Posts tagged protests

Philippines Suspends Internet Law The Philippine Supreme Court suspended a far reaching Internet law that went into effect October 3. The law passed new restrictions on online behavior and speech in an attempt to address child pornography, identity theft and other computer related crime. However, journalists and free speech activists protested that the libel provisions bundled into the law would curtail free speech. Via ABC Radio Australia: However one provision that metes out heavy jail terms for online libel, tougher than for defamation in the traditional media, has caused an uproar. Equally controversial is a provision that allows the government to shut down websites and monitor online activities, such as video conversations and instant messaging, without a court order. Human rights groups, media organisations and netizens have voiced their outrage at the law, with some saying it echoes the curbs on freedoms imposed by dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s. Philippine social media has been alight with protests, while hackers have attacked government websites and petitions have been filed with the Supreme Court calling for it to overturn the law. Note that the law has been suspended, not struck down. This gives the government time to amend it. Image: A protester in Manila rallies against a cyber-crime law in front of the Supreme Court building. By Noel Celis, AFP/Getty Images via the Los Angeles Times.

Philippines Suspends Internet Law

The Philippine Supreme Court suspended a far reaching Internet law that went into effect October 3. The law passed new restrictions on online behavior and speech in an attempt to address child pornography, identity theft and other computer related crime.

However, journalists and free speech activists protested that the libel provisions bundled into the law would curtail free speech.

Via ABC Radio Australia:

However one provision that metes out heavy jail terms for online libel, tougher than for defamation in the traditional media, has caused an uproar.

Equally controversial is a provision that allows the government to shut down websites and monitor online activities, such as video conversations and instant messaging, without a court order.

Human rights groups, media organisations and netizens have voiced their outrage at the law, with some saying it echoes the curbs on freedoms imposed by dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s.

Philippine social media has been alight with protests, while hackers have attacked government websites and petitions have been filed with the Supreme Court calling for it to overturn the law.

Note that the law has been suspended, not struck down. This gives the government time to amend it.

Image: A protester in Manila rallies against a cyber-crime law in front of the Supreme Court building. By Noel Celis, AFP/Getty Images via the Los Angeles Times.

Killing journalists doesn’t kill the truth.

Demonstrators outside the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa, Honduras protesting the murder of more than 20 journalists in that country over the last three years.

None of the murders have been solved.

Face Off: Boy vs Russian Police Via the NY Daily News: The New Yorker and Foreign Policy magazine correspondent Julia Ioffe snapped the photo with her iPhone during violent protests by anti-Putin demonstrators on the day before Putin’s inauguration, ABC News reports. She tweeted the photo to her more-than-6,000 followers with a reference to Tiananmen Square. Ioffe was referencing the huge pro-democracy protest in Tiananmen Square, China in 1989, iconized by a photograph of one man standing still in front of a row of tanks. At least 20,000 people rallied Sunday at Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square in protest of Putin’s election. Violence erupted as the protesters marched toward the Kremlin and police fought back with clubs, injuring several people and leading to more than 400 arrests, reports the Associated Press.

Face Off: Boy vs Russian Police

Via the NY Daily News:

The New Yorker and Foreign Policy magazine correspondent Julia Ioffe snapped the photo with her iPhone during violent protests by anti-Putin demonstrators on the day before Putin’s inauguration, ABC News reports. She tweeted the photo to her more-than-6,000 followers with a reference to Tiananmen Square.

Ioffe was referencing the huge pro-democracy protest in Tiananmen Square, China in 1989, iconized by a photograph of one man standing still in front of a row of tanks.

At least 20,000 people rallied Sunday at Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square in protest of Putin’s election.

Violence erupted as the protesters marched toward the Kremlin and police fought back with clubs, injuring several people and leading to more than 400 arrests, reports the Associated Press.

Naughty Banks Need a Spanking Occupy/May Day images from the LA Times, BBC, CNN and Reuters. Image: A protestor in New York City, via AFP/BBC.

Naughty Banks Need a Spanking

Occupy/May Day images from the LA Times, BBC, CNN and Reuters.

Image: A protestor in New York City, via AFP/BBC.

Photographing Greek Protests The New York Times Lens Blog profiles Angelos Tzortzinis, a 28-year-old Greek photographer who’s been shooting his country’s protests over austerity measures. His ideal shooting location, he says, is between the protestors and the police. Via the New York Times: Taking photos during demonstrations in Athens can be very difficult — tear gas clouds create a suffocating atmosphere, people without gas masks run in all directions, while protesters who have masks hurl stones and Molotov cocktails. To get his pictures, Mr. Tzortzinis says he must stand between the riot police and the protesters, every moment exposed to violence from either side. Many times photographers have been attacked by the riot police. But many times, too, they have lost their equipment after being attacked by angry protesters. Image: A riot officer after being hit with a Molotov Cocktail, by Angelos Tzortzinis. Via the New York Times. Tzortzinis’ work can be seen the Times’ link above as well as on his personal site.

