongoing struggles for change in Libya, Syria and other parts of the world constantly remind us that cell phones, video and the Internet are playing a major role in the social and political change movements of our time. Our report notes the opportunities presented by this rapidly changing landscape as well as some of the risks and challenges, mainly to individual activists who risk their lives bearing witness and standing up for change.

Beyond taking stock of this new visual-media heavy landscape, our report makes specific recommendations to companies, organizations and individuals in the sectors of technology, policy, human rights, and civil society as well as those who fund and invest in such endeavors.

This report was developed by a team at WITNESS including myself, Bryan Nunez (our Technology Manager), and Yvette Alberdingk Thijm (our Executive Director). And the lead researcher and author was our former Hub Manager, Sameer Padania. Our insights and recommendations are based on interviews with over 40 experts and practitioners in the fields of technology, media, technology and policy including people like Bob Boorstin (Director, Public Policy, Google), danah boyd (Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research), Steve Grove (YouTube News & Politics), Joi Ito (Director, Media Lab, MIT), and Marietje Schaake (Member of European Parliament).

We hope you will find the findings of the report thought-provoking and that you will join us in engaging with the technology, human rights and policy fields to support and advocate for the recommendations. You can read more about the next steps we are taking here. Visit the Cameras Everywhere Report section of our website for more on the report. And we invite you to return to the blog for forthcoming posts focused on specific recommendations of the report and guest author perspectives on some of the topics.

If you are a member of the press, please visit our press release for more information and to request interviews.

Human Rights Video, Privacy and Visual Anonymity in the Facebook Age

Guest Contributor — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 21:37:14 +0000

This is a guest blog entry by Sam Gregory, Program Director for WITNESS. Originally posted on WITNESS' blog.

Protester's placard thanking youth of Egypt and Facebook (via Twitter user @richardengelnbc, and now widely re-posted online)

The successful nationwide organizing and subsequent protests in Egypt to oust the 30-year regime of President Hosni Mubarak have in part been facilitated by Facebook. But as media and technology commentators and human rights activists alike are noting, using Facebook for activism is fraught with risks.

Facebook’s insistence that its users use their ‘real identity’ when signing up – and deleting accounts and groups that do no comply – makes it difficult for human rights activists needing to work anonymously or pseudonymously. And it makes it easier for governments to track not only individuals but also their networks.

The risks that affect activists using Facebook have their counterparts in video too. At the same time as the use of video has become more widespread in human rights work, the risks associated with shooting and circulating video, whether by professional human rights advocates or citizen activists, have become equally apparent.

Some of the most notable and publicized examples include the Saffron Revolution in Burma, when intelligence agents scrutinized citizen-shot photographs and video footage to identify demonstrators and bystanders. During the post-election protests in Iran, the government crowd-sourced identification of protesters via facial pictures grabbed from YouTube. And then there is Asmaa Mahfouz’s recent experience in Egypt. Asmaa, whose video blog (below) was one of the alleged catalysts of the January 25th protests, received threats from pro-Mubarak supporters.

With human rights documentation and organizing increasingly taking place via video, and video becoming the primary communication mode online, how are people enabled to make purposeful choices about when they speak out and what degree of anonymity they hold onto for themselves? At WITNESS, we’ve been thinking this in terms of facilitating choices about ‘visual privacy’ and ‘visual anonymity’. And what role, if any, should service providers like Facebook and YouTube play in enabling their spaces for those engaged in human rights work, particularly with video?

In this post, I highlight some new dilemmas of privacy and anonymity related to the increasing ubiquity of human rights video. These themes have emerged during the course of research for a report for our Cameras Everywhere initiative, which we’ll publish next month. The report, drafted with Sameer Padania, formerly of WITNESS, is based on interviews with leading experts in human rights, technology, media and policy-making.

But given the debate that’s happening now about the relationship between the major technology platforms and human rights, we’ve decided to share with you today some relevant parts of the report. We’ll share thoughts today on issues related to anonymity, privacy and freedom of expression and provide some initial recommendations, drafted with Sameer (and which you’ll find at the end of this post), as a contribution to the discussion.

Freedom of Expression, Privacy and Anonymity: Grounding in Human Rights Principles

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. – Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Article 19

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence. – UDHR, Article 12

Anonymity is very much a part of the right to free speech. International human rights law addresses the right to free expression and exchange of information, as well as freedom of association in Article 19 of the UDHR (see above), and also in Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which adds that restrictions on this right “shall only be such as provided by law and are necessary: (a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others; (b) For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or public health and morals.” Further international declarations on the rights of human rights defenders also emphasize the capacity to disseminate and receive information on human rights topics.

