Posts tagged middle east

We’re changing the name ‘Palestinian Territories’ to ‘Palestine’ across our products. We consult a number of sources and authorities when naming countries. In this case, we are following the lead of the UN, ICANN, ISO and other international organizations

Nathan Tyler, a Google spokesperson, to the Huffington Post. Google Recognizes Palestine.

FJP: Watch the HuffPo interview with Yousef Munayyer, Executive Director of the Palestine Center, about why this is significant.

World Press Photo of the Year 2012 contest winners newsflick: Paul Hansen of Sweden, a photographer working for the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, has won the World Press Photo of the Year 2012 with this picture of a group of men carrying the bodies of two dead children through a street in Gaza City taken on November 20, 2012. Jury member Mayu Mohanna said about the photo: The strength of the picture lies in the way it contrasts the anger and sorrow of the adults with the innocence of the children. It’s a picture I will not forget. Picture: REUTERS/Paul Hansen/Dagens Nyheter/World Press Photo

World Press Photo of the Year 2012 contest winners

newsflick:

Paul Hansen of Sweden, a photographer working for the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, has won the World Press Photo of the Year 2012 with this picture of a group of men carrying the bodies of two dead children through a street in Gaza City taken on November 20, 2012. Jury member Mayu Mohanna said about the photo: The strength of the picture lies in the way it contrasts the anger and sorrow of the adults with the innocence of the children. It’s a picture I will not forget.

Picture: REUTERS/Paul Hansen/Dagens Nyheter/World Press Photo

In recent months, a team of researchers part of Canada’s Citizen Lab have been conducting network scans of public servers in countries on almost every continent. Today, they released their findings—which appear to show that networking technology made by Blue Coat, a Silicon Valley-based company, is being used in a host of countries with questionable human rights records.

The equipment in question can serve a legitimate purpose—like filtering out spam or malware. But in the hands of an authoritarian regime it can easily be turned into a tool for monitoring users or blocking content. Citizen Lab says it found Blue Coat filtering technology capable of censorship operating in countries including Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. It also found Blue Coat technology that can be used for surveillance and tracking of Web users in Afghanistan, Bahrain, China, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Nigeria, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey, and Venezuela.

Ryan Gallagher, Slate. Report: Silicon Valley Internet Surveillance Gear Used by Authoritarian Regimes.

For more, see Citizen Lab, Blue Coat and the report itself. Bonus: a prior investigation on Blue Coat (via the article above.)

There is something grotesque and disturbing about two parties with a long history of conflict live-narrating the launching of bombs that kill civilians and destroy communities.

The Israeli military and Hamas are livetweeting their war, including images of killed and wounded children. This certainly raises some questions, including for the companies whose platforms they’re using.

(The linked articles notes that the Israeli army’s Twitter account was briefly suspended. However, this is based on a report in the Daily Dot that does not cite sources for its claim, so I would treat it with caution.)

The Washington Post has more, including on a Youtube video from the Israeli military that was briefly taken down but has been reinstated.

(via curiousontheroad)

FJP: Agreeing with the next sentence: “There is no empowerment or revolution here: just a dark, sinking feeling as we watch the bloodshed unfold in real time.”

And in the things they didn’t teach you in school department, to delete the content or suspend the accounts “is not a decision a couple of hundred engineers in North California want to be making.”

Jessica Roy, BetaBeat. Social Media Companies Have Absolutely No Idea How to Handle the Gaza Conflict.

Much of the criticism of the American media during the height of the Iraq War focused on its role repeating White House talking points and propaganda. But using the tools of social media, as Israel is doing, reveals there’s no longer a need to rely a media middleman, or to filter the raw feed of war through an “embedded” — and, military officials hope, captured — journalist’s mouth or keyboard. The military can broadcast exactly what it wants to, directly to its citizens, allies, and enemies. The IDF even appropriates the language of news, prefacing several tweets with “BREAKING” — and native social media, at one point saying “in case you missed it” before pointing to a YouTube video of it killing Ahmed Jabari in a missile strike. And unlike any propaganda machine before it, it’s inherently viral. It’s designed to spread. So the IDF spokesperson provides posters and YouTube videos and a constantly updated Flickr account; they’re more shareable than plain text. Its tweets are a mixture of documentation, saber rattling, sober reminders of the reality of war, and upbeat updates on the advanced state of its technology. All delivered direct to you. Please RT…

…Most importantly, though, consider this: A country can declare that it is at war with Twitter. If that doesn’t make the internet real, I don’t know what does.
Matt Buchanan, Buzzfeed. How to Wage War on the Internet.

Currently on the Israeli Defense Forces Twitter Feed

Live blogging its attack on Hamas.

Images: Screenshots from @IDFSpokesperson. Select to embiggen.