Photographing Greek Protests

The New York Times Lens Blog profiles Angelos Tzortzinis, a 28-year-old Greek photographer who’s been shooting his country’s protests over austerity measures.

His ideal shooting location, he says, is between the protestors and the police.

Via the New York Times:

Taking photos during demonstrations in Athens can be very difficult — tear gas clouds create a suffocating atmosphere, people without gas masks run in all directions, while protesters who have masks hurl stones and Molotov cocktails.

To get his pictures, Mr. Tzortzinis says he must stand between the riot police and the protesters, every moment exposed to violence from either side. Many times photographers have been attacked by the riot police. But many times, too, they have lost their equipment after being attacked by angry protesters.

Image: A riot officer after being hit with a Molotov Cocktail, by Angelos Tzortzinis. Via the New York Times.

Tzortzinis’ work can be seen the Times’ link above as well as on his personal site.

Self Immolation Protests Rise in Tibet Via the New York Times: On March 3, a few days before the start of the spring semester, Tsering Kyi, 20, emerged from a public toilet at the town’s produce market, her wispy frame bound in gasoline-soaked blankets that had been encircled with wire, relatives and local residents said. In a flash she was a heap of flames, her fist raised defiantly, before falling to the ground, residents said. She died at the scene. Over the past year 29 Tibetans, seven of them in the last three weeks, have chosen a similarly agonizing, self-annihilating protest against Chinese policies. Of those, 22 have died… …Tsering Kyi’s death has been widely publicized by Tibetan activist groups eager to draw attention to the self-immolations. The Chinese state news media, which has ignored most of the cases, reported that she was mentally unstable after hitting her head on a radiator. Her grades started to sag, the official Xinhua news agency said, “which put a lot of pressure on her and made her lose courage for life and study.” In interviews, several Tibetan residents and relatives of Tsering Kyi’s contemptuously waved away such assertions. Instead, they were eager to discuss her devotion to her Tibetan heritage and the final moments of her life. When she emerged from the public toilets in flames, they said, the market’s Han Chinese vegetable sellers locked the front gate to prevent her from taking her protest to the street. No one, they claim, tried to douse the fire. When the police arrived, they forced witnesses to remain inside the market and returned Tsering Kyi’s body to the bathroom. Then, after collecting everyone’s cellphones, they methodically went through the devices and deleted any photographs of the incident. Related: Beijing-based Blogger Under House Arrest for Writing About Tibet, Committee to Protect Journalists. China Imposes Media Blackout on Sichuan, Qinghai and Autonomous Region of Tibet, Reporters Without Borders China Cuts Internet and Mobile Phone Service in Areas of Protest, Global Post Image: Video still of a 35-year-old nun burning herself alive via a February BBC report on self-immolation protests in Tibet.

Self Immolation Protests Rise in Tibet

Via the New York Times:

On March 3, a few days before the start of the spring semester, Tsering Kyi, 20, emerged from a public toilet at the town’s produce market, her wispy frame bound in gasoline-soaked blankets that had been encircled with wire, relatives and local residents said.

In a flash she was a heap of flames, her fist raised defiantly, before falling to the ground, residents said. She died at the scene.

Over the past year 29 Tibetans, seven of them in the last three weeks, have chosen a similarly agonizing, self-annihilating protest against Chinese policies. Of those, 22 have died…

…Tsering Kyi’s death has been widely publicized by Tibetan activist groups eager to draw attention to the self-immolations. The Chinese state news media, which has ignored most of the cases, reported that she was mentally unstable after hitting her head on a radiator. Her grades started to sag, the official Xinhua news agency said, “which put a lot of pressure on her and made her lose courage for life and study.”

In interviews, several Tibetan residents and relatives of Tsering Kyi’s contemptuously waved away such assertions. Instead, they were eager to discuss her devotion to her Tibetan heritage and the final moments of her life. When she emerged from the public toilets in flames, they said, the market’s Han Chinese vegetable sellers locked the front gate to prevent her from taking her protest to the street. No one, they claim, tried to douse the fire.

When the police arrived, they forced witnesses to remain inside the market and returned Tsering Kyi’s body to the bathroom. Then, after collecting everyone’s cellphones, they methodically went through the devices and deleted any photographs of the incident.

Related:

Image: Video still of a 35-year-old nun burning herself alive via a February BBC report on self-immolation protests in Tibet.

ACTA Protests in Europe

Over the past few weeks protests have erupted across Europe against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement Act, an international treaty that would standardize criminal targeting and enforcement in counterfeit goods, generic medicine and copyright infringement on the Internet.

Via the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

ACTA has several features that raise significant potential concerns for consumers’ privacy and civil liberties for innovation and the free flow of information on the Internet, legitimate commerce and for developing countries’ ability to choose policy options that best suit their domestic priorities and level of economic development.