Complementary to rights of freedom of expression is the right to freedom from arbitrary and unlawful interference with one’s privacy and correspondence, recognized both in Article 12 of the UDHR and in Article 17 of the ICCPR. The right to privacy is usually understood to include both the individual’s right to a zone of autonomy within a “private sphere” such as the home, as well as in respect to personal choices within the public sphere. Much discussion around online Internet privacy focuses on the security of personal data and personal identity.

Critical to an active right to both free expression and to privacy is the right to communicate anonymously. Of course, this is not an absolute right – after all, anonymity can also be used, for example to cover criminal activity. However the active presence of options to have anonymity and no a priori restrictions on anonymity enables freedom of expression and supports the right to privacy.

The Right to Communicate Anonymously: Moving from Data to Video

Most contemporary discussions around anonymous communication on the Internet focus on the data protection side. They focus on options for encryption or for using proxy server and circumvention approaches like Tor to conceal both the person communicating and the data being transmitted. These conversations are often exemplified in the handover of user information to repressive governments (for example, Yahoo in China providing the details of journalist Shi Tao) or to governments’ tracking and accessing users’ personal data and communications. Additionally, there is also a tendency to assert that privacy is a thing of the past online and that societal trends and social norms are moving away from assumptions of privacy and anonymity (see for example, contentious public statements made by Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook).

But in the case of video (or photos), a largely unaddressed question arises. What about the rights to anonymity and privacy for those people who appear, intentionally or not, in visual recordings originating in sites of individual or mass human rights violations?

Consider the persecution later faced by bystanders and people who stepped in to film or assist Neda Agha-Soltan as she lay dying during the election protests in Iran in 2009. People in video can be identified by old-fashioned investigative techniques, by crowd-sourcing (as with the Iran example noted above and shown below) or by face detection/recognition software. The latter is now even built into consumer products like the Facebook Photos, thus exposing activists using Facebook to a layer of risk largely beyond their control.

Here the current methods of protecting privacy are largely inadequate. The IP address from which you send a video is concealed (for example using Tor), yet the person in the video is quickly identifiable with facial recognition software. Often the metadata of location and creator is embedded in the image. And there are no ready options either in the capture of footage or the upload options to video sharing and social media platforms to better anonymize or conceal the identity of those who speak out, or those who are accidentally caught in ‘incriminating’ circumstances. There are few options to preserve what WITNESS has been thinking of as ‘visual privacy’ and better bound the choices we make about protecting our personal visual identity or holding onto ‘visual anonymity’.

Visual anonymity or visual privacy may sound like a contradictions in terms, but people often wish to speak out and to ‘be seen’ while at the same time concealing their face and identifying surroundings. Conversely, people caught in the background of a video may be unaware they are even being filmed in that moment and have no option to protect themselves. This is particularly true outside of mass protest settings where the wave of group solidarity may overwhelm any sense of personal privacy. But imagine you are someone speaking out from a far more marginalized position, for example, a gay person in Uganda, or a rural activist in Mexico. As video increasingly displaces text as the primary mode of online communication, the need for options for visual anonymity will only become more important.

Any steps to protect human rights activists, as well as victims and survivors of human rights violations must initially be grounded in the knowledge and agency of individuals themselves. Whether filming or being filmed, people themselves can take proactive steps at the moment of filming or before they upload in order to protect themselves. WITNESS has blogged extensively about this in the past in this post from our blog series with YouTube, and provides a series of tips in our training materials (PDF). We are also developing a mobile phone application that enables better anonymization of on-the-fly of visual images. However, I’d like to focus the rest of this post on the role that online and mobile service providers can play in terms of supporting new forms of anonymity.

Online Service Providers and Mobile Networks Set Many Parameters

Some of the dilemmas of ’real name’ identity and ‘visual anonymity’ come together when we consider that so much of social justice advocacy in social media and online video spaces occurs in in spaces that are ‘public spaces’ only to the extent that their corporate owners permit it. As the internet researcher Ethan Zuckerman has put it:

Hosting your political movement on YouTube is a little like trying to hold a rally in a shopping mall. It looks like a public space, but it’s not – it’s a private space, and your use of it is governed by an agreement that works harder to protect YouTube’s fiscal viability than to protect your rights of free speech.