The Center for International Media Assistance has just released its latest report, by journalist and editorial consultant, Jane Sasseen. The report traces the rise of crowd-sourced video and its impact on the international news landscape. In short: No longer do professional journalists have a monopoly on the footage that is shot and broadcast. Perhaps most importantly, in repressive countries where media is heavily controlled by the state or other powerful interests, the video revolution has destroyed their monopoly on what will be covered or deemed newsworthy. Instead, the man or woman on the street has a powerful new ability to record what is happening around him or her. Citizens shooting video and spreading it through social media have become critical eyewitnesses in exposing government repression and abuse. The report also examines challenges: If the rise of video has created new opportunities and increased accountability, however, it has also created increased challenges for journalism. Much of the footage shot by citizens around the globe and loaded onto YouTube or elsewhere is of poor quality, with little context or clear narrative. “We’re getting into totally uncharted territory when it comes to using these technologies,” said Eric Chinje, the former head of the Global Media Program at the World Bank Institute who now oversees communications for the London-based Mo Ibrahim Foundation, which supports improved governance and leadership in Africa. “We’ve got to weigh the greater good that comes from them, but we also have to be conscious of what the potential dangers are.” FJP: In light of the recent video that’s sparked outrage throughout the Middle East, let’s look at this from another perspective. The report is an in-depth look at how new citizen video production is, particularly in the Middle East. Granted, the discussion is largely about video-as-news. But Chinje’s worries can point—by extension—to the fact that the culture around independent video production is very new as well. In the United States, the culture around video production is born from a long precedent of free speech. That said, our filters for video quality, credibility, humor, sarcasm, opinion, and fact are well-developed. YouTube and the like have very much helped to speed up our process of developing such filters.  In the Middle East, the way media is received and has historically been governed is very unlike in the United States. In Michael’s words: Little has been said that in the countries where protests are taking place the media is government controlled. Whether this is hands-on control or self-censorship, people consider created media such as The Innocence of Muslims as something that has some sort of “official” approval. There isn’t necessarily a First Amendment concept where anyone, anywhere can go out and create a trashy hit piece, preview it in a movie theater and then throw it on a YouTube. And just as the region is acclimatizing to its newfound democracies, it’s also acclimatizing to, and creating its own unique culture around media in the era of internet. That, perhaps, can shed some light on why some in the western world have trouble understanding Muslim reaction to the film, and lack of Muslim gratitude to the US.—Jihii Read the full PDF.

The Center for International Media Assistance has just released its latest report, by journalist and editorial consultant, Jane Sasseen. The report traces the rise of crowd-sourced video and its impact on the international news landscape.

In short:

No longer do professional journalists have a monopoly on the footage that is shot and broadcast. Perhaps most importantly, in repressive countries where media is heavily controlled by the state or other powerful interests, the video revolution has destroyed their monopoly on what will be covered or deemed newsworthy.

Instead, the man or woman on the street has a powerful new ability to record what is happening around him or her. Citizens shooting video and spreading it through social media have become critical eyewitnesses in exposing government repression and abuse.

The report also examines challenges:

If the rise of video has created new opportunities and increased accountability, however, it has also created increased challenges for journalism. Much of the footage shot by citizens around the globe and loaded onto YouTube or elsewhere is of poor quality, with little context or clear narrative.

“We’re getting into totally uncharted territory when it comes to using these technologies,” said Eric Chinje, the former head of the Global Media Program at the World Bank Institute who now oversees communications for the London-based Mo Ibrahim Foundation, which supports improved governance and leadership in Africa. “We’ve got to weigh the greater good that comes from them, but we also have to be conscious of what the potential dangers are.”

FJP: In light of the recent video that’s sparked outrage throughout the Middle East, let’s look at this from another perspective. The report is an in-depth look at how new citizen video production is, particularly in the Middle East. Granted, the discussion is largely about video-as-news. But Chinje’s worries can point—by extension—to the fact that the culture around independent video production is very new as well.

In the United States, the culture around video production is born from a long precedent of free speech. That said, our filters for video quality, credibility, humor, sarcasm, opinion, and fact are well-developed. YouTube and the like have very much helped to speed up our process of developing such filters. 

In the Middle East, the way media is received and has historically been governed is very unlike in the United States. In Michael’s words:

Little has been said that in the countries where protests are taking place the media is government controlled. Whether this is hands-on control or self-censorship, people consider created media such as The Innocence of Muslims as something that has some sort of “official” approval. There isn’t necessarily a First Amendment concept where anyone, anywhere can go out and create a trashy hit piece, preview it in a movie theater and then throw it on a YouTube.

And just as the region is acclimatizing to its newfound democracies, it’s also acclimatizing to, and creating its own unique culture around media in the era of internet.

That, perhaps, can shed some light on why some in the western world have trouble understanding Muslim reaction to the film, and lack of Muslim gratitude to the US.—Jihii

Read the full PDF.

humanrightswatch:

The Price of Sex (Trailer):

The Price of Sex is a feature-length documentary about young Eastern European women who’ve been drawn into a netherworld of sex trafficking and abuse. Intimate, harrowing and revealing, it is a story told by the young women who were supposed to be silenced by shame, fear and violence. Photojournalist Mimi Chakarova, who grew up in Bulgaria, takes us on a personal investigative journey, exposing the shadowy world of sex trafficking from Eastern Europe to the Middle East and Western Europe. Filming undercover and gaining extraordinary access, Chakarova illuminates how even though some women escape to tell their stories, sex trafficking thrives. Learn more at www.priceofsex.org .