ACTA is being negotiated by a select group of industrialized countries outside of existing international multilateral venues for creating new IP norms such as the World Intellectual Property Organization and (since TRIPs) the World Trade Organization. Both civil society and developing countries are intentionally being excluded from these negotiations. While the existing international fora provide (at least to some extent) room for a range of views to be heard and addressed no such checks and balances will influence the outcome of the ACTA negotiations.

To date, 31 countries have signed the treaty, including the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia and most members of the European Union.

For more information about ACTA, see University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist’s ACTA tracker and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s ACTA topic page.

Images: Anti-ACTA signs from European protests, via OWNI.

Hacking Occupying Iowa

Anonymous is out with a video that says both the Democratic and Republican parties are corrupt and calls for a shutdown of the Iowa caucuses.

This is separate and distinct from Occupy Des Moines, an OWS offshoot that is currently planning protest actions surrounding the caucuses.

Via the Des Moines Register:

But Occupy Des Moines leaders say there’s a difference: The Iowa group’s planned sit-ins at presidential campaign headquarters are not intended to shut down the Iowa caucuses, they say. Rather, they want to target presidential candidates and big-moneyed corporations that activists say are pulling the strings behind the scenes.

While there are similarities between the groups’ beliefs, they are separate, Occupy Des Moines participants emphasized Sunday.

“I don’t like it one bit,” former Rep. Ed Fallon, a Des Moines Democrat and participant in Occupy Des Moines, said of the video on Sunday. “It doesn’t fit with my definition of Gandhi- and Martin Luther King Jr.-style nonviolence. The core of nonviolent action is truth. And if you are doing everything you can to be truthful, then you should be up front and transparent. No distorting of your voice or hiding.” 

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.

Thirty-Two OWS Journalist Arrests and Counting

The Free Press’ Josh Stearns created a Google spread sheet and an ongoing Storify thread to track the 32 “official” journalists who’ve been arrested covering Occupy Wall Street protests.

Both are interesting.

The spread sheet lists the journalists, occupations, news organizations and date arrested. The Storify aggregates chatter around them, and also includes handy link such as Stearns’ Legal Resources for Journalists Covering Protests and the Citizen Media Law Project’s Citizen’s Guide to Reporting on #OccupyWallStreet.

Occupy Wall Street is Focussing on the Wrong Street

Via adistinctivetaste:

I hate to say it but for those of us who live here in D.C. we have a pretty apathetic feeling towards those protesters in NY.  1 they are taking over the wrong street. Wall Street does all its bidding down here on K Street. High powered lobbying firms, NGO, and government contractors are the real problem. A great book called the shadow elite covers this pretty well.  If the republicans make candidates sign pact agreeing not to support something for office, so should the dems. This isn’t working.

We say: Location location location is a relatively fair critique but think New York is a good place to shine light on corporate control of American civic life. And if DC is what you want, pay attention to 13th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW this coming Thursday morning.

The Cover: The New York Post. The Angle: Today’s New York Post lead article: About 700 protesters were arrested after a horde of anti-Wall Street demonstrators swarmed the Brooklyn Bridge yesterday, halting traffic for more than three hours and clashing with cops on the famed span. Up to 100 cars were left stranded as the loud, angry crowd covered the crossing from end to end in an inflamed day of demonstrations against high unemployment, bank bailouts and financial pain for the masses. One irate driver, a Ground Zero construction worker, was livid. “I work my ass off all day, and these goddamned hippies close down the Brooklyn Bridge so I can’t get home?” he said. “This ain’t right!”

The Cover: The New York Post.

The Angle: Today’s New York Post lead article:

About 700 protesters were arrested after a horde of anti-Wall Street demonstrators swarmed the Brooklyn Bridge yesterday, halting traffic for more than three hours and clashing with cops on the famed span.

Up to 100 cars were left stranded as the loud, angry crowd covered the crossing from end to end in an inflamed day of demonstrations against high unemployment, bank bailouts and financial pain for the masses.

One irate driver, a Ground Zero construction worker, was livid.

“I work my ass off all day, and these goddamned hippies close down the Brooklyn Bridge so I can’t get home?” he said. “This ain’t right!”

The Syrian Uprising 2011 Information Center put together this Google Map that shows videos from where activists posted videos of Monday’s protests. The map and videos can be viewed via Al Jazeera.

The Syrian Uprising 2011 Information Center put together this Google Map that shows videos from where activists posted videos of Monday’s protests.

The map and videos can be viewed via Al Jazeera.

A protestor walks past a burning van during a 48-hour general strike against austerity measures in Greece. Photo: Yannis Behrakis/Reuters, New York Times Pictures of the Day.

A protestor walks past a burning van during a 48-hour general strike against austerity measures in Greece.

Photo: Yannis Behrakis/Reuters, New York Times Pictures of the Day.