Online service providers like Facebook and YouTube are private spaces that must largely prioritize as friction-free a user interface as possible. This approach may be at odds with important considerations with human rights content, such as issues of anonymity, consent, and contextualization (other potential concerns are summarized in this post from the Transmission network). In general, the human rights user has been de-prioritized as a consumer and user-category (and indeed it is a minor one in terms of relative quantity) in relation to other user-scenarios in these mass-public platforms – if it is acknowledged as a user-scenario at all.

Yet any progress in addressing human rights questions must also be informed at least by dialogue with the technology providers of services, hardware and software; online and in the mobile arena, both from within the closed, proprietary sector and the world of open video.

These online and mobile service providers dominate too much of the space and – as we see from Egypt – are used for upload and sharing by too many of the grassroots activists and citizen documentors creating human rights video to be ignored as key actors. These providers have the ability to further support in this respect or at least not actively hinder, and they can’t simply be ignored in favor of using niche or specialized spaces that seem more immediately aligned either ideologically, practically or in terms of their non-corporate ownership or content focus with traditional human rights advocacy – but that have correspondingly small, niche communities.

Next month we’ll publish our summary of recommended policy and practical steps that creators, human rights advocates, technologists (online and mobile, software and apps-developers, service-providers and hardware-makers), funders and policy-makers can take to mitigate risks in the use of technology (and particularly visual technologies) in human rights work, and how the overall environment for this work can be strengthened.

In the meantime, here’s a preview of the recommendations for online and mobile service providers. We’ll expand on them further next month in the report.

Recommendations for Online and Mobile Service Providers

There are three sets of changes – to policies, to functionality and to editorial content – that technology companies enabling the creation or sharing of video could make right away, and that would have a significant normative ripple effect. Online and mobile service providers should, in the first instance:

1. Change key usage and content policies (including those covering apps) to include specific reference to human rights:

Create a “human rights” content category, and build a specific content review workflow (including an assessment of informed consent where appropriate) to deal with content tagged and flagged as such. This workflow should also look at account deactivation requests related to human rights content, or to anonymous or pseudonymous usage of sites and platforms.
Conduct a human rights impact assessment of existing site policies, including mobile products, in consultation with relevant stakeholders, and make public some or all of the findings, along with recommendations for modifications.
Participate in wider initiatives to develop, share and refine ethical codes or codes of conduct for online, mobile and ubiquitous video. These guidelines should specifically address human rights edge-cases, but will likely be applicable to much broader general user use-cases.

2. Develop or incorporate tools and technologies into core functionality that enable both human rights activists and general users to exercise greater control over visual privacy:

Build “visual privacy” checks (including masking geolocational and EXIF data) as well as standard privacy checks into product design, development and marketing workflows, drawing on risk scenarios outlined through human rights impact assessments.
Follow the principle of “privacy by design”, or for products already in circulation, “privacy by default”.
Build tools enabling users to selectively blur faces, voices, specific words and to use other relevant anonymization/privacy protection techniques directly at the point of upload (for platforms or social networks) or acquisition (for hardware or mobile apps)
Build human rights-relevant nudges (e.g. related to addition of context, protection of identity, consent) into the user flow for any content categorized as “human rights” or tagged with human rights-related tags.
Provide links at appropriate points in the mobile and online user flow to downloadable, mobile-ready video guides supporting users to deal better with (informed) consent, protecting safety and security of those filmed and those filming, and vicarious trauma for those filming, and those watching. Promote these guides where appropriate.

3. Create officially-supported spaces in relevant products and in mobile and online settings, for curation and discussion of online content from a human rights perspective, to strengthen user and broader public understanding of human rights in the digital era

Curate human rights-related video content selected by appropriately qualified, trained or experienced staff.
Discuss transparently key cases relating to inappropriate content or account take-down requests in human rights situations, from government requests, and other related and emerging scenarios.
Announce and highlight changes to site, mobile or product policies that specifically address human rights and privacy vulnerabilities or concerns raised in human rights impact assessments or through other means.
Discuss editorial decisions that illuminate human rights content guidelines (described under #1).

We look forward to your feedback on our in-depth data and recommendations in early March.

Thanks to Sameer Padania for his additional editorial and substantive input on drafting this blog, and to Matisse Bustos Hawkes for her editing.

Syria: Tal al-Molouhi, a 19-year-old female blogger in jail for almost a year

Mohamed ElGohary — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 22:44:51 +0000

Tal al-Molouhi

Tal al-Molouhi, a Syrian blogger, was arrested by Syrian state security agents for posting poems about Palestine on her blog.
Tal, who is 19 years old secondary school student, was arrested on the 27th of December 2009 by the Syrian state security agents, they had her computer confiscated. Till now she is detained with no charges and no trial, whereabouts unknown, that her mother has appealed the Syrian president for her release.

A video was made by Syrian activists calling for her freedom:

Another Youtube video wishing her a Happy Eid wherever she is.

Several Egyptian activists and bloggers have agreed to organize a protest in front of the Syrian Embassy in Egypt.

Activists around the Arabic blogosphere are calling for support by signing this petition, sending emails to the to the Syrian Ambassador in Washington Imad Moustapha, and also a campaign blog entitled Free Tal is now active calling for her freedom along with a Facebook group.

GV summit 2010 Videos: A Discussion of Content Moderation

Sami Ben Gharbia — Fri, 07 May 2010 20:33:10 +0000

During this panel discussion, Victoria Grand, Senior Manager for Communications at YouTube, speaks on content moderation processes providing a “behind-the-scenes” look at YouTube's content removal and deactivation policies.

A “behind-the-scenes” look at YouTube's content removal and deactivation policies

The panel, which was moderated by Rebecca MacKinnon, also includes Jillian York, who focus on the case of Facebook, and Oiwan Lam, with some cases from Hong Kong, discusses content removal and deactivation across a number of platforms, as well as the importance of context and transparency in dealing with activist content on these platforms.

A Discussion of Content Moderation: The case of Facebook

Oiwan Lam and Some cases from Hong Kong

Taiwan: Police ask for Plurkers' IPs

Oiwan Lam — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 09:15:38 +0000

Plurk is the most popular micro-blogging platform in Taiwan. Recently, in March 29 2010, one of its founder Alvin Woon posted a plurk, saying that he had been receiving letter from police asking for the IP information of some of the plurkers' accounts. However, the police did not present any court order for the IPs.

According to Frank Hsieh, human rights lawyer and leader of DPP, pointed out that unless the court deems it necessary for criminal investigations, it is illegal for the police to breach Plurkers’ privacy.

However, it has been an usual practice for the Taiwanese police to ask websites for user IP information. In fact, upon the inquiry of a DPP Taipei city councilor, the police confirmed that they on average would make about 10 inquiries to Plurk every month. Since Alvin Poon is not a local Taiwanese and Plurk server is in North America, he did not comply to the police's demand. However, some websites, such as the PTT bulletin board system, in Taiwan are “cooperative” with the police and give the user information to the police without any court order.

Since the case has been widely reported in the mainstream media, webmasters and users would be more aware of the privacy issue.

Azerbaijan: Bloggers sentenced

Onnik Krikorian — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:29:39 +0000

As many of their supporters feared, and on the same day as a round table on the case against two detained video blogging youth activists, a court in Baku, Azerbaijan, earlier passed sentence on Adnan Hajizade and Emin Milli.

The verdict and first reaction spread on Twitter.

Media Helping Media quickly commented on the sentence.

According to supporters tweeting from the court, the lawyer for Hajizade, Isahan Ashurov, said the case was about power.

“Today we witness the unfair struggle of mind and physical power.” “Today we witness the unfair struggle of mind and physical power.”

[…]

Supporters have tweeted that Hajizade said the decision was built on lies.

Flying Carpets and Broken Pipelines also reflects on the verdict and says “this is not an end, this is only the beginning.”

Today at the end of the hearing, Emin said he is feeling proud and thats why he is ready to accept the verdict given to him. Adnan, questioned how alleged witnesses will look into the eyes of their families- we will be done with our sentences but I wonder how they are going to live a life built on lies… They both showed their strength to us, we must to the same in return.

Meanwhile, the first ever World Blogging Forum in Bucharest, Romania, immediately issued a preliminary statement.

We, the bloggers, will promote a world in which Internet users shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and repression in any form.

The bloggers united in Bucharest at the World Blogging forum are worried about the situation in Azerbaijan and support #EminAdnan as a Free Voice of the Internet and as a member of the World Blogging Family.

Global Voices caught up with Parvana Persiani, OL! youth activist and Hajizade's girlfriend, at the conference yesterday.

More updates will be posted as of when. Meanwhile, full coverage of the detention, trial and imprisonment of Adnan Hajizade and Emin Milli is available in the Azerbaijan section of Global Voices Online and on the OL! Blog (in English and Azeri). The hashtag #EminAdnan is also used on Twitter.