FJP: The Price of Sex was written, directed and produced by Mimi Chakarova, won the 2011 Nestor Almendros Award for Courage in Filmmaking at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and the 2011 Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting.

If you’re in DC there’s a screening of the film this evening.

Know Your Thobe The afternoon explainer via Brownbook. FYI, I’ve only worn it Saudi style. — Michael

Know Your Thobe

The afternoon explainer via Brownbook.

FYI, I’ve only worn it Saudi style. — Michael

Press Freedom: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Via the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas:

Less than 15 percent of the world’s population lives in a country with a full free press — the lowest level in more than a decade, according to Freedom House’s new report, Freedom of the Press 2012, released Tuesday, May 1. The global press freedom rankings were released to coincide with the May 3 celebration of World Press Freedom Day.

In general, the report found that, for the first time in eight years, worldwide media freedom did not decline overall. Still, of the 197 countries and territories examined, only 33.5 percent (66) were rated as “free.” The number of “partly free” countries increased to 72 (36.5 percent), and 59 (30 percent) were rated “not free.” Most of the world’s population (45 percent) lives in a country with a “partly free” press, the report showed. The rankings are based on the level of freedom in three categories: legal, political, and economic.

While the rest of the world saw no real decline in press freedom — and even improved in the Arab world — in the Americas, press freedom deteriorated in 2011, the report said. Both Chile and Guyana moved from “free” to “partly free,” and Ecuador’s overall numeric score declined significantly. Press freedom remained restricted in Venezuela and Cuba, and extreme danger for journalists in Mexico also hurt that country’s press freedom scores — both Mexico and Honduras remained listed as “not free” (see these Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas maps on press attacks in Mexico and Central America) While the United States continues to have one of the freer presses in the region, it, too, saw a slight decline because of arrests and harassment of journalists covering the Occupy movement.

Read on for more.

Time names “The Protestor” its Person of the Year Full story via Time.com.

Time names “The Protestor” its Person of the Year

Full story via Time.com.

The internet helped to speed up things. But the revolution would have taken place without it.

Hossam al-Hamalawy, an Egyptian blogger at 3arabawy. 

Memeburn reports that 200 bloggers from the Middle East and North Africa are gathering in Tunis to discuss the role online activism and social media has in political change.

According to event organiser and administrator of Tunisian site Nawaat, Malek Khadroui, the bloggers will focus on the role of cyberactivists in a period of political transition.

“It is an exceptional meeting. There have been three Arab revolutions and the majority of the invited bloggers have been involved in these revolutions, which will allow them to meet and develop solidarity networks,” he said.

We will reflect together on new challenges facing movements in countries like Syria, Bahrain, Yemen,” Khadraoui added, underlining the symbolism of holding the meeting in Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring.

One topic which the bloggers will focus on is their continuing role in political life. This is particularly relevant to seven of the Tunisian bloggers who are candidates in the upcoming constituent assembly elections.

Survey respondents, when asked about the actual incidence of problems related to online activity, reported a remarkably high level of incidents and attacks stemming from their online activities. One third of respondents reported personal threats. One fifth reported that one or more of their online accounts had been hacked. One in seven unwillingly had their online identify exposed. Nine percent of respondents had been arrested or detained.

In a survey of 98 bloggers from the Middle East and North Africa, researchers from Harvard’s Berkman Center explore issues of online security and perceptions of risk as the bloggers write about social and political issues in their respective countries.

The bloggers chosen for the survey were those that had been cited by Global Voices Online, an international news and citizen media aggregator. The survey was conducted in May 2011.

The report’s authors note a caveat in their findings:

The unusual sample populated by reform-minded bloggers and the timing of the survey — following a period of intense online activism and government attempts to quell this activity—contribute to these high figures. This makes it impossible to extrapolate to other populations and regions. Nevertheless, these reported figures are astounding from our perspective and highlight the vital importance of security concerns for online activists. As we anticipated, the respondents report a mix of cyber attacks and offline responses to their online activities.

Online Security in the Middle East and North Africa: A Survey of Perceptions, Knowledge, and Practice (PDF)

For a second day Egyptian protestors and police clash over the pace of reform. Via the New York Times: The clashes began Tuesday evening when the police refused to allow a crowd of people to enter a central theater for an event commemorating protesters killed during the 18-day revolution in January. Many in the crowd said they were relatives of those who died and fought with the police to gain entry. The police responded by attacking the crowd, until they reached the square. There, thousands of people, outraged at hearing of the harsh police action, joined in the clashes, which lasted into the night. Photo: BBC Day in Pictures.

For a second day Egyptian protestors and police clash over the pace of reform.

Via the New York Times:

The clashes began Tuesday evening when the police refused to allow a crowd of people to enter a central theater for an event commemorating protesters killed during the 18-day revolution in January. Many in the crowd said they were relatives of those who died and fought with the police to gain entry. The police responded by attacking the crowd, until they reached the square. There, thousands of people, outraged at hearing of the harsh police action, joined in the clashes, which lasted into the night.

Photo: BBC Day in Pictures.