Posts tagged arab spring
After going through torture and persecution and such a long court case, I am devastated. This sends the signal that we are no longer free to express ourselves.
Edson Chakuma, a trade union leader in Zimbabwe, after a court found him and five others guilty of conspiring to commit public violence.
The crime: screening a film about the Arab Spring.
Via the Independent:
The group was charged with treason in February last year after they and 40 others were arrested at a trade union office, at which a film consisting of television news clips of the rebellions in Tunisia and Egypt were shown.
The six say they were tortured in custody -– by being beaten with planks of wood –- until they confessed to plotting to overthrow President Mugabe, 88. The 40 others were released and, in a case that has lasted more than a year, the charges against the six were eventually downgraded from treason, which carries the death penalty.
Sentencing occurs today.
The Independent, Guilty — of watching a film on the Arab Spring in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
After my identity was disclosed, it meant a lot of responsibilities. I kind of feel responsible for whatever I say on the page. I always ask myself, before every post, is that in the best interest of this country or not? I do not want to abuse a tool like this, because at the end of the day, it could lead to people dying, or it could lead to bringing the government, you know, bringing the country in the wrong direction. So it’s a lot of responsibility. I personally became more conservative than before; I calculate my steps before taking them. I truly love my country, and I think the people of Egypt deserve a much better life.
Ahead of Anniversary, Bahrain Denies Visas to Foreign Journalists
Reporters Without Borders reports that Bahrain has denied entrance visas to foreign journalists such as the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof ahead of the February 14 anniversary of protests in the Gulf kingdom.
The country’s Information Affairs Agency claims this is because of the “high volume of requests” coming in.
Reporters Without Borders also notes that several Bahraini journalists and activists such as Waheed Al-Balloushy and Reem Khalifa continue to be targeted for prosecution.
Bahrain currently ranks 173 out of 179 on the organization’s Press Freedom Index.
World Press Photo of the Year
Congratulations to Samuel Aranda for winning the 2011 World Press Photo of the Year.
The picture shows a woman holding a wounded relative in her arms, inside a mosque used as a field hospital by demonstrators against the rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, during clashes in Sanaa, Yemen on 15 October 2011. Samuel Aranda was working in Yemen on assignment for The New York Times. He is represented by Corbis Images.
Egyptian Revolution: “The Flood”
Part one of a three part documentary created by Heba Kandil, a former Reuters journalist, and produced by TrustMedia, the media development wing of the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The series captures the events through the eyes of one family.
Egyptian Revolution Part 2: The Clash.
Egyptian Revolution Part 3: The Fall.
Run Time: 5:22.
Arabic versions of the documentary can be found here (part 1), here (part 2) and here (part 3).
Censorship, Surveillance and Hackers
A great article in Forbes on Telecomix, a group of hackers that have aimed their sites, and hacking chops, on free-speech starved countries. The group has also exposed western (mostly American) technology firms whose products have (knowingly or unknowingly, depending on who you believe) slipped into the hands of state agencies bent on monitoring and suppressing uppity populaces.
One morning in mid-August, seven months into the Arab Spring protests and government crackdowns in which thousands have been killed, something strange happened on Syria’s Internet. As users aimed their Web browsers at Google and Facebook, they instead saw a page of white Arabic script scrawled across a black background.
“This is a deliberate, temporary Internet breakdown. Please read carefully and spread the following message,” it read. “Your Internet activity is monitored.”
Then the page switched to a white screen filled with instructions on using free encryption and anonymity software like Tor and TrueCrypt to evade surveillance and censorship. Emblazoned above the text was a round, mysterious symbol: a star inside an omega, hovering over a pyramid surrounded by lightning bolts. Below it were written the words: “This is Telecomix. We come in peace.”
Telecomix, a loose-knit team of international hacktivists, had been scanning the Syrian Internet in a massive sweep, dividing 700,000 target connections among its members in Germany, France and the U.S., probing for hackable devices with software tools like Nmap and Shodan. They compromised vulnerable Cisco Systems-produced network switches to find other devices’ passwords, snooped on open cameras revealing street scenes and even officials’ desks, and at one point retrieved the log-in credentials for 5,000 unsecured home routers, which they used to insert the surveillance warning (shown below) into browsers across the country.
As the globally-distributed hackers combed Syria’s networks and posted their findings in a crowd-sourced document, one American member of the group, who uses the handle Punkbob, spotted a Windows FTP server filled with data he recognized: logs from a Proxy SG 9000 appliance built by the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company Blue Coat Systems. In Punkbob’s day job at a Pentagon contractor, he says, the same equipment had been used to intercept traffic to filter and track staff behavior. The Syrian machine’s logs showed the Internet activity of thousands of users, connecting the sites they attempted to visit and every word of their communications with the IP addresses that pointed directly to their homes. In short, he had discovered American technology being used to help a brutal dictatorship spy on its citizens.
The Arab Spring and Information Flow
The International Journal of Communication has a new study that explores “information flow” during the Arab Spring. In particular, it looks at how Twitter promulgated information from Tunisia and Egypt to and among journalists, activists, mainstream media outlets and other interested parties.
GigaOm’s Matthew Ingram does a good job exploring the report’s findings:
The evolution of what media theorist Jeff Jarvis and others have called “networked journalism” has made the business of news much more chaotic, since it now consists of thousands of voices instead of just a few prominent ones who happen to have the tools to make themselves heard. If there is a growth area in media, it is in the field of “curated news,” where real-time filters like NPR’s Andy Carvin or the BBC’s user-generated-content desk verify and re-distribute the news that comes in from tens of thousands of sources, and use tools like Storify to present a coherent picture of what is happening on the ground.
The study makes the point that mainstream media outlets play a key role in the dissemination of news during such events (and also notes that journalists tend to retweet other journalists more often than they do non-mainstream sources), but it also makes it obvious that prominent bloggers and activists are crucial information conduits as well.
The full study can be found here.
The Year According to Twitter
Yesterday it was Facebook with its most shared links of 2011.
Today it’s Twitter with its “most important”.
Among the mix is “Welcome back Egypt #Jan25” for the Arab Spring and “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)” which foretold the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.
So too is “my daughter her name is sarah m. rivera,” sent out by a homeless man in New York who hadn’t seen his daughter in 11 years. They were reunited the next day.
While the prominence of women in the revolutions has been moving, there is a psychology behind celebrating and glorifying women’s political activity when it is part of a popular push. In these times women are almost tokenised by men as the ultimate downtrodden victims, the sign that things are desperate, that even members of the fairer sex are leaving their hearths and taking to the streets. The perception isn’t that women are fighting for their own rights, but merely that they are underwriting the revolution by bringing their matronly dignity to the crowd like some mascot.