Azerbaijan: Video blogger trial postponed… again

Onnik Krikorian — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:29:25 +0000

In what many consider to be a politically motivated trial to stifle dissent in Azerbaijan, video blogging youth activists Adnan Hajizade and Emin Milli once again appeared in court today.

The two young activists, exemplary in their use of new media in the region, were unexpectedly detained in the early hours of 8 July after they were attacked at a restaurant in the center of Baku, the Azerbaijani capital.

On the eve of yet another hearing, Flying Carpets and Broken Pipelines blogger Arzu Geybullayeva summed up her own feelings about the case.

Tomorrow (27th October), Adnan and Emin are going to have another hearing. Its been almost two weeks since the last one and there is still hope that they will be released. At least I want to hope so! I want to see my friends free again. I want their parents to see their sons and be proud of them. I want all of us- his friends, be honored that we have friends as them.

The following morning, L4L made a similar post albeit in a much shorter form and injected with some humor, perhaps in an effort to lift the spirits of others.

I don’t want to hear anything rational right now. I don’t want to think anything rational right now. I want them out of the jail today. Adnan still owes me few rounds of beer. So, i want them back. :)

When the trial started earlier today, supporters of the two detained activists used Facebook and Twitter to spread updates from the ground worldwide.

However, as has been common throughout the case and despite significant international outcry, many seem resigned to the fact that the authorities appear intent on dragging out the court case for as long as possible rather than see it come to a speedy end.

Support Adnan and Emin yesterday listed some of the many concerns about the trial expressed by human rights and pro-democracy organizations inside Azerbaijan.

This legal trial chaired by Araz Huseynov strikingly indicates the dependence of the judicial system on the executive power and the use of trials for political pressure on dissidents and repressions, particularly against freedom of speech, thought and self-expression.

Despite likely having already resigned themselves to more of the same, the disappointment was evident in the tweets of supporters when the hearing was adjourned less than a hour after it started.

Update: Some hours after the hearing, L4L made a promised second post reflecting on the day. The blog summed up the combination of both anger, frustration and hope that supporters of the two online activists must have felt.

Well, we all witnessed what happened today. Adnan’s and Emin’s court hearing was postponed once again […]. One of the witnesses was missing, so judge decided that one hour of work is enough for his conscience to continue its state of sleep for another week and told tired audience of this spectacle that next hearing will be held on November 6, 2009(2009!). Seriously, case of hooliganism that is already under investigation for almost 4 months? Should we consider contacting Guinness World Records anytime soon? […]

[…]

[…] E&A’s smile, the way they handle themselves. Dignity, positivity, courage. Love and happiness in their eyes every time they see us. The fact that they still cheer us even being behind convoy car’s bars. That makes me hopeful. That gives me strength. And I hope that our tries to cheer them up are working, that they know how much we love them and miss them. Of course, I hope that Adnan didn’t forget about 2 beers that he still owes me :)

Full coverage of the detention and trial of Adnan Hajizade and Emin Milli is available in the Azerbaijan section of Global Voices Online and on the OL! Blog (in English and Azeri). The hashtag #EminAdnan is also used on Twitter.

Iran: new and innovative ways to get heard loudly

Pendar — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 11:38:40 +0000

Let's see how people in Iran are using media to make their voices heard when all media outlets have been subjected to government pressure and censorship. After the suppositious election in Iran, most of the internet had been filtered and there were no any other media, such as radio or television, where people can exercise their freedom of expression. Moreover, all the opposition newspapers had been banned.

However, Iranian people have used their cell phones and computers to disseminate information about the green movement and it was remarkable as they succeeded in communicating with the outside world.
Now, they have found another way to make their voice heard. They gather in any places where governmental media are placed, such as football stadiums.

For instance, few days ago there was a football match in Iran and people gathered in the stadium and started protesting the government and shouting slogans against the dictatorship and it became a scandal when the government censored the shouting when it was relayed on the Iranian television.

They were also gathered for another match between two famous soccer clubs in Tehran and this time you would be able to hear their voices when they are shouting slogans. They were saying:”We don't like political football matches.” As recently, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps spent huge amount of money on football to make a black market and get the benefit of that.

In another case, people call in during live shows that stream on government’s television and talk about the green movement in Iran.

Here you would be able to see how people are making use of social media:

People in stadium are looking for their votes.

People are against political sport.

An Iranian woman congratulated an official TV narrator as he wears green T-shirt and joined the green movement in Iran